The master offered the visitor a cup of tea and began pouring tea into the cup. He continued pouring even after the cup had filled. Tea began to flow onto the floor as the master continued pouring.

The visitor asked why the master had not stopped when the cup was full. The master replied that the over-flowing tea cup was the visitor’s mind and no teachings could be received by that mind because it was already full.

“If you want to be my student so that you can receive teachings from me, you will first have to empty your cup,” said the master. The visitor, who had sharp karmic roots and understood what the master was saying, attained enlightenment at once.

If you saw Avatar, James Cameron’s 3-D movie, you may recall that the tribal people told the ex-Marine that he would first have to empty his cup before they could begin teaching him their ways. He said something like: “Oh, my cup is empty, that’s for sure.”

To empty the cup means to drop opinions, to admit that we know nothing. As Socrates said: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Socrates was no Buddha but he was close. He famously counseled his students to “Know Thyself.” As Hyon Gak Sunim says, Zen is all about answering the question: Who are you?

Until we come to grips with the fact that we have been behaving foolishly, our cup is not empty and we will continue our foolish ways regardless of how much we read about Zen.

The actual practice of Zen requires a threshold admission of past stupidity, i.e., emptying the cup.

If we refuse to empty our cup, we are just like our friend, the follower of Jesus who is a sniper and proud of it. As long as we refuse to empty our cup, we know nothing of Zen.

If we cannot admit that we have been following the path of selfhood, the satanic I-think-therefore-I-am path that leads to greater and greater levels of delusion, deeper and deeper ignorance, then we can’t get started on the path of awakening.

A clean break with superstitions and dogmas is required. A clean break with philosophical opinions or mind sets is required. We have to put our opinions down, i.e., relinquish them. That means we have to stop liking some things and disliking others.

But “empty the cup” goes even beyond that. We have a firm belief that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We believe we are a living entity on the third planet from a star. We even believe that gravity holds things down. All of these beliefs may be wrong.

Because, as Nagarjuna said, the mind is in reality, but reality is not in the mind. Our deepest beliefs are just bunk.

We can never take anything for granted. Read what the great scholar Stuart Lachs has pointed out about teachers, for example. Ironic, isn’t it, that Zen teaches students to question everything except authority, including the myth of the unbroken lineage from the Buddha to present day teachers.

We have to empty our cup of all mortal thoughts, including our deepest beliefs. Especially our deepest beliefs! Zen students are well-advised to enter into Zen with their eyes wide open. Read everything published by Stuart Lachs. Don’t be fooled by anyone.

Our senses do not deliver to us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

When we can drop our opinions about everything, absolutely everything, then we can truly be free of likes and dislikes, begin to cultivate wholesome states in every moment, every single moment regardless of what the apparent content of that moment might be, and leave behind forever the possibility of falling into the hell worlds of the tenth dharma realm.

The next time we become aware that we like something, or dislike it, we need to drop such unenlightened modes of thinking.

Both liking and disliking are unwholesome states.

There is nothing outside of us so there is nothing to sit in judgment upon, i.e., there can be no judge and no adjudged because there is no subject and no object. There are no two things.

Everything we think we know about the objective world is just baloney – mind stuff; mortal thoughts, unwholesome states. To empty the cup means to wake up to the reality that everything, absolutely everything, is not out there. There is no out there.

The belief that there is an “out there” is just an opinion, an unwholesome state of mind, to be dropped.

We Buddhists are not optimists who say the glass is half full or pessimists who say the glass is half empty. Both pessimism and optimism are unwholesome states.

We are realists who know that the famous glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Such thinking is neither pessimistic nor optimistic; it is wholesome and not the result of delusion.

John Donne’s Meditation XVII, published in 1624, includes the passage made famous by Ernest Hemmingway:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Emptiness, in Buddhism, reaches a little deeper: the expression “because I am involved in mankind” indicates that Mr. Donne still saw himself as a part of mankind. Accordingly, the passing away of one person “diminishes me.”

He didn’t quite get it, but he was close. The Buddha in the Diamond Sutra said there is no independent self that can pass away or that can be diminished in any way. He asserted that we are not independent selves that have birth dates and that will some day have death dates.

Such an assertion cannot be accepted by anyone who does not practice Zen. To a deluded, untrained mind, it is just nonsense. To a practitioner of Buddhism, it makes sense only at the deepest levels of meditation, where delusion is shattered.

Ultimate liberation comes from the knowledge, not the belief, in the fact of emptiness, the interconnectedness of all things, the absence of independent entities, and the reality of our inherent Buddha nature. Our inherent Buddha nature is Awareness.

None of us has ever heard a bird sing. It is Unborn Hearing Awareness that hears. Nor have we ever seen a bird. It is Unborn Seeing Awareness that sees. And this unborn awareness just is; it is not a being. We exist in that awareness like scenes in a motion picture. Our ignorance has allowed us to convince ourseves that we are real.

Let’s consider a word like Book. That word, like any other word standing alone, means nothing. We had to learn as children that a book is a collection of pages secured together at their respective edges somehow and that upon those pages are words and possibly illustrations. But then, before that, we had to know what a page was, what paper is, and so on. Every word in a dictionary is defined by other words. Nothing stands alone.

And that’s the way reality is. A dictionary is a great teacher of emptiness. Not a single word in it exists independently of the other words. Every single word is empty of an independent meaning and is therefore defined in terms of other words that are themselves defined in terms of other words and the regression is endless with no beginning. When a “new” word is coined, old words define it.

To fully understand, to fully experience emptiness, we have to practice Zen. That is the key to awakening. It has nothing to do with going to church and being entertained by a sermon. It has nothing to do with adopting a belief system.

Ironically, if we take the How To Practice Zen course with the ambition to become an authentic Zen practitioner, we won’t complete it. If our only goal is to wake up, to be free of self rather than to improve the self, we’ll make it. To state the matter more accurately, our inherent Buddha nature will reveal itself.

Looking for better mental and physical health? Better relationships? Want to win friends and influence people? Those may be some of the side effects of Zen practice but if Zen is practiced with those goals in mind, the practitioner is striving for self-improvement and therefore strengthening the ultimate delusion.

People say: “If Buddhism is all about giving up the self, count me out.” They are clinching a shiny new penny in their hand, unwilling to give it up. Untold, limitless riches appear when that penny is released. How foolish it is to insist on living in the dungeon of self when the stairs leading out are bathed in sunlight.

The pictures appeared in the twelfth century. They were based on The Sutra of the Ten Stages that was translated into Chinese from Sanskrit in the fifth century. The original Sanskrit was authored about five hundred years before that by Vasubandhu, an Indian patriarch of the Dhyana (Indian)/Ch’an (Chinese)/Zen (Japanese) lineage.

The Ten Stages Sutra appears in its modern form as the 26th chapter of The Avatamsaka Sutra, also known as The Flower Garland Sutra or the Flower Adornment Sutra.

The intent of the Ox-herding pictures and the accompanying text was to depict and explain the stages a Zen practitioner experiences as he or she begins Zen practice, perseveres in the practice, and wakes up to Buddhahood, nirvana.

In other words, the pictures and text are passive in nature, i.e., they represent what happens to a Bodhisattva (a Buddha-to-be) who starts and maintains an authentic Zen practice.

The pictures say nothing about how to start a daily Zen practice, how to develop a full, well-rounded daily Zen practice, and how to sustain one. They passively report what happens when the Zen path is followed with diligence.

In the How To Practice Zen program, the pictures and the accompanying text are used in an active way to teach how to get on and stay on the Zen path.

The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures are entitled:

1. Seeking the Ox

2. Finding the Footprints

3. First Glimpse of the Ox

4. Catching the Ox

5. Taming the Ox

6. Riding the Ox Home

7. Self Alone, Ox Forgotten

8. Both Self and Ox Forgotten

9. Reaching the Source

10. Returning to the Marketplace

The Ox is a metaphor for the enlightened mind. To catch it, we have to discipline our wild, undisciplined monkey mind. The practice of Zen disciplines that monkey mind. We first look for the enlightened mind because we suffer from delusion and perceive it as something separate from ourselves. We then find its footprints, catch a glimpse of it, catch it, tame it, ride it home, forget ourselves, forget the ox as well, break through the Zen barrier, and return to the marketplace as teachers, refraining from entry into Nirvana so that we can benefit all sentient beings.

This is where the Mahayana school diverges from the Theravada. The Arhat overcomes the ten fetters, sees dependent origination, and disappears from the human dharma realm and all other dharma realms as well.

The Bodhisattva remains in the dharma realms to help the sentient beings there. And not just the dharma realms on this planet.

As I child, I asked my Sunday school teacher how people could enjoy heaven with the knowledge that others were in hell. He replied that it was our job to convert everyone to our church and if we failed to do so, at least we tried and it wasn’t our fault that others refused to be converted into the one true church. He had no problem with his belief that a very select few would enjoy eternity while the masses endured eternal agony.

I realized that my teacher was nuts. But the point of this story is that some Buddhists think something like Church of Christ people – they will try to enlighten everyone but if they fail to do so, they plan to enter Nirvana anyway.

I assume the Arhats do not concern themselves with those they leave behind because they know that suffering is impermanent and that every sentient being will someday enter into Nirvana. They are not mean-minded like my Sunday school teacher who was quite content with the knowledge that unbelievers would burn forever.

Looking for the Ox, finding its footprints, catching a glimpse of it, capturing it, taming it, riding it home, forgetting the desire to become awakened and forgetting the self lead to the Source, to Buddhahood. In the Mahayana tradition, the awakened one then returns to the marketplace, living among the unenlightened and explaining the Buddhadharma (the teachings of the Buddha).

The traditional explanation of the first step, Seeking the Ox, is that a seeker goes through a stage of gathering information, reading about meditation, and eventually trying it. However, the scholars say one has not really sought the Ox until one reaches the stage of frustration or disappointment. When we persevere in the face of hardship, only then are we truly Seeking the Ox.

Thus a person who reads a lot about Zen, tries a few sittings and declares: “That’s not for me,” has not sought the Ox.

In modern times, seeking the Ox for most people takes the form of reading books and visiting Buddhist sites on the web. In ancient times, it meant traveling from monastery to monastery, listening to lectures, looking for a teacher.

Most people today never take that first step. They spend their lives in school, working, raising children, taking vacations, going to the church they grew up in, if any, and getting into hobbies such as spectator sports, dancing, and so on.

If you are one of the few who have been collecting information about Buddhism, you have at least begun to Seek the Ox. A truly unruly mind never looks for the enlightened mind. However, until you practice and persevere through the early discouraging days and weeks and months of pain and disapppointment, you haven’t yet begun the search.

Ajahn Brahm flies from time to time, visiting countries where he has received invitations to visit and lecture. When asked if he had any fear that his plane might someday crash and burn, he asked why crashing and burning was something to fear. Then he added: “After all, it’s a free cremation, isn’t it?”

Few Buddhist practitioners have reached such a level of selflessness but those who at least have an intellectual grasp of emptiness can appreciate where Ajahn Brahm is coming from.

One’s location on the continuum from strongly independent, isolated and fearful to a universal, fearless confidence and connectedness indicates where one stands on the path to enlightenment.

The unenlightened have a strong sense of an independent self that is under attack from a hostile universe. The enlightened have realized their inherent Buddha nature and live fully and fearlessly.

We don’t sit because we believe that a rabbit once committed hara kiri. We don’t sit in order to get into heaven or to avoid hell. Nor do we sit because the Buddha sat; sitting is not the cause of enlightenment and enlightenment is not the effect of sitting.

We sit because we believe the Buddha spoke the truth when he said that all living beings are truly enlightened and shine with wisdom and virtue. We sit because we believe our minds have become deluded and turned inward to the self-centered ego, thereby preventing us from realizing that we are whole and complete, just as we are, shining with wisdom and virtue.

But if sitting is not the cause of enlightenment, then why sit? We sit to create the conditions that allow awakening to occur. When we sit, we are not running around, creating more karma. For once, we are finally doing nothing, not stirring the pot. We sit in serene silence so that we can experience the inherent wisdom and virtue that we possess but which noisy daily activities cover up. We sit in deep silence. But we sit relaxed, happy and calm.

When issues arise, we just let them go. We drop anything that arises. We relax, let go, smile, get even calmer, and continue to sink into silence and calmness. We do so without effort, without working. This is what the Buddha did.

We eventually arrive at the heart or the jewel of the lotus; we arrive at the center of everything and discover that no thing and no one is there.

When we realize that there is no self, we give up all doubts about the Buddhadharma, we realize that chanting alone and following rites or rituals do not lead to awakening, and we enter the stream.

We cannot reach that silence, that tranquility, however, if we lead a heedless life.

Just sitting comfortably on a mat doesn’t alone create the conditions that allow awakening to occur. A mind that is undisciplined and filled with ignorance cannot wake up just by the simple expedient of meditation.

When the Buddha sat, he brought a high degree of discipline with him. He was not a mean-minded, loud-mouthed, opinionated, pleasure-seeking ignoramus who decided to sit to experience bliss. He was not trying to get high. He simply wanted to put an end to suffering, to wake up to reality itself with no preconceptions as to what he would find, with no expectations of feeling good or bad; he just wanted to see clearly.

Most Buddhist teachers teach that every serious Zen practitioner can benefit by having a personal teacher. Some students therefore ask: Who was the Buddha’s teacher? The answer has already been given but it is repeated below.

When he sat down, he did so as a deluded individual. He wanted something. He didn’t want to suffer anymore. He wanted happiness.

But he had practiced many disciplines. He was a person who had learned to avoid harming other people and other living things. His lifestyle was in harmony with nature and his fellow human beings. He was a practicing monk. He was a renunciate. He had left home. He was not a fool when he sat under that tree.

He realized that his belief that he was an independent individual who suffered was the root cause of that very suffering.

The desire to end suffering is the cause of suffering. When we understand that suffering exists but there is no sufferer, we begin to wake up.

Suffering does not exist, any more than happiness or the passage of time does. For suffering or happiness or time itself to appear, the illusion of an independent self must first arise. The belief in an independent self as a subjective entity in an objective world is what allows time, suffering, happiness, and everything else, including the entire universe or plurality of universes, to arise and become manifest. Enlightenment is liberation from that delusion.

The teacher of the Buddha, obviously, was suffering itself.

The word “Zen” means meditation. However, Zen meditation is unlike Hindu, Christian, and Islamic meditation. It requires no belief in a creed, a guru, a savior, a prophet, or a god. Belief in an outside entity is a roadblock to Zen practice; the Buddha is nothing other than the true self of every apparent independent individual. There are no two things; nothing, absolutely nothing, is outside, nothing is out there. Everything is mind. In the concluding lines of an ancient Buddhist chant:

This moment arises from mind. This moment itself is mind.

Those two sentences contain the most liberating knowledge ever reduced to the written word. Those two sentences reveal the open secret of everything.

If you are not a Zen practitioner, you have no idea what it’s all about. If you have read books like The Dharma Bums you have been misled as to what Zen is.

I once visited a self-proclaimed Zen group in St. Petersburg, Florida. A bunch of guys sat around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, eating chicken and listening to an audio tape recorded by some guy who kept mentioning steak houses as he tried to make whatever foolish point he was trying to make. “Zen is anything goes,” they explained to me.

Zen, however, is a highly disciplined practice having nothing to do with self-absorption, self-gratification, and licentious, undisciplined behavior.

Zen is not a revealed religion. It does not present a Truth and ask you to believe it. The Buddha challenged people not to believe his teachings but to test them. He said to follow the teachings that passed the test of practice and to drop the others. Blind belief, blind faith, plays no role in Zen.

The Buddha made it clear that he was a man, not a god. Having entered into parinirvana, he is extinct. It follows that prayer to the Buddha or worship of the Buddha makes no sense.

Zen is not a conventional philosophy. A conventional philosophy has a worldview, an outlook as to how one should think and live. Zen is about un-knowing, dismantling neat packages of thought that purport to explain things.

Liberation does not come from an accumulation of mundane knowledge; it is a dropping off of body and mind. A large accumulation of knowledge-based opinions is a hindrance to awakening.

Zen is non-religious and non-philosophic. Zen is a practice. Roshi Philip Kapleau explained that Zen is a religion only to the extent that those who practice it have faith that they are creating the conditions that allow awakening to occur. The practice of Zen opens the gateless gate.

Books about Zen philosophy are bunk. The Buddha taught that metaphysical speculation is a waste of time. Practice is the answer to every question, not philosophy.

Going to church might make us feel good, especially if the preacher tells jokes or convinces us that we are somehow better than those who don’t go to church. Unlike church-attendance, Zen is active work, not passive entertainment. Going to church gives us a nice feeling that quickly fades. We don’t practice Zen so that we can get a nice feeling.

This was about a year before the BP oil spill.

Why would anyone demand that their nest be subjected to potential fouling? “Please subject my home to fouling so that I may have a victory over those who tried to prevent it.”

Another letter writer informed us that our legal system provides a presumption of innocence to all accused persons and that accused terrorists had no right to be tried in federal courts because an obviously guilty person should not be presumed innocent!

He concluded that we need to try “jihadists” before military tribunals after they have been tortured “to extract valuable information from them.”

For what it’s worth, here’s a link to the famous fact-checking site of the former St. Petersburg Times, now entitled Tampa Bay Times.

A book could easily be filled with examples of ignorant ramblings that newspaper publishers feel compelled to print.

Almost everyone alive today is deluded. The ignorant who demand that their nest be fouled so that they can experience the thrill of victory while losing their habitat is the part of us that is that stupid.

The people who think we defeat terrorism by becoming terrorists are the part of us that is that stupid.

That’s what the Buddha taught. There are no two people, there are no two things. Consciousness or Awareness is a seamless whole and there is no such thing as an independent individual.

The proof of that assertion can be proven but not by chaining words together. It can only be experienced and it can only be experienced by those who practice authentic Zen every day.

Equanimity is the seventh factor of the seven factors of enlightenment. We might think we have experienced equanimity, but we haven’t. It appears in the highest of the meditative states, the immaterial attainments.

A movie screen is another metaphor for the Buddha mind. When fires burn in a movie, the screen remains cool to the touch. When a town floods, the screen remains dry. A movie monster lurks in the dark, and as the hero approaches doom, we think: “No! Turn back!”

Unenlightened life is just like that. We get caught up in the plot and come to believe that what is happening is real. But an enlightened mind remains cool, dry, and free of monsters.

Like a mirror, a movie screen, or a still forest pool, it is unaffected by what seems to be real. It is not indifferent; indifference is evidence of a closed mind. Equanimity is open, soft, and accepting, not indifferent, closed and hard.

The awakened ones understand that the ups and downs of life are just scenes projected onto the movie screens of our minds. They understand that each scene was caused by a previous scene, that each thought, word, or action leads to the next thought, word, or action. And none of it is us.

Our inherent Buddha nature, our true self, is unaffected by the illusions projected onto or reflected by it. Our ignorant self denies that it is the screen or the mirror, and insists that it is a self that experiences the events flickering on the screen or reflected in the mirror.

We’re all living our mundane lives, thinking we are pretty much OK. In fact, we’re a bunch of Satans, walking around with deluded minds filled with junk and passing the time by doing stuff we like to do and avoiding stuff we don’t like to do. We live in the dungeon of the unenlightened and are quite proud of it, too dumb to know we’re dumb.

We have to drop our current modes of thinking. Only when we drop our body and mind that we cherish so much can we be liberated from the prison of body and mind.

That’s the law of cause and effect. The effects we are now experiencing arise from previous causes. The Sanskrit word “karma,” often translated as “action,” can also be translated as the law of cause and effect because every action produces an effect.

If we find ourselves in a pleasant situation, it’s because every thought we ever held, every act we ever performed, has brought us to that situation. Where we are now is the sum total of everything we’ve ever thought or done.

But the best situation to be in is one that is perceived as neither good nor bad. If we adjudge our situation to be pleasant or unpleasant, our mind is defiled. Our thoughts are satanic if we categorize everything we do as something we enjoy doing or don’t enjoy doing. Our mind is satanic if we divide our personal acquaintances into people we like and those we don’t. Or countries we like and those we don’t. Or religions we like and those we don’t.

And if we find ourselves in a pleasant life and do not practice Zen (who needs it? I’m happy!), then we are merely coasting, using up the momentum of our good karma.

If we find ourselves in an unpleasant life, at least we know we are using up our bad karma, but only if we practice.

Either way, practice is the only worthwhile activity.

Ajahn Brahm flies from time to time, visiting countries where he has received invitations to visit and lecture. When asked if he had any fear that his plane might someday crash and burn, he asked why crashing and burning was something to fear. Then he added: “After all, it’s a free cremation, isn’t it?”

Few Buddhist practitioners have reached such a level of selflessness but those who at least have an intellectual grasp of emptiness can appreciate where Ajahn Brahm is coming from.

One’s location on the continuum from strongly independent, isolated and fearful to a universal, fearless confidence and connectedness indicates where one stands on the path to enlightenment.

The unenlightened have a strong sense of an independent self that is under attack from a hostile universe. The enlightened have realized their inherent Buddha nature and live fully and fearlessly.