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