What are the opening hours?

Monday 6:45am - 9am 5:15pm - 7pm Tuesday 6:45am - 9am 5:15pm - 7pm Wednesday 6:45am - 9am 5:15pm - 7pm Thursday 6:45am - 9am 5:15pm - 8:15pm Friday 6:45am - 9am 5:15pm - 7pm Sunday 9:30am - 11:30am

Two Arrows Zen, 21 G Street, Salt Lake City, UT (2026)

08/29/2026

The flooding in Nepal has caused widespread destruction, damaging roads, bridges, homes, and essential infrastructure and leaving communities facing profound loss and uncertainty.

Images from the affected regions convey the extraordinary force of the flooding, but behind those images are individuals and families whose lives have been disrupted — people searching for loved ones, survivors in need of shelter and medical care, and communities working under difficult conditions to provide rescue, relief, and support.

Two Arrows Zen holds the people of Nepal in compassion and offers metta:

May those who are in danger be safe.

May those who are missing be found.

May those who are injured receive care.

May those who are grieving be surrounded by compassion.

May those who have lost homes and livelihoods find shelter and support.

May rescue workers, medical teams, volunteers, neighbors, and all those providing assistance be protected and sustained.

May those who are frightened find refuge.

May all beings affected by this disaster be free from suffering.

May all beings know peace.

For those wishing to offer material assistance, the following organizations and funds are supporting relief efforts in Nepal:

Government of Nepal — Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund
https://pmdrf.nchl.com.np/

Nepal Red Cross Society
https://donation.nrcs.org/donate

UNICEF — Nepal Flood Emergency
https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/nepal-flood

There are moments when words are necessarily limited. What remains possible is attention, compassion, generosity, and practical support.

May the people of Nepal receive the care and assistance they need.

May suffering be relieved.

08/27/2026

August 26, 1940, marks the Birthday of Shōdō Harada Roshi. He became one of the prominent contemporary teachers of Rinzai Zen and is the abbot of Sōgen-ji in Okayama.

Although he was raised in a temple family, Harada did not initially intend to become a monk. While still a student, he encountered Yamada Mumon Roshi, one of the leading Rinzai teachers of the 20th century. Harada later described that meeting as decisive. He went on to study at Hanazono University in Kyoto and then entered monastic training under Mumon at Shōfuku-ji in Kobe.

Harada trained there for approximately twenty years in the traditional Rinzai system, which included zazen, kōan practice, sanzen, work practice, chanting, and intensive sesshin. He later received formal recognition from Mumon and was sent to Sōgen-ji, a historic Rinzai monastery in Okayama whose formal training hall had been inactive for many years.

At Sōgen-ji, Harada reestablished intensive monastic training and gradually opened the monastery to international practitioners. This became one of the distinctive features of his teaching career. Students from Europe, North America, and elsewhere were able to participate in traditional Japanese Rinzai practice without necessarily entering the Japanese temple-priest system.

Harada also began leading sesshin outside Japan. These communities eventually became associated with One Drop Zen, named after the traditional expression “Sōgen’s One Drop of Water.” The phrase refers to the transmission of the Dharma from one person to another and is linked with a story preserved at Sōgen-ji concerning the value of even a single drop of water.

Harada’s teaching remains closely aligned with traditional Rinzai practice. His instruction emphasizes zazen, kōan study, sesshin, breath practice, samādhi, and direct realization. He has also taught methods of abdominal breathing and concentration associated with the Rinzai tradition and with Hakuin Zenji.

His published works in English include Morning Dewdrops of the Mind, The Path to Bodhidharma, Moon by the Window, and Not One Single Thing. His calligraphy and written commentaries frequently draw on traditional Zen sayings, kōans, and classical Buddhist texts.

Harada’s work has contributed to the transmission of Rinzai Zen outside Japan while maintaining a strong connection to traditional monastic forms. Sōgen-ji continues to function as an international training monastery, and students trained under Harada have established practice communities in several countries.

On August 26, 2026, Shōdō Harada Roshi turns 86.

Reading List

One Drop Zen — Shōdō Harada Roshi and lineage
https://onedropzen.net/lineage

One Drop Zen — official site
https://onedropzen.net/

One Drop Zen — teachings and texts
https://www.onedropzen.org/teachings/texts/

Shōdō Harada Roshi, The Path to Bodhidharma
https://search.worldcat.org/title/The-path-to-Bodhidharma-%3A-the-teachings-of-Shodo-Harada-Roshi/oclc/43615614

Shōdō Harada Roshi, Morning Dewdrops of the Mind
https://books.google.com/books/about/Morning_Dewdrops_of_the_Mind.html?id=86uvSe58DD0C

“Sōgen’s One Drop of Water” — One Drop Zen
https://onedropzen.net/uploads/sogensonedropofwater.pdf

08/26/2026

Thank You Dolly Parton …..

08/25/2026

NIETZSCHE, ZEN, AND THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISM

Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900, at the age of fifty-five. His statement that “God is dead” has become one of the most widely cited phrases in modern philosophy, but its significance extends beyond a rejection of religious belief. Nietzsche used the phrase to describe a historical and cultural crisis in which traditional European sources of moral authority and metaphysical certainty were losing their persuasive force.

Nietzsche regarded Christianity as one of the principal structures through which European culture had understood morality, purpose, truth, and human destiny. By the nineteenth century, developments in science, historical criticism, and philosophy had weakened confidence in many traditional religious claims. Nietzsche argued that the erosion of these foundations created the possibility of nihilism: a condition in which inherited values lose their authority without being replaced by an equally compelling framework of meaning.

Much of Nietzsche’s later philosophy can be read as an attempt to respond to this problem. Concepts such as self-overcoming, amor fati—the love of one’s fate—and eternal recurrence are connected to his effort to formulate an affirmation of life that does not depend upon a transcendent or otherworldly source of value. Nietzsche’s project therefore concerns not only the critique of religion, but also the problem of how human beings might live after the decline of inherited metaphysical certainties.

This concern has created an important point of comparison between Nietzsche and Buddhist philosophy, particularly in later encounters between European philosophy and Japanese Zen thought.

Nietzsche was not a Zen Buddhist, and his philosophy should not be treated as a form of Buddhism. Nevertheless, both Nietzschean philosophy and Buddhist thought address questions concerning fixed identity, permanence, attachment to conceptual systems, and the foundations upon which human beings construct meaning. Their responses to these questions, however, differ substantially.

A central concept in Mahayana Buddhism is śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness. Emptiness does not mean that phenomena do not exist. Rather, it refers to the absence of independent, permanent, self-sufficient essence. Phenomena arise through causes and conditions and exist in relation to other phenomena. This principle is closely associated with the Buddhist teaching of dependent origination.

The distinction between emptiness and nihilism is therefore important. Nihilism concerns the loss or negation of meaning, value, or metaphysical foundation. Buddhist emptiness concerns the mode in which phenomena exist: dependently, relationally, and without permanent self-nature.

In simplified terms, nihilism may be associated with the conclusion that nothing possesses ultimate meaning, whereas Buddhist emptiness denies that anything possesses independent existence.

These positions are not equivalent.

This distinction can be particularly relevant for Western students of Buddhism whose intellectual background has been shaped by Christian concepts. Christianity encompasses a wide range of theological traditions, but Western religious thought has often included ideas such as God as creator, an enduring soul, divine purpose, salvation, and eternal existence. Buddhist concepts such as anātman or no-self, emptiness, impermanence, and “nothing to attain” emerge from a substantially different philosophical framework.

As a result, Buddhist teachings can sometimes be interpreted through categories inherited from Christian theology. The doctrine of no-self, for example, can be misunderstood as a claim that persons do not exist. In classical Buddhist thought, however, anātman denies the existence of a permanent, independent, unchanging self. It does not deny the conventional existence of persons.

Similarly, emptiness is not a doctrine of nonexistence. A phenomenon such as a flower exists conventionally, but its existence depends upon soil, water, sunlight, biological processes, time, and numerous other conditions. The flower is therefore described as empty of independent existence rather than nonexistent.

The same analysis is applied to human beings. Persons arise through biological, psychological, social, cultural, and environmental conditions. Buddhist analysis therefore treats the self as conditioned and relational rather than as an independent and permanent entity.

The relationship between Nietzschean nihilism and Buddhist emptiness became especially important in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy through the work of Keiji Nish*tani (1900–1990).

Nish*tani was a major representative of the Kyoto School, a group of Japanese philosophers who brought Buddhist thought, particularly Zen, into sustained conversation with European philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the central Western thinkers in Nish*tani’s work, particularly because of Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism.

Nish*tani argued that nihilism could not simply be overcome by returning to earlier religious or metaphysical certainties. Instead, he treated nihilism as a historical and existential condition that had to be examined fully. In Religion and Nothingness, he described a movement through the standpoints of being, nihility, and emptiness.

For Nish*tani, nihility emerges when previously accepted foundations of identity and meaning lose their authority. At this level, things can appear to lack any ultimate ground or significance. Nish*tani regarded Nietzsche as one of the Western philosophers who confronted this condition most directly.

Nish*tani nevertheless distinguished nihilism from the Buddhist standpoint of emptiness. The standpoint of emptiness does not replace lost foundations with another metaphysical substance. Instead, it challenges the assumption that phenomena require an independent, permanent foundation in order to exist.

From this perspective, emptiness is not an underlying “nothing” beneath the world. It describes the relational and conditioned character of reality itself.

Nish*tani’s philosophical work was also shaped by his engagement with Christianity, especially Christian mysticism and the writings of Meister Eckhart. The Kyoto School consequently became an important site of dialogue among Zen Buddhism, European philosophy, and Christian theology. This dialogue did not depend upon treating the traditions as identical, but rather upon examining how each addressed questions of selfhood, nothingness, transcendence, suffering, and ultimate reality.

The distinction between nihilism and emptiness also helps clarify several expressions commonly encountered in Zen literature:

No self.
Nothing to attain.
Emptiness.
Mu.

Taken outside their doctrinal and practical contexts, such expressions can appear to advocate a philosophy of negation. Within Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, however, they function within a broader critique of attachment to fixed concepts and independent selfhood.

Buddhist philosophers also warned against treating emptiness itself as an absolute doctrine. Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy rejects both the assertion of permanent independent existence and the opposite claim of complete nonexistence. Emptiness therefore functions as part of a “middle way” that avoids both substantialism and nihilism.

Zen practice applies these philosophical concerns experientially. Rather than asking practitioners simply to accept propositions about emptiness or no-self, Zen traditions generally emphasize direct investigation of experience, impermanence, attachment, and the construction of identity.

Nietzsche and Zen therefore intersect around a shared problem without arriving at the same conclusion. Nietzsche examined the consequences of the collapse of inherited metaphysical and moral foundations and sought forms of life-affirmation beyond them. Zen Buddhism examines attachment to permanent identity and independent existence and interprets emptiness through dependent origination and non-self.

The relationship between the two became particularly important through Nish*tani and the Kyoto School, where European nihilism and Mahayana emptiness were placed into sustained philosophical dialogue.

Their similarity lies less in shared doctrine than in the seriousness with which both traditions examine what remains when familiar assumptions about self, permanence, and meaning are called into question.

READING LIST

Friedrich Nietzsche — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/

Keiji Nish*tani — Religion and Nothingness
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/religion-and-nothingness/paper

Keiji Nish*tani — The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism
https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Self-Overcoming-of-Nihilism

The Kyoto School — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

Nāgārjuna — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nagarjuna/

Chan Buddhism — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buddhism-chan/

08/25/2026

August 25, marks the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Ayya Khema (1923–1997), one of the most influential Western women in modern Theravada Buddhism. A nun, meditation teacher, author, and advocate for Buddhist women, her life crossed an extraordinary amount of twentieth-century history—from N**i Germany and wartime imprisonment in Asia to Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka, Australia, and Germany. (Buddhistdoor Global)

She was born Ilse Ledermann in Berlin on August 25, 1923, to Jewish parents. In 1938, as N**i persecution intensified, the fifteen-year-old escaped Germany with a group of children and was taken to Scotland. Her parents had fled to Shanghai, and two years later she was able to join them there. During the Second World War, the family was interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where her father died. After the war she eventually emigrated to the United States, married, raised children, traveled extensively, and encountered meditation during years spent traveling through Asia. (Buddhistdoor Global)

Her path into Buddhist monastic life came relatively late. After beginning to teach meditation in Europe and Australia, she became a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka in 1979, receiving the name Khema, meaning safety or security. She became closely associated with the Theravada tradition and eventually emerged as an unusually direct and accessible teacher of meditation, particularly vipassana, loving-kindness, and the jhanas—the deep states of meditative concentration described in early Buddhist teachings. Her student Leigh Brasington would later become one of the better-known contemporary teachers of jhana practice in the West. (Buddhanet)

But Ayya Khema’s importance extends beyond her teaching. She helped establish Wat Buddha-Dhamma, a Theravada forest monastery in Australia, and later founded or supported Buddhist communities for women in Sri Lanka and Germany. In 1987 she helped organize the first international gathering of Buddhist women at Bodh Gaya, the site traditionally associated with the Buddha’s awakening. Out of that gathering came Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women—“Daughters of the Buddha.” (Sakyadhita)

Sakyadhita became part of a much larger movement addressing one of Buddhism’s complicated historical inheritances: although Buddhist teachings affirm that women possess the same capacity for awakening as men, opportunities for education, institutional authority, and full monastic ordination had disappeared or remained restricted for women in several Buddhist cultures. Sakyadhita brought Buddhist women from different countries and traditions together to address those inequalities, and the organization continues that work today. (Sakyadhita)

Ayya Khema was also a prolific writer. Her best-known English-language work, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, presented Buddhist practice without requiring readers to adopt an exotic identity or escape ordinary life. Her teaching repeatedly returned to a basic Buddhist movement: relinquishing attachment rather than constructing a better and more permanent version of ourselves. As she put it, “The spiritual path is all about letting go. There is nothing to achieve or gain.” (Lion’s Roar)

There was warmth in her teaching, but little sentimentality. Loving-kindness, in her understanding, wasn’t simply an agreeable feeling. It was something to be cultivated deliberately until it became embodied. Meditation likewise was not merely relaxation. Concentration steadied the mind so that impermanence, dissatisfaction, and the absence of a permanent self could be seen more clearly. Hundreds of her recorded talks remain available today, preserving teachings on everything from loving-kindness and everyday practice to the most subtle stages of meditative absorption. (Dharma Seed)

Ayya Khema died in Germany on November 2, 1997, at the age of seventy-four. Her legacy can be found not only in her books and students, but in something larger: the increasingly visible presence of women as Buddhist teachers, scholars, monastics, and institutional leaders around the world.

On her birthday, perhaps that is the most fitting way to remember her. Ayya Khema’s life suggests that Buddhist practice is not about where a person begins. A refugee from N**i Germany, a wife and mother, a traveler, and eventually a nun and teacher, she spent the latter part of her life asking a much older Buddhist question: What can be let go of, right now, so that we can see more clearly and love more freely?

READING & LISTENING

Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path — Ayya Khema
https://www.shambhala.com/being-nobody-going-nowhere-15420.html

Ayya Khema — Dharma Seed archive, including more than 500 recorded teachings
https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/334/

Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women
https://sakyadhita.org/

Ayya Khema — Tricycle archive
https://tricycle.org/author/ayyakhema/

Biographical material and excerpts from I Give You My Life: The Autobiography of a Western Buddhist Nun
https://www.buddhanet.net/khema/

08/24/2026

August 24, marks the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Tangen Harada Roshi (1924–2018), a prominent twentieth-century Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher and longtime abbot of Bukkoku-ji. His birthday is particularly appropriate for Buddhist reflection because August 24 is traditionally associated in Japan with Jizō Bodhisattva, and Harada himself regarded that connection as significant. Last year, the Two Arrows Zen sangha studied Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha: The Life and Zen Teachings of Tangen Harada Roshi, the 2023 collection that brought his autobiographical recollections and Dharma teachings together in English. (Shambhala Pubs)

Harada was born in Niigata Prefecture on August 24, 1924. The account of his birth preserved in Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha begins with the death of his mother. According to Harada’s recollection, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer while pregnant with him and was urged to undergo treatment that would have ended the pregnancy. She refused. Harada survived, while his mother died before his first birthday. In telling the story decades later, Harada made a point of noting the date: “I was born on August 24, the day we worship Jizo Bodhisattva.” He understood his mother to have entrusted the infant to Jizō’s protection. (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

The date is not incidental to Japanese Buddhist tradition. The twenty-fourth day of each month is widely observed as an ennichi, or sacred observance day, of Jizō, the Japanese form of the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha. In parts of Japan, particularly the Kansai region, August 23 and 24 are also associated with Jizō-bon, a communal observance centered on neighborhood Jizō images, memorial rites and the protection and well-being of children. Historical and contemporary temples continue to hold Jizō services on the twenty-fourth. (Gangoji Temple)

Jizō occupies a distinctive place in East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Usually represented in Japan in the simple robes of a monk rather than the ornamented form of many bodhisattvas, Jizō became closely associated with beings enduring difficult states of existence and, in Japanese devotional culture, with children, the dead and travelers. One of the defining features of Kṣitigarbha devotion is the bodhisattva’s determination to remain present among suffering beings rather than seek liberation apart from them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes Jizō’s longstanding association with intervention on behalf of beings suffering in the hell realms. (The Met Collection API)

Harada’s later account of his childhood places this inherited life at the center of his spiritual questioning. Once he understood the circumstances of his mother’s death, he remembered asking what he was meant to do with the life she had preserved. The question was not originally framed in the technical language of Zen. It was a question of debt, mortality and purpose: if another human being had given her life so that he might live, what constituted an adequate response to that gift? In the autobiographical material collected from his Dharma talks, this question becomes one of the earliest threads connecting his childhood to his eventual religious vocation. (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

The Second World War radically intensified the problem. As a young man Harada entered military service and trained for a su***de mission. On August 15, 1945, at the age of twenty, he was at an airfield preparing for what was expected to be his final flight when Japan’s surrender was announced. He later learned more fully the extent to which wartime propaganda had distorted his understanding of Japan’s role in the conflict. The deaths of his comrades, combined with his own survival, generated another version of the question that had followed him since childhood: why had he remained alive, and what should be done with that life? (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

After the war Harada spent nearly a year in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, where he encountered further death and hardship. He returned to Japan in 1946 and eventually undertook intensive Zen training at Hosshin-ji under Daiun Sōgaku Harada Roshi (1871–1961). Sōgaku Harada was himself an important figure in modern Japanese Zen: a Sōtō priest who emphasized rigorous zazen and incorporated intensive kōan training into his teaching. Among his successors were both Tangen Harada and Hakuun Yasutani, whose later Sanbō Zen organization became influential in the transmission of Zen practice beyond Japan. Sanbō Zen’s own institutional history describes its practice as fundamentally rooted in Sōtō Zen while incorporating the Rinzai method of kōan study inherited through Sōgaku Harada. (Sanbo Zen International)

Tangen Harada eventually became Sōgaku Harada’s Dharma heir. At approximately thirty years old he was sent to Bukkoku-ji, where he became abbot and remained for close to sixty years. Bukkoku-ji developed into a rigorous practice center that welcomed monastic and lay practitioners from Japan and abroad, including students of different nationalities, genders and ages. Harada’s reputation grew less through institutional prominence than through decades of intensive practice and direct teaching. (Shambhala Pubs)

The English-language volume Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha requires some clarification as a historical source. It is not a conventional autobiography composed by Harada from beginning to end. Harada rarely narrated his life systematically. Instead, he occasionally used episodes from his own experience while giving Dharma talks. Editor Kogen Czarnik assembled these autobiographical passages into a continuous narrative from translations of those talks. The volume pairs this reconstructed life story with twenty-four teachings, many translated by Harada’s longtime translator Belenda Attaway Yamakawa. The result is best understood as an edited collection of autobiographical testimony and Dharma teaching rather than a memoir written in the usual literary sense. (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

Harada’s mature teaching repeatedly returned to the limitations of a practice organized around the isolated individual. In a teaching titled “The Will of the Dharma,” he described practice as beginning through personal effort but eventually requiring the relinquishment of that personal will. The phrase that later supplied the English collection with its title comes from this teaching: to “throw yourself into the house of Buddha” is to cease approaching practice solely as something controlled, possessed or accomplished by an autonomous self. (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)

This teaching places Harada firmly within a central stream of Sōtō Zen thought associated with Dōgen’s language of dropping away body and mind and abandoning acquisitive approaches to awakening. Yet Harada’s biography gives the teaching a particular historical and personal context. His concern with relinquishing the self was not developed apart from the concrete realities of twentieth-century life. His childhood was marked by his mother’s death; his youth by nationalism and war; his early adulthood by imprisonment and survivor’s anguish; his later life by sustained monastic discipline and teaching.

The connection with Jizō therefore provides more than an attractive detail surrounding his birthday. Harada himself used Jizō as part of the narrative through which he understood his life. He was born on Jizō’s sacred day, believed himself entrusted to Jizō by his dying mother, and later interpreted several episodes of survival through this relationship. Historically, Jizō represents a bodhisattva ideal rooted in remaining with suffering beings. Harada’s own Zen teaching eventually emphasized a comparable movement away from protecting the isolated self and toward a life understood through practice, gratitude and relationship.

On August 24, Harada’s biography thus returns to the question with which it began. A mother gave her life so that her child could live. The child grew into a young man prepared to surrender that life to war, survived when others did not, and then spent decades investigating what it meant to offer one’s life in an entirely different way. The trajectory from his birth on Jizō’s day to his mature Zen teaching makes the anniversary an appropriate occasion for considering one of Buddhism’s enduring questions: What does it mean not merely to possess a human life, but to receive it and respond to it?

Reading and Further Study

Tangen Harada Roshi, Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha: The Life and Zen Teachings of Tangen Harada Roshi. Translated by Belenda Attaway Yamakawa; edited by Kogen Czarnik. Shambhala Publications, 2023.

https://www.shambhala.com/throw-yourself-into-house-of-buddha.html

Tangen Harada Roshi, “Break Through or Die Trying.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Winter 2023. An excerpt from the autobiographical material collected in Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha, including Harada’s account of his mother, his August 24 birth and Jizō.

https://tricycle.org/magazine/tangen-harada-roshi-zen/

Tangen Harada Roshi, “The Will of the Dharma.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Fall 2023. A short primary teaching containing the language from which Throw Yourself into the House of Buddha takes its title.

https://tricycle.org/magazine/tanden-harada-roshi/

Sanbō Zen International, “Short History of Sanbo Zen.” Useful historical background on Daiun Sōgaku Harada, Hakuun Yasutani and the development of the Sōtō-based Zen tradition incorporating kōan study.

https://sanbo-zen-international.org/en/about/history/

Gangō-ji, Nara, “Jizo-e, Commemoration Event for Jizo.” An official Japanese temple account of the August 23–24 Jizō observance.

https://gangoji-tera.or.jp/en/event/feature.html

Byōdōji Temple, “Kṣitigarbha Homa.” Background on the traditional observance of the twenty-fourth of each month as Jizō’s sacred day.

https://byodoji.online/en/ritual/ksitigarbha-homa

“Diversity in Jizo-bon Ceremony and Common Space Inside Public Housings in Eastern Kyoto City.” Journal of Architecture and Planning, Architectural Institute of Japan, 2019. Academic research describing Jizō-bon and the significance of August 24 in contemporary Kyoto-area practice.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/aija/84/763/84_1871/_article/-char/en

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Arts of Japan. Includes historical discussion of Jizō/Kṣitigarbha, his iconography and his association with beings suffering in the hell realms.

https://resources.metmuseum.org/resources/metpublications/pdf/The_Arts_of_Japan_The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art_Bulletin_v_45_no_1_Summer_1987.pdf

08/23/2026

On August 22, 1977, the Korean Seon master Chunseong died. Forty-nine years later, he remains a fascinating—and outside Korea, surprisingly little-known—figure in modern Buddhism.

Chunseong (1891–1977) does not fit very comfortably into the image many of us have of a Buddhist master. He was a serious scholar of Buddhism and became particularly accomplished in the Avatamsaka Sutra and Huayan thought. He was also a rigorous meditation practitioner, trained within the Korean Seon tradition, served as an abbot and teacher, and studied under some of the most important Korean Buddhist figures of his era. But he was equally famous for swearing, making outrageous jokes, disregarding social conventions, wandering from place to place, and saying things that could scandalize monks and laypeople alike.

Korean Buddhists came to describe him as a muaedoin (無碍道人)—a “person of the Way without obstruction.” He was sometimes simply remembered as the “cursing monk.” The profanity was not incidental to his reputation. Chunseong seemed almost determined to prevent anyone from confusing Buddhist realization with politeness, respectability or the performance of holiness.

This is where comparisons with the fifteenth-century Japanese Zen master Ikkyū become interesting. Ikkyū wrote openly about s*x, drank in taverns, attacked the hypocrisy of the Zen establishment and repeatedly overturned expectations about how an enlightened person was supposed to behave. Chunseong lived in a very different century and Buddhist culture, but there is something recognizably similar in his refusal to allow spiritual realization to become another respectable costume.

It would be a mistake, though, to remember Chunseong simply as Buddhism’s foul-mouthed eccentric. Behind the stories was an extraordinarily disciplined practitioner. As a young monk he became a disciple of Manhae Han Yong-un, the celebrated Korean Buddhist reformer, poet and independence activist. When Han was imprisoned following the March First Independence Movement of 1919, Chunseong cared for his teacher from outside the prison. Korean historical sources also credit Chunseong with helping transmit Han’s clandestinely written Declaration of Korean Independence beyond the prison so that it could reach the Korean independence movement.

His irreverence also existed alongside a radical practice of non-possession. Stories describe him giving away money when he encountered someone poorer than himself and removing his own clothing to give to someone suffering from the cold. Accounts of his death emphasize how little he possessed. His life was unconventional, but the unconventionality was accompanied by something much more demanding: an unwillingness to accumulate much of anything, including a respectable spiritual identity.

That may be the most interesting reason to remember Chunseong today. Zen has always contained figures who make us uncomfortable because they refuse to behave the way we expect “Zen masters” to behave. Sometimes these stories become romanticized, and eccentricity should never automatically be mistaken for realization. But figures like Chunseong and Ikkyū raise an important question: What remains of our idea of enlightenment when we remove all of the behaviors we associate with looking enlightened?

Near the end of his life, Chunseong reportedly described eighty-seven years of living and talking as something like a single snowflake falling into a red-hot furnace. He then instructed his students to scatter the entirety of his cremated remains into the West Sea—even the relics that Buddhist followers might ordinarily have preserved.

For a man called the “unobstructed person of the Way,” it is an unusually fitting conclusion.

Nothing to preserve. Nothing to possess.

Not even Chunseong.

Reading List :

English Wikipedia overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunseong

Two Arrows Zen

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