The Daily Dharma
from "Tricycle - The Buddhist Review"
June 10, 2006
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The abandonment of religious virtue has left this culture aggressively antagonistic to the pursuit of the unknown, the unknowable, to the mystical realms of reality. The original enthusiasm for Zen in the United States was not just for personal discovery, but for the possibility of developing an appreciation for the unknown in an excessively cluttered society--it was an effort to break ground for new possibilities.
What we need to know cannot arise from what we know now; our liberation from personal and collective suffering must derive from what we cannot envision, what is beyond our imagination, even beyond our dreams of what is possible.
One day an American student asked a Japanese Zen master, "Is enlightenment really possible?"
He answered, "If you're willing to allow for it."
--Helen Tworkov, from Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol III, #3
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