Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice,

including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early
childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded
over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct
come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the
heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day,
at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without
knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something "greater" than ourselves, something apart
and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to
seek one's own true nature is "a way to lead you to your long lost home." To practice Zen means to
realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past
and daydreaming of the future. To "rest in the present" is a state of magical simplicity...out of the
emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one
need not be a 'Zen Buddhist', which is only another idea to be discarded like 'enlightenment,' and
like 'the Buddha' and like 'God.

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion
air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags,
great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain.
Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy
juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a
time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a
bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. In another life-this
isn’t what I know, but how I feel- these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten
knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a
kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon- the homegoing that needs no
home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and
rises once again to the sky.