What Do You Preserve?

In the opening dharma talk of Upaya’s Winter Ango, Sensei Matthew Kozan Palevsky delves into Case 2 from the Blue Cliff Record, a koan titled “The Ultimate Path is Without Difficulty”. How can the path not be difficult when our lives can often be filled with so much suffering? In the koan, Chao Chou instructs “just avoid picking and choosing”, and yet this Zen master admits he ”does not abide within clarity” either. Bodhisattvas, we are told, don’t abide anywhere, free of attachments to picking and choosing and to clarity. In this talk we are asked by Chao Chou and Sensei Kozan: Where do you abide? What do you preserve? Like the student monk in the koan, it is enough to pose the question and just leave a space.