Master Kyogen said: ‘My poverty last year was not real poverty, but this year my poverty is real. Though last year there was no place even for an awl to stick into, this year have no awl either’.

The Wisdom of the Zen Masters by Irmgard Schloegl

In this talk:

•   We hear the story of Master Kyogen who came to awakening by hearing a pebble strike a bamboo trunk.

•   The root of ‘I’ clings to status and to have that being threatened evokes an existential crisis. In Kyogen’s story he lays violent hands on his master and was cast out to wander for ten years.

•   But inside him something was slowly developing which took a further ten years to mature and fully ripen.

•   This story and the above passage reminds us how the ‘empty heart’ or mushin, as it is called, is highly prized in Zen. Just this is the holy of holies on the path because it is the fount of wisdom and compassion and the ‘mother’ of all the buddhas.