Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi
Zen Mountain Monastery, 4/11/2021
The Blue Cliff Record, Case 95 – Ch’ang Ch’ing’s “Three Poisons”
Picking up where he left off from a previous Fusatsu talk on Right Speech (“Learning How to Speak” – 4/8/21), Shugen Roshi investigates storied examples of practitioners using language to express the ordinary and the extraordinary. Master Dogen says, “Words are neither different nor not different from our fundamental nature. But if a person becomes attached to words and their everyday meaning, they can become attached to views.” We tend to use words very casually, but language has power and views can imprison.
