What’s it like to be fully alive? That’s really the question of this week’s Zen story on death. What that question is asking is: what’s it like to be enlightened? What’s it like to be awake? And the answer is, really, not that different than what you are doing now. The big difference A few …
Category Archives: Zen Stories
Eight Billion Fully Awake Beings
So this week’s Zen story is about death. But really, it’s about life. Are we all fully grasping our life potential? Are we living our lives? This is a life or death question. It’s an important question because if we are only living our lives partially, then we are using up resources without a full …
What Happens When You Die?
Death This week’s Zen story is about death. A hot topic. Yes? I have a little thing here that I think that most people are not going to get, so I am interested in seeing your comments. You can comment on the Youtube video. What Happens When You Die? Soooooo… think about what happens when …
Death
A man once came to Sheik Faried and asked him, “What happens when we die?” Faried just laughed. He looked at him and said, “You have come to the wrong person. I don’t know anything about death because I’m alive. I’m not dead. I only know about life.”
Spiritual Bickering
Our Zen story this week is about spiritual bickering. You would think that spiritual people would be the people that would get along the most, right? You’d think that because we believe in love that everyone should magically get along. Somehow it doesn’t work out, does it? It always seems to go wrong in every …
Proving Your Meditation
In the story of Rinjai’s cat, killing the cat was really, really stupid. But the point of this story is that we have the same fantasies about spirituality today. We think spiritualty will look like something… and we also think the enlightened master would have to be perfect in all ways. What Zen is saying …
What is Real?
So what’s real and what’s not? In the story of Rinjai’s Cat the master is asking all of these monks to simply be able to show him that they know the difference between what’s real and what’s not real. He’s asking them to be able to show their meditation, but that’s not to show how …
Rinjai’s Cat
A long time ago, back in the land of Zen, there was a monastery. This monastery had two wings. There were 1000 monks in the monastery. Half of them, 500, were on one wing and half of them, 500, were on the other wing. The master had this beautiful cat. The cat was so friendly. …