This is the rough script of a Dharma talk I gave on 1 November 2026. I have kept it close to the way it was delivered, with only some repetition removed and a few small changes for readability.
The last time I was supposed to give a talk, I became ill. So here I am, trying again. Nothing particularly dramatic: I had a high temperature, I felt exhausted, and for a couple of days I spent most of my time in bed. But something about the experience interested me.
I had plans. I was supposed to give the talk, I was supposed to work, and I wanted to go cycling. I had things I wanted to do, and then my body seemed to have completely different plans. I wanted to get up; my body wanted to stay exactly where it was.
That reminded me of a rather strange Zen koan. Zen Master Goso said to his monks: “Seijo’s soul separated from her being. Which was the real Seijo?”
I am not trying to work out exactly what they meant by “soul” here, but there is definitely this idea of a split, of a separation. After my experience with illness, the question Which is the real Seijo? suddenly didn’t seem quite as strange as it normally does. Lying there in bed, there seemed to be the Riccardo who wanted to get on with his normal life and the Riccardo whose body wasn’t going anywhere. So which one was me?
The story of Seijo
There is a little more to the story of Seijo, a fascinating story which nowadays they would easily turn into a Manga.
When Seijo was young, she and her cousin Ochu were very close, and eventually they fell in love. Seijo’s father had once suggested that they would marry, but later he changed his mind and decided that Seijo should marry someone else. Ochu was devastated and decided to leave.
One night, he got into a boat and began travelling away from the village. After he had gone some distance, he noticed someone following him along the riverbank. It was Seijo. She joined him, and the two of them left together. They lived away from home for several years, married and had children.
Seijo continued to feel the separation from her family, however, and eventually they decided to return home. When they arrived, Ochu went first to Seijo’s father to apologise for taking his daughter away, but her father looked at him in astonishment. “What are you talking about?” According to him, Seijo had never left. She had become ill shortly after Ochu disappeared and had remained at home ever since, hardly speaking and spending most of her time in bed.
Ochu couldn’t understand what he was hearing. The Seijo he knew was waiting outside in the boat. So her father went to the room where the other Seijo had been lying all those years. When she heard that Ochu had returned, she got up and walked outside. At the same time, the Seijo who had travelled with Ochu came towards the house. The two Seijos met and became one.
The koan asks again: Seijo’s soul separated from her being. Which is the real Seijo?
Obviously what happened to me was nothing like that. There weren’t two Riccardos wandering around Royston — at least I hope there weren’t. But there was something in the story that felt surprisingly familiar.
While I was lying in bed, part of me was still living somewhere else, thinking about the bicycle ride I wasn’t doing, the work I should have been doing, the talk I was supposed to give, normal life and when I could get back to it. Meanwhile, another reality was much simpler: I was in bed, I had a temperature and I was tired. That was what was actually happening.
I noticed how easily I could think of the illness as something happening to me. My body was ill. My body was stopping me from doing what I wanted. My body wasn’t cooperating with my plans. But who exactly was this “me” that the body was refusing to cooperate with? Was the Riccardo making plans more real than the Riccardo lying in bed? Was one the real me and the other an interruption, or were they both simply what my life looked like at different moments?
My body and me
I started thinking about the way we talk about ourselves. When I am well and I go cycling, I say, “I am going cycling.” I don’t normally say, “My body is going cycling and I have decided to accompany it.” But when I was ill, something changed. Suddenly it was, “My body won’t let me,” “My body needs to rest,” or “My body isn’t doing what I want it to do.” There seemed to be me on one side, with all my plans and intentions, and my body on the other, refusing to cooperate.
We do something similar with the mind. We say, “My mind is all over the place,” “My thoughts won’t stop,” or “I couldn’t control myself.” There is nothing unusual about speaking this way, but if we stop and look at these expressions they become quite interesting. If my thoughts won’t stop, who is the one who wants them to stop? If I couldn’t control myself, who was supposed to be controlling whom? If my body won’t do what I want it to do, where exactly is the “I” that wants something different?
I’m not suggesting that we need clever answers to these questions, but perhaps they tell us something about how easily we divide ourselves. There is the person I think I am, or perhaps the person I would like to be, and then there is everything else that seems to get in the way.
I like the Riccardo who gets up early, goes cycling, goes to work and gets on with things. The Riccardo lying in bed with a temperature is slightly less useful. But he was still there, and for those couple of days that was my life. The illness wasn’t something happening somewhere outside my life while I waited for my real life to start again. It was my life.
Getting back to normal
Eventually the temperature went. I got out of bed, went back to work and eventually got back on the bike. So perhaps the “normal” Riccardo returned. But was the person lying in bed simply an interruption? Was he somehow less real than the person riding the bicycle?
We seem to have versions of ourselves that we prefer: healthy rather than ill, energetic rather than tired, calm rather than angry, confident rather than frightened. Perhaps even the good Zen practitioner rather than the one sitting in meditation wondering when the bell is going to ring. Without noticing it, we can begin to decide that one of these is the person we really are, while the others are temporary problems that need to disappear.
But Seijo’s story doesn’t give us two Seijos and then tell us which one was genuine. The two Seijos meet and become one, and still the koan asks: Which is the real Seijo?
A few days before giving this talk I was lying in bed with a temperature. Then I was standing in front of the sangha giving the talk. The following morning I would be doing something else. Which one is the real Riccardo?
Perhaps I could choose the one who is here now. That sounds quite good: this moment, this Riccardo, this is the real one. But give him five minutes and he’ll be different again. Even while I was giving the talk, things were changing. Thoughts appeared and disappeared, I breathed hundreds of times, and people were sitting there listening, perhaps agreeing with some of it, perhaps disagreeing, perhaps wondering how much longer I was going to carry on.
And yet through all those changes there remained this very familiar sense of “I”: the same “I” who was ill, the same “I” who wanted to go cycling, the same “I” who was standing there giving a Dharma talk. We use that word all day long without much difficulty, until somebody like Goso comes along and asks: Which one?
Perhaps the question is more useful than any answer we could give it. The moment I decide what the real Riccardo looks like, I have already left quite a lot of Riccardo outside: the tired one, the frightened one, the angry one, the ill one, perhaps even the one who doesn’t particularly like the person he is at that moment. But those moments don’t take place outside my life. They are my life too.
When I was ill, I kept thinking about getting back to normal, and eventually I did. But looking back, I’m not sure there was anywhere to get back to. There was the Riccardo riding his bicycle, there was the Riccardo lying in bed, and there was the one standing in front of the sangha talking about both of them. None of them stayed. This one won’t either.
So perhaps I’ll leave you with Goso’s question, not because I have an answer to it, but because after spending a couple of days in bed when I wanted to be somewhere else, the question feels a little less abstract than it did before.
Seijo’s soul separated from her being. Which is the real Seijo?
And perhaps: Which is the real me? Which is the real us?
