12/15/2025
New dharma talk released on Korinji's Patreon, our constantly growing online library of Rinzai Zen instructional videos, talks, and other resources to support your home practice. We invite you to join! Contributions to the Patreon keep our monastery and international community alive.. we are so grateful.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/144979679
"Don't Make Practice an Entertainment"
Our lives are something like a show, in which we watch ourselves on the stage as we don many masks and play endless roles. In the same manner, we sometimes make of practice a kind of positive entertainment (fixating on whatever arises in our bodies and minds with fascination, and projections of hope and identity), or a negative entertainment (entranced by our own drama, senses of tragedy, hardship, or victimhood, etc.).
All of that, however, is just more fixation, and a perpetuation of the same show we've been watching our whole lives. The actual purpose of practice is not to project ourselves onto another stage, but to walk out of the theatre entirely...or to burn the stage down!
In this incredibly important talk about how to practice, Meido Roshi repeats the usual, crucial advice that we so like to resist: just give yourself to the practice method, wholly with the entire body-mind, to such a degree that there is nothing left out, and no "watcher" standing apart from it. If we choose this manner of practicing in each moment, we will see that our practice is big enough to hold and encompass whatever arises: there is no need to fixate on anything, or push anything away. We will understand that practice is not a focusing upon one thing to the exclusion of others, but rather a call to include and integrate everything - simply, to make everything, and every activity, the practice.
A talk recorded at the December 2025 Rohatsu Dai-sesshin at Korinji.
