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No Water, No Moon Zen Story
A nun seeks enlightenment but finds only failure — until one moonlit night, her pail breaks, the water spills, and the reflection of the moon disappears. In that moment… she awakens. This Zen story invites you into the quiet freedom of release.
2 min read
The Last Poem of Hoshin
On the night of his death, Zen master Hoshin wrote one final poem… then left the last line blank. What he didn’t say became the deepest teaching of all.
2 min read
The Final Freedom: Nothing Left to Say, No One Left to Say It (Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter Twenty)
A free reflection on Chapter Twenty of the Ashtavakra Gita, The Final Freedom, the closing chapter of the whole dialogue, read through Internal Family Systems (IFS). Explore the king's final dissolution of body, mind, teaching, and even the "I" that had been speaking, into the bodiless freedom (videhamukti) where the dialogue trails off into silence, and how IFS distinguishes the genuine Self that holds every part with room to spare from a part that uses the language of no-se
Resting in One's Own Majesty: Where Did It All Go? (Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter Nineteen)
A free reflection on Chapter Nineteen of the Ashtavakra Gita, Resting in One's Own Majesty, read through Internal Family Systems (IFS). Explore the king's exultant sweep through every pair of opposites, the tweezers of knowledge drawing out the last thorn of thought, his amazed "where is it now?" from the throne of his own being (svamahima), and how IFS distinguishes a genuine spaciousness in which the old troubles have lost their grip from a part that prematurely declares th
Liberation in Life: Living It All, Bound by None of It (Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter Eighteen)
Liberation in Life: Living It All, Bound by None of It (Ashtavakra Gita, Chapter Eighteen) 6 min read In chapter seventeen Ashtavakra had held up the still portrait of the true knower, complete enough to stand alone with no loneliness in it. Now that motionless figure begins to move and live. Eighteen is the longest chapter in the whole dialogue by far, a hundred verses that do not so much teach a new thing as let the entire realization pour out at once, image after image of
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