Michael Hall PhD

10/18/2026

Roshi Kapleau could have been alluding to many different ideas here, but here is my take: Zen practice leads eventually to seeing everything exactly as it is, with nothing added, and nothing taken away. Clear seeing I call it.

Conventional wisdom says, “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” Zen wisdom says, “Where there is smoke, there is smoke.”
- Roshi Philip Kapleau, Awakening to Zen

https://www.louisvillezen.org/sittings.html

09/25/2026

Light in the desert is often startling. I see why so many visual artists, like Georgia O’Keeffe, chose to live in such remote places. I enjoyed visiting her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico two years ago.

09/18/2026

Is effort necessary? It’s hard for me to ask this question with a straight face!😅 Yet many current neoadvaita, non dual teachers claim that effort is futile. Tangen Roshi has it right, quoting Zen Master Dogen, who brought Zen to Japan around 1350. Or, as Albert Low, Roshi once said in his book Hakuin on Kensho-great effort, great realization; little effort, little realization.

THE LAST REFUGE FOR ALL'

Dogen on Effort

The great way of the Buddha and the patriarchs involves the highest form of exertion, which goes on unceasingly in cycles from the first dawning of religious truth, through the test of discipline and practice, to awakening and nirvana. It is sustained exertion proceeding without lapse from cycle to cycle.

Accordingly, it is an exertion that is neither self-imposed nor imposed by others but free and uncoerced. The merit of this exertion upholds me and upholds others. The truth is that the benefits of one's own struggles and sustained exertions are shared by all beings in the ten directions. Others may not be aware of this, and we may not realize it ourselves, but it is so. It is through the sustained exertions of the Buddhas and patriarchs that our own exertions are made possible, that we are able to reach the high road of Truth. In exactly the same way it is through our own exertions that the exertions of the Buddhas are made possible and that the Buddhas attain the high road of Truth.

This exertion too sustains the sun, moon, and the stars; it sustains the earth and sky, body and mind, object and subject, the four elements and five skandhas.

The merits of these exertions are sometimes disclosed, and thus arises the dawn of religious consciousness, which is then tested in practice. Sometimes, however, these merits lie hidden and are neither seen nor heard nor realized. Yet hidden though they may be, they are still available because they suffer no diminution or restriction, whether they are visible or invisible, tangible or intangible.

At this moment a flower blossoms, a leaf falls - it is a manifestation of sustained dynamic activity. A mirror is brightened, a mirror is broken - it is a manifestation of sustained dynamic activity. Everything is striving. To attempt to avoid exertion is an impossible evasion because the attempt itself is exertion. This sustained exertion is not something that people of the world naturally love or desire; yet, it is the last refuge of all."

- Shobogenzo
- photo: Tangen Harada Roshi

08/23/2026

I am currently practicing with a Korean Zen group-the Ordinary Zen Sangha in Sarasota, Florida. Korean Zen has a long and distinguished history, and worthy of study alongside the more familiar to Americans Japanese, Chinese and Tibetan traditions.

On August 22, 1977, the Korean Seon master Chunseong died. Forty-nine years later, he remains a fascinating—and outside Korea, surprisingly little-known—figure in modern Buddhism.

Chunseong (1891–1977) does not fit very comfortably into the image many of us have of a Buddhist master. He was a serious scholar of Buddhism and became particularly accomplished in the Avatamsaka Sutra and Huayan thought. He was also a rigorous meditation practitioner, trained within the Korean Seon tradition, served as an abbot and teacher, and studied under some of the most important Korean Buddhist figures of his era. But he was equally famous for swearing, making outrageous jokes, disregarding social conventions, wandering from place to place, and saying things that could scandalize monks and laypeople alike.

Korean Buddhists came to describe him as a muaedoin (無碍道人)—a “person of the Way without obstruction.” He was sometimes simply remembered as the “cursing monk.” The profanity was not incidental to his reputation. Chunseong seemed almost determined to prevent anyone from confusing Buddhist realization with politeness, respectability or the performance of holiness.

This is where comparisons with the fifteenth-century Japanese Zen master Ikkyū become interesting. Ikkyū wrote openly about s*x, drank in taverns, attacked the hypocrisy of the Zen establishment and repeatedly overturned expectations about how an enlightened person was supposed to behave. Chunseong lived in a very different century and Buddhist culture, but there is something recognizably similar in his refusal to allow spiritual realization to become another respectable costume.

It would be a mistake, though, to remember Chunseong simply as Buddhism’s foul-mouthed eccentric. Behind the stories was an extraordinarily disciplined practitioner. As a young monk he became a disciple of Manhae Han Yong-un, the celebrated Korean Buddhist reformer, poet and independence activist. When Han was imprisoned following the March First Independence Movement of 1919, Chunseong cared for his teacher from outside the prison. Korean historical sources also credit Chunseong with helping transmit Han’s clandestinely written Declaration of Korean Independence beyond the prison so that it could reach the Korean independence movement.

His irreverence also existed alongside a radical practice of non-possession. Stories describe him giving away money when he encountered someone poorer than himself and removing his own clothing to give to someone suffering from the cold. Accounts of his death emphasize how little he possessed. His life was unconventional, but the unconventionality was accompanied by something much more demanding: an unwillingness to accumulate much of anything, including a respectable spiritual identity.

That may be the most interesting reason to remember Chunseong today. Zen has always contained figures who make us uncomfortable because they refuse to behave the way we expect “Zen masters” to behave. Sometimes these stories become romanticized, and eccentricity should never automatically be mistaken for realization. But figures like Chunseong and Ikkyū raise an important question: What remains of our idea of enlightenment when we remove all of the behaviors we associate with looking enlightened?

Near the end of his life, Chunseong reportedly described eighty-seven years of living and talking as something like a single snowflake falling into a red-hot furnace. He then instructed his students to scatter the entirety of his cremated remains into the West Sea—even the relics that Buddhist followers might ordinarily have preserved.

For a man called the “unobstructed person of the Way,” it is an unusually fitting conclusion.

Nothing to preserve. Nothing to possess.

Not even Chunseong.

Reading List :

English Wikipedia overview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunseong

08/22/2026

Wonderful summary of Roshi Kapleau’s life.

Born on August 20, 1912, Philip Kapleau occupies an unusual place in the history of American Buddhism. He was neither the first person to introduce Americans to Zen nor the first Western student to travel to Japan in search of it. His contribution was more consequential in another way: Kapleau helped establish the idea that Zen in the West should be understood not principally as a philosophy, an aesthetic, or a subject of comparative religion, but as a rigorous practice requiring meditation, discipline, teachers, retreats, and sustained personal inquiry.

His route to Buddhism was improbable. Trained as a court reporter, Kapleau served as chief court reporter at the Nuremberg Trials following the Second World War and later worked at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Exposure to the testimony and evidence surrounding the devastation of the war contributed to a period of profound questioning about human nature, suffering, and the meaning of existence. While in Japan, he encountered Zen and became acquainted with the teachings of D. T. Suzuki, whose lectures and writings were already bringing Zen into Western intellectual life.

But Kapleau eventually wanted something different from an intellectual understanding of Zen. In 1953, he returned to Japan and entered a period of intensive training that would last approximately thirteen years. He practiced principally with Harada Daiun Sogaku, Hakuun Yasutani, and Sōen Nakagawa, teachers associated with an especially demanding stream of twentieth-century Japanese Zen. Yasutani’s approach drew from both Sōtō and Rinzai traditions and placed considerable emphasis on zazen, kōan practice, and the possibility of direct realization—kenshō—among serious lay practitioners as well as monastics.

Out of those years came one of the most influential books in the transmission of Zen to the English-speaking world, The Three Pillars of Zen. First published in 1965, it differed markedly from much earlier Western writing about Zen. Kapleau did not merely explain Buddhist ideas. He assembled meditation instructions, teachings by Yasutani, descriptions of teacher-student encounters, accounts of intensive practice, and first-person narratives of awakening. The result allowed readers to glimpse Zen from inside the training hall rather than simply encounter it as philosophy.

That distinction mattered. D. T. Suzuki had played an extraordinary role in bringing Zen into Western intellectual culture, influencing philosophers, psychologists, artists, poets, and writers. Kapleau represented another stage in that transmission. His message, implicit throughout his work, was that reading about Zen was not enough. One sat down. One practiced. One attended sesshin. One met with a teacher. One encountered boredom, resistance, ambition, doubt, fear, and the relentless activity of one’s own mind.

Yet reading was also an essential part of the legacy Kapleau left behind. The Three Pillars of Zen became a defining Zen text for generations of English-speaking readers, but it was not his only contribution. In books such as Zen: Merging of East and West, To Cherish All Life, and Straight to the Heart of Zen, he continued trying to translate the demands of Zen practice into language Western practitioners could inhabit. His writing was never simply descriptive. Again and again, it pointed the reader away from Zen as an interesting philosophy and back toward practice itself. For countless people who never met Philip Kapleau, their encounter with him happened first—and sometimes entirely—through a book.

After returning to the United States, Kapleau founded the Rochester Zen Center in 1966. It became one of the important early institutions of sustained Zen training in North America and helped establish a model for serious lay practice outside Japan. Kapleau had been ordained by Yasutani and authorized to teach, although he did not receive formal Dharma transmission from him—a historical distinction worth preserving. His eventual independence from Yasutani also reflected a larger question that would confront nearly every Buddhist lineage transplanted to the West: how much of an inherited Asian religious form belongs essentially to the Dharma, and how much belongs to the culture through which the Dharma has historically been expressed?

Kapleau believed that Zen could take root in American soil without merely reproducing Japanese institutional culture. That process was inevitably imperfect, and aspects of the Zen he transmitted—particularly its strong emphasis on kenshō—have been debated by later practitioners and scholars. But those debates are themselves evidence of his influence. Kapleau helped create a Western Zen substantial enough to develop its own institutions, literature, teachers, arguments, and questions.

His legacy therefore extends beyond any single book or Zen center. He helped mark a pivotal transition in the history of Buddhism in America: from Zen primarily encountered as an idea about awakening to Zen practiced as an embodied discipline of awakening.

And he left behind both sides of that transmission: places where people could sit down and practice, and books that continued inviting people through the door.

On August 20, the anniversary of Philip Kapleau’s birth in 1912, it is worth remembering how consequential that doorway became.

Reading Philip Kapleau

The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment — the essential starting point and Kapleau’s most influential book.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89766/the-three-pillars-of-zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/

Zen: Merging of East and West — a companion to The Three Pillars of Zen, focused particularly on the questions that arose as Zen moved into Western culture.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89770/zen-by-roshi-philip-kapleau/

The Zen of Living and Dying — Kapleau’s exploration of death, dying, practice, and the possibility of meeting mortality directly.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89764/the-zen-of-living-and-dying-by-philip-kapleau/

Straight to the Heart of Zen: Eleven Classic Koans and Their Inner Meaning — talks on classic kōans and the fundamental questions of Zen practice.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89763/straight-to-the-heart-of-zen-by-philip-kapleau/

To Cherish All Life: A Buddhist Case for Becoming Vegetarian — Kapleau’s argument for Buddhist vegetarianism and an important example of how he extended Zen practice into ethical life.
https://books.google.com/books/about/To_Cherish_All_Life.html?id=xvAKAAAAYAAJ

08/16/2026

This story related by Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede about Tangen Harada Roshi is remarkable on several levels. It relates the power of absolute surrender; and raises the question of what do we really control in life. This episode in Tangen Roshi’s life was one of several times he was moments away from death and was miraculously saved. Who is in charge here, really? Who is it?

SURRENDER

AT A TEA BREAK one day, Tangen Roshi told us of a woman who had just joyfully informed him that her husband, who had needed surgery for stomach cancer eight months earlier, was just pronounced cured. When the wife had first learned of his diagnosis, Tangen Roshi said, she came to him overwrought with concern. “What do you think I told her?” he asked us, beaming. Someone guessed, “Kannondo (Kannon Room).” “That was the second thing I told her,” he grinned. “What was the first thing?” Finally, he told us: “Surrender.”

At the morning tea break on my first day at Bukkokuji, Tangen Roshi passed around maple sugar candies that I had brought him from Rochester. This reminded him, he said, of the deep karma he felt with a maple tree that had saved his life right after taking charge of Bukkokuji. While hiking on the mountain behind the temple, he had slipped and fallen over a precipice. About thirty feet down he was caught in his midsection by the single branch left on the tree, which left him with permanent pain in his hip. But it saved him from almost certain death. While falling, he said, he realized “ego… unnecessary….” Then he brought out the branch itself, which someone, to his regret, had cut off to present to him.

- Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede about his training under Tangen Harada Roshi

A rakusu given by Tangen Roshi to Bodhin Kjolhede when he was staying at Bukkokuji. The inscription on the left says, “For Zen brother Ven. Bodhin, in remembrance, from Daisetsu Tangen, Bukkokuji, June, Showa 60 [1985].” On the right, the three big characters read, literally, “plum- flower-go.” One could interpret this as “May the fragrance of plum blossoms follow you always.”

https://www.rzc.org/news/harada-tangen-roshi/

08/09/2026

This powerful vignette gives a taste of the passion needed to ‘rouse the Mind that seeks the Way’.

At age 29, Tangen was the head monk at Hos¬shinji when Philip Kapleau first walked through the monastery gates in 1953. Kapleau’s studies in Zen philosophy under D.T. Suzuki in New York had convinced him of the Zen saying, “A picture of a cake doesn’t satisfy hunger,” even as it left him brimming with concepts about Zen. But by now Tangen had developed the insight to see through Kapleau-san’s intellectual pride and brashness, recognizing beneath it the same anguished searching of his own youth. Their countries had been mortal enemies, leaving them both scarred and dedicated to realizing that which united them: their innately enlightened nature.

Tangen also must have seen that Kapleau-san, his senior by 12 years, had the full package: the compelling need to come to realization, and the determination to do so. His demands on Kapleau-san matched his faith in him.

Once when the American newcomer was sitting in the dokusan line, Tangen, who alone at the monastery had learned a little English, was sitting behind him ready to go in with him as his interpreter. No sooner had Kapleau-san struck the bell and stood up than Tangen, without warning, struck him violently behind the ear. Kapleau-san, enraged, took a swing at him, but with no time to lose, stormed straight in to see Harada Roshi. For the first time, Kapleau-san was able, in his aroused state, to respond to the Roshi no-mindedly, from the guts rather than the head. Harada Roshi signaled his delight. From then on, Kapleau writes in Zen: Merging of East and West, he found himself “operating on a higher energy level, and at dokusan was no longer afraid of the roshi.” Tangen had known well that compassion can take the form of harshness.

- https://www.rzc.org/news/harada-tangen-roshi/
- Philip Kapleau in Japan in 1953

05/03/2026

This quotation is wisdom speaking. It is one reason why in my teaching, which I began in 2005 I have always discouraged the use of thinking to apprehend spiritual truth. The source of direct knowing is never the thinking mind. Stop thinking, turn inward, be still and know God directly.

THE HEART IS THE CENTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS,
NOT THE BRAIN

The brain, for instance, is a lump of matter. The brain is merely an instrument that human consciousness uses. When the citta enters into a deep state of calm and concentration, the conscious awareness that is normally diffused throughout the body simultaneously converges from all areas of the body into one central point of focus at the middle of the chest.

The knowing quality manifests itself prominently at that point. It does not emanate from the brain. Although the faculties of memorization and learning arise in association with the brain, direct knowledge of the truth does not. Step by step, beginning with the initial stages of samãdhi practice, progress in meditation is experienced and understood in the heart—and only in the heart. This is where the truth lies, and the meditator who practices correctly knows this each step of the way.

When it comes to understanding the true nature of all phenomena, the brain is not a factor—it is not useful at all. The citta’s serene and radiant qualities are experienced at the heart. They emanate conspicuously from that point. All of the citta’s myriad aspects, from the grossest to the most subtle, are experienced clearly from this central spot. And when all defiling influences are finally eliminated from the citta, it is there that they all cease.

- Venerable Ãcariya Mahã Boowa, Arahattamagga

05/02/2026

Here is a link to my second discussion with Susanne Marie about embodiment and spiritual awakening.

In this second conversation, Susanne and Michael explore what it truly means to awaken without leaving our humanity behind. Rather than transcending grief, d...

03/11/2026

Below is a link to a video I did a week ago with spiritual teacher Susanne Marie. Here is a link to the video on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGefvt8_yc.
Here is a link to Susanne Marie's website: https://susannemarie.org/susanne-marie/
I first met Susanne about 7 or so years ago when she was in Binghamton, New York to celebrate her mother's retirement from Binghamton University, where she had been a professor for many years. She is a warm, open, and friendly person, who has deeply embodied her awakening. As is also true for me, this process continues indefinitely. Thank you for having me on your podcast, Susanne! I throughly enjoyed this sharing.
During the first year of the COVID pandemic shutdown, I did daily meditation sessions and weekly talks on ZOOM and Facebook Live which were available for free to anyone anywhere in the world who was interested. After the world returned to some semblance of normalcy, I took an extended sabbatical from spiritual teaching, primarily to travel and directly experience the work of a variety of spiritual teachers.
Warm wishes to all! God bless us everyone!

I became a seeker at the early age of seven. I felt like I was engaged in a losing battle with the conditioned trance of the adult world, rendering the felt sense of unity I had throughout my childhood for the most part, unconscious. I sought for that lost part in various ways over the course of my....