(Follow this link to see the February 2025 Priory Newsletter where this was recently published.)

Someone recently expressed appreciation for the quote I have on the signature line of our everyday email address for regular correspondence. This also reminded me of how someone once took me to task for how dumb this was: “how can we live without making choices about things?” they demanded.

The Way to the Ultimate is not hard;
   simply give up being picky and choosy.
Just by not giving in to hatred and craving
  will your heart and mind be as clear and bright
     as the realm beyond the opposites;
Let but a hair’s breadth of discriminatory thought arise
  and you have made Heaven and Earth strangers
     to each other.”

– Kanchi Sosan

Upstairs hallway to our future rooftop terrace.

Kanshi Sosan was the third ancestor in our transmission lineage after Bodhidharma and the above is the opening stanza to his poem “That Which Is Engraved Upon the Heart that Trusts to the Eternal.”

I have sympathy for this vexation with how impractical Zen teaching can often seem, particularly when it comes to the problem of discriminatory thought. So, what does he mean in saying “give up being picky and choosy?”

Of course we must make choices and decide between one thing or another in our day-to-day lives. I remember how, at the dinner table, my mother would tell one or another of my siblings or me: “don’t be picky!” That was about the food we might have been served, but it really applies to anything. This is an admonition that we might encounter in any English speaking household. Don’t be picky: don’t get all caught up in insisting on having things the way that we want them. Being picky (and choosy) is about an attitude of mind: it (whatever “it” is) has to be just the way I want it. Or, maybe we elevate it a bit in our mind to how “it” should be. Getting mired down in how we think other people or circumstances “should” be, represents a lot of suffering, particularly if they insist on being a way different from how we think they “should” be.

So we can give up being picky and choosy; we can give up this attitude of mind; we can give up insisting on having things the way that we want them or think they should be.

But what if I give that up; what if I let that go? Won’t standards go out the window and all sorts of harm follow? Well maybe, but I don’t think so. In the next line, what does he say: Just by not giving in to hatred and craving will your heart and mind be as clear and bright as the realm beyond the opposites. He introduces us to three new ideas “hatred” and “craving” and also the idea that there is another experience of mind that we can come to know: a mind that is clear and bright. There is a realm beyond the opposites: this is not something that we experience only once. It is something we can know by training ourselves to not give in to hatred: “I don’t like that thing! I don’t like how you are! You must be different! We can know this mind by training our minds to not get all caught up in our craving: I want that thing over there! I like this thing! I want you to be this way!

Letting go of this attitude of mind does not impair our ability to perceive things in a refined way or impair our ability to make the often subtle choices that our lives require of us. Letting go of being picky and choosy just helps us to see the Bright Mind, in an ongoing way, that is with us all the time and is the True Refuge.