This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.

We took a bus to the nearby monastery of one of the last great Tang dynasty Chan masters, Yun-men. Yun-men was known for his pithy “one word” Zen. When asked “What is the highest teaching of the Buddha?” he replied: “An appropriate statement.” On another occasion, he answered: “Cake.” I admired his directness.

The practice of mindfulness aims for a still and lucid engagement with the open field of contingent events in which one’s life is embedded. All events are ontologically equivalent: mind is not more “real” than matter, nor matter more “real” than mind.

[A] person is formed from a continuum of words and actions over time and cannot be reduced to a fixed “self” that is either “enlightened” or “unenlightened.

When my self is no longer the all-consuming preoccupation it once was, when I see it as one narrative thread among myriad others, when I understand it to be as contingent and transient as anything else, then the barrier that separates “me” from “not me” begins to crumble. The conviction of being a closed cell of self is not only delusive but anesthetic. It numbs me to the suffering of the world.

No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now.Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world.

I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person.Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative.

A person who is asleep is either lost in deep unconsciousness or absorbed in a dream. Metaphorically, this was how the Buddha must have seen both his previous self as well as everyone else he had known: they either were blind to the questions of existence or sought consolation from them in metaphysical or religious fantasies.

The extent to which dharma practice has been institutionalized as a religion can be gauged by the number of consolatory elements that have crept in: for example, assurances of a better afterlife if you perform virtuous deeds or recite mantras or chant the name of a Buddha.