The practise of zazen cannot make human beings hard as iron against the vicissitudes of life. It cannot arm them to fight battles or make them impervious to the inevitable pain of life. It does not make benign, world honoured beings who have transcended suffering.

Zazen lets the light of existence seep into shrouded skulls, flesh and bones. It allows experience to permeate so that artificially created edges become difficult to define, become permeable and eventually vanish. They were never really there.

Ceasing to define things and self in opposition to them, ceasing to make distinctions and artificial divisions of self from experience of which we were ever a part and unfold into the truth that, in its eternal benevolence, was always waiting for us, always was us, always is us.