Riccardo

Good evening everyone, and thank you for being part of this final session of our series.

Over the past weeks, we’ve walked together through episodes from the life of Eno, or Huineng, exploring not only his story but what it might reveal about our own experience of practice and daily life. Along the way, we’ve connected these teachings with those of Shinzan Roshi, bringing these ancient stories into something immediate and lived.

We began with a simple but extraordinary moment: Eno hearing a line from the Diamond Sutra while selling firewood:

“Abide nowhere and let the mind come forth.”

In that instant, something shifted.

Not necessarily something added, but perhaps something released. The grip of ideas about himself, reality and how things should be seemed, for a moment, to loosen.

That gave us our first question: how much of our lives is shaped by what arises in the mind—and by how tightly we hold on to it?

In the following session, we explored Eno’s meeting with the Fifth Ancestor, who asked him a seemingly simple question:

“Where are you from?”

We can answer that question very easily.

I am from Italy. I live in England. I have a name, a history, a job, relationships, memories and countless other things I can use to describe myself.

All of them are true.

But is that the whole answer?

Eno’s response challenges the divisions we use to make sense of ourselves and others: north and south, this person and that person, this identity and another.

So where are you from?

We then turned to the famous poems: one emphasizing discipline and the continual polishing of the mirror, and Eno’s response:

“Originally there is not a single thing.”

Here we encountered an apparent tension.

Practice requires effort. Discipline matters. We sit down, we pay attention, we return when the mind wanders. We polish the mirror.

And then Eno comes along and asks, in effect: what mirror?

When we look closely for something fixed that we can call mind, it becomes remarkably difficult to find. Thoughts appear and disappear. Feelings change. Experience moves continuously.

And still, we practise.

This led us to another subtle trap: what Shinzan Roshi calls the “stink of Zen.”

We can have an insight and almost immediately turn it into something we possess.

Now I understand.

Now I know.

Perhaps we even begin to build another identity around being someone who understands.

The grasping has simply found a new object.

Later, we followed Eno into the mountains, pursued by the monk Myo. When Myo finally caught up with him, Eno gave him one of the great questions of Zen:

“Without thinking of good or evil, what is your original face before your parents were born?”

It is tempting to explain what that question means.

But perhaps we can leave it alone for a moment.

Without good.

Without evil.

Before your parents were born.

What is your original face?

These stories have travelled across centuries to reach us, but they are not museum pieces. Eventually they have to meet our own lives.

Not some ideal Zen life.

This one.

Working.

Walking.

Talking to someone.

Being irritated.

Feeling joyful.

Sitting quietly.

Standing in a queue.

There may be moments when we notice ourselves constructing a story about what is happening. Moments when we catch ourselves defending an identity, holding tightly to an opinion, or immediately dividing experience into what we want and what we don’t want.

And occasionally, perhaps, the grip loosens.

Only for a moment.

That may not sound very dramatic.

No thunder.

No flash of light.

No certificate of enlightenment arriving through the post.

Just a little less grasping.

A little less defending.

A little less certainty that every story appearing in the mind must be true.

And then life continues.

So perhaps, as this series ends, we don’t need to arrive at a conclusion.

Eno’s story doesn’t give us something new that we have to carry around with us. If anything, again and again, it seems to ask what we might put down.

The identities.

The certainties.

Even our understanding of Zen.

And then we return to whatever is in front of us.

The next conversation.

The next irritation.

The next breath.

The next moment.

Nothing special to attain.

Nothing we need to hold.

And still—

what is your original face?