Excerpted from the fourth video of Tricycle Meditation Month 2026: “Awakening with Zen Koans.”
Back in 9th-century China, the great Chan master Zhaozhou (in Korean, we say “Joju”) received a student who asked him, “Master, tell me the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?” Basically, the student was asking, what is the essence of Zen?
Master Joju said, “The pine tree in the courtyard.”
They were sitting in front of the courtyard, and there was a pine tree. So the master basically directed the student’s attention [to the tree.] “Hey, that tree you see outside, that’s the ultimate, that’s the true essence of Zen.”
In other words,”enlightenment,” or “pure awareness,” is not a sublime or otherworldly and transcendental experience. It is grounded, anchored in our everyday living.
Because if everything returns to one, then anything can be what? The ultimate.
So this is a very curious thing about buddha-nature or nirvana or whatever you call it. It’s not something that is so different from our ordinary life. In fact, the more awakened you are, the more ordinary you behave. Because the ordinary mind is the awakened mind.
A lot of great teachers I’ve met never pretended to be somebody other than a simple human being. They don’t have any aura of, “I am special or I’m a guru,” those kinds of feelings. In fact, they are often childlike—innocent—and they laugh and cry and live seemingly normal human lives. Why? Because the ultimate reality that we imagine, it’s not separate from our ordinary living experience.
So if somebody says, “What is the Buddha?” You can say, “My cell phone is my Buddha. My cup is Buddha.” Everything is Buddha, right? This is illustrating the eminent nature of the buddha-nature. Eminent. So it has two different qualities. The first one is transcendental, in a sense that maybe I can use the example of mirror, or maybe the example of television. The television screen has many different shows. But even if a drama is about war—like the Vietnam War, Korean War, or whatever the very scary war is—the TV screen itself is not terrified. Right? It does not share the destiny of the people inside the movie. Just because the main character dies, the TV screen does not die. It has a transcendental nature. However, the TV screen itself, the drama, cannot be separated from the TV itself, the TV screen. The TV screen is the drama. You see what I mean? So there is this knowing of your true nature, which is unborn and it cannot be defiled. It’s pristine, immaculate. At the same time, it participates in the world. And that’s where this bodhisattva path comes in.
That is, we live as a bodhisattva. We know everything that appears, that has a form and shape, can come and go. But that which knows what’s coming and going is not moving. It doesn’t disappear. It is the suchness: Tathagata. But at the same time, this suchness has the texture and form and shape, the experience of everyday living, which is not separate from the transcendental, from the unborn nature.
So here is the question. What is the essence of Zen?
The essence of Zen is the pine tree in the courtyard. Or you can say that it’s the TV or computer monitor or your mobile phone, through which you are watching this.
Very ordinary living itself has a transcendental nature. It cannot be separated.
