Effort And Aliveness
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi
Zen Mountain Monastery, Mt. Tremper, New York, Sunday 08/09/2026
From The True Dharma Eye, Case 44: Guishan’s “I have already exhausted myself for you.”
With effort in practice, we bring forth our natural aliveness. To do this we make an effort to let go of self-clinging and other ways we deplete our energies. Even with expectations of the way we imagine “letting go” to be, when we encounter the reality of how tight we grasp on to our attachments, can we yield our fixed and self-centered ideas? Shugen Roshi explores this energy of aliveness with the Five Powers of the Buddha as well as a koan from Dogen’s 300 Koan Shobogenzo.
