To Actually Practice Selflessness

Suzuki Roshi begins with the pain students meet in zazen and what it shows about their habits. The same pause applies before anger, he says: count to ten. He treats a difficulty as a useful reason to work, using his own nervous cough as an example.

He then turns to selflessness, which he says is to be practised, not explained: there is no fixed self-nature, only conditions and causality. He tells the koan of the old man who lived as a fox for about five hundred lifetimes after answering a question about karma wrongly. Freedom from karma, he concludes, means neither ignoring it nor being caught by it. He ends on calmness in anger and pain, and on trusting oneself, the Buddha and others. The audio is rough.