That’s true (laughs). My teacher said that I should go to Eiheiji, not for practice but to see what it’s like there. You hear Eiheiji, Eiheiji, all the time and you think it must be an extraordinary place, but you go there and see it for yourself and you realize that it is nothing special — ‘This is all it is?’ Then you can relax and get down to practising. That’s the reality, isn’t it?
Sawaki Roshi
Final Lesson, by Arthur Braverman
And he [Uchiyama Kôshô Roshi] told us ‘to look at zazen and not at him as our teacher’. It’s almost as if he knew some of us would become disappointed in him and he didn’t want our disappointment to carry over into our zazen…