The Buddha Leaves Home, (and how this relates to our own Zen practice!)

Record December 7, 2024This teisho, the opening teisho of our two-day rohatsu sesshin, itself the culminating event of five previous days of heightened daily practice, is on the Buddha’s leaving home and its relation to our own maturing Zen practice.   According to legend, when at the age of twenty-nine, the long-sheltered prince, Siddhartha Gautama, left his comfortable palace to explore life in his home city, he suddenly saw an aged person, a sick person, a dead person, and a homeless truth-seeker and his life was irrevocably changed. Traumatized by this collision with reality, he didn’t turn and run, but became determined, instead, to get to the root of it. With lay Zen practice we leave home without leaving home. What we learn to leave is our unconscious, self-centered habits regarding relationships, family, meaningful work. We abandon nothing but our own painfully dualistic habits of mind. Home leaving is actually the beginning of coming home. The Korean ex-Zen monk poet Ko Un, wrote – “But surely you can only come home/if you’ve really left home, can’t you?”  Books Cited: A Zen Life of Buddha. Rafe Martin (Sumeru Press)What?: 108 Zen Poems. Ko UnThe Blue Cliff Record. Trans, Thomas and J.C. Cleary Photo: Old wooden Chinese Buddha at Endless Path Zendo by Rafe MartinBooks by Roshi Rafe MartinTalks on YouTubeMore information at endlesspathzen.org