Today's episode centers on awakening as a practice of intimacy. Roshi John Tarrant takes up koan case 89 from The Blue Cliff Record:

Yunyan asked Daowu, "How does Guanyin use all those hands and eyes?"
Daowu answered, "It's like feeling behind you for a pillow in the middle of the night."
"I understand."
"What do you understand?"
"The whole body is hands and eyes."
"That's very well expressed, but it doesn't say it all."
"What would you say, older brother?"
"All through the body are hands and eyes."

Tarrant speaks of koans as companions for learning to move in the dark, meaning learning to embrace the uncertainties in our lives and of life itself.

Listen to hear more about the secret kindness of the world, and the unexpected help we receive when we take up the real journey.

"You don't go with a theory, you don't go with a plan, you just reach into the night." - John Tarrant

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/01

Koans transform us through immersion and saturation, by dissolving the usual boundaries we keep between us and the world. If you have an unanswerable question, the koan is designed to open it.

Today's episode explores a koan from the Miscellaneous Collection that poses:

In the Sea of Ise, 10,000 feet down, lies a single stone.
I want to pick up that stone without getting my hands wet.

Roshi John Tarrant offers a guided meditation down through the ship wrecks, strange creatures, and unimaginable depths of our lives, showing how koans offer a kind of imaginative mindfulness by bringing attention to reality beneath the level of our usual thoughts.

This koan brings images and sensations with it. There's water, earth, depth, sinking, light from above, pressure, breath, moving in the dark, finding, meeting, meeting yourself, rising up, shallowness, an impossible feat, getting immersed, and being untouched. Also, foxes.

Listen to this episode for a full experience of one of the great Japanese koans.

"The sweetness in the path of using a koan, is that it assumes that we can change." - John Tarrant.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/02

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant explores a koan from The Blue Cliff Record featuring great Yunmen, great Cloud-Gate:

A student asked Yunmen, "When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what's that?"
Yunmen said, "The Golden Wind reveals itself."
— transl. by John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland

Exploring the beauty and wistfulness of Autumn, Tarrant describes it as a time of connecting with the eternal; a time when the spaciousness inside everything becomes especially apparent.

Autumn also brings about the descent into darkness that evokes Persephone's return to Hades. It is through moving down, he says, that we eventually come to rest and be carried by the larger currents of life itself.

"You have to go down before you can come up." - John Tarrant.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/03

Telling stories of how we are most deeply transformed by the encounters we try to keep at bay, Beasley reveals the tenderness that emerges when we can just simply feel how connected to everything we already are.

Listen in to discover the red thread in your own life.

"Somehow in the silence, we find each other." - Tess Beasley.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/04

In this episode, Roshi Allison Atwill tells the story of Baizhang's Fox, a classic koan from The Gateless Gate collection about the nature of karma.

In this koan case, an old man confesses he was once abbot of the mountain temple, but was sentenced to live 500 lives as a fox for misapprehending the nature of cause and effect. The story of his eventual freedom touches on the relief we find in realizing that our particular karma holds within it our awakening, and indeed our piece of the world's awakening.

Listen to learn how Allison found Zen and why even 500 lives as a fox become 500 lives of grace.

"Suddenly it is like you become the center of the universe." - Allison Atwill.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/05

Fire is the vital element of transformation.

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant discusses the Zen koan, Put Out the Fire Across the River, which originally arose in response to seeing the camp fires of Genghis Khan's army burn brightly through the night.

Fire has a terrifying power for destruction but also a sacred role in connecting us.

Like the old alchemists, we must immerse ourselves in something to transform it, and thereby we, too, cannot help but be transformed in the process. We cannot achieve much without a fire inside us, and meditation becomes a vessel by which we cultivate our capacity to become a living flame.

Listen in to hear stories of all kinds of fire and also how koans come into existence.

"Fire burns the barriers." —John Tarrant.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/06

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant takes up a koan from The Gateless Gate collection in which the Buddha tells his attendant, "That person is like a fine racehorse who runs at the mere shadow of a whip."

Tarrant investigates our relationship to suffering, describing the four kinds of horse metaphors in Zen Buddhism, ranging from the one who runs at the mere shadow of the whip to the one who must be whipped to the bone.

Noting how everyone wants to be the best horse, but Buddha's compassion actually arises for the worst, Tarrant reveals the unexpected joy and wholeness found in our "worst horse" moments. After all, it is the very worst horse who reaches enlightenment in the end.

Listen for stories and reflections on embracing the worst horse.

"We often give away our life hoping for a later improved version." - John Tarrant.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/07

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant tackles the first great gate of koan study, in which a student asks, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" And, Zhaozhou simply answers, "No," (translated as "Mu" in Japanese, and "Wu" in Chinese).

Exploring the vivid commentaries that accompany this foundational koan case, including instructions to "cut off the mind road" and "make your whole body a mass of doubt," Tarrant speaks about entering deeply the very trouble we usually seek to avoid, and the modesty of setting down our most treasured defenses against it. Being clever, being important, being tough won't help. It's when all this falls away that freedom appears.

How then should you work with this? Listen to find out.

"For the practice of Zen it is imperative that you pass through the barriers set up by the founding teachers." - John Tarrant.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/08