Right and Wrong — The Zen Koan of Mayoku Thumping His Staff

In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Michael Brunner explores the Zen koan “Mayoku Thumps His Staff,” Case 16 of the Book of Equanimity. The story appears simple: Mayoku performs the same gesture before two different Zen masters. One responds “right.” The other responds “wrong.” The question is not which master is correct — but what this reveals about our tendency to interpret life through fixed ideas.

This teaching examines how easily the mind replaces direct experience with shorthand: right and wrong, good and bad, success and failure. Zen practice invites us to release those conceptual filters and respond directly to the living circumstances of our lives.

Rather than solving the koan as a puzzle, Sensei Brunner shows how it exposes the way we cling to judgments and inherited narratives. When those stories fall away, a deeper responsiveness — what Zen calls wisdom — becomes available.

Recorded at One River Zen in Ottawa, Illinois, this teishō connects a classic Zen koan with the ordinary challenges of daily life.

• The Zen koan Mayoku Thumps His Staff

One River Zen offers Soto Zen meditation practice, Dharma study, and Zen training in Ottawa, Illinois. Practitioners from outside the area may also train online.

Schedule an introductory meeting with Sensei Michael Brunner:
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Learn more:
https://oneriverzen.org

Daily Zen teachings:
https://oneriverzen.org/daily-zen

Awakening Streams shares Zen teachings, koan reflections, and conversations on practice with Sensei Michael Brunner of One River Zen. Each episode explores how classical Zen teachings illuminate the challenges of modern life.

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

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Ungan Sweeps the Ground — The Second Moon and the Problem of Effort
Book of Equanimity (Shoyoroku), Case 21
With Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner
Recorded at One River Zen (Ottawa, Illinois)

Attention! As Ungan was sweeping the ground, Dogo said, “You’re hard at it!”
Ungan replied, “You should know there’s one who isn’t hard at it!”
Dogo said, “So, is there a second moon?”
Ungan held up the broom saying, “Which moon is this?”
Dogo desisted.
Regarding this, Gensha remarked, “Indeed, this is the second moon.”
Ummon also said, “The butler watches the maid politely.”

In this teishō, Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner explores one of the most subtle dynamics in Zen practice: the split between activity and commentary.

How ordinary activity becomes self-conscious effort

The moment identity forms around striving

What Zen calls the “second moon”

Why spiritual self-improvement can reinforce duality

The difference between immersion and evaluation

How intention functions without becoming self-centered

Why “just keep sweeping” is not passivity

This talk examines how commentary quietly replaces functioning. When Dogo says, “You’re hard at it,” heaven and hell separate—not because sweeping changes, but because narration enters the field.

Ungan’s response points beyond both effort and non-effort, yet the trap remains: if there is “one who isn’t hard at it,” has a second self appeared?

Gensha’s and Ummon’s remarks sharpen the point. Even subtle spiritual refinement can become a second moon—an observer watching itself practice.

Activity vs. identity

Commentary as subtle duality

The “board on your shoulder” metaphor

Bodhisattva intention vs. spiritual self-making

Dogo’s desisting as embodied response

Mara and the 108 distractions

Returning to functioning

Where does commentary replace action in your own life?

When you are working, are you working—or evaluating yourself working?

When you are practicing, are you practicing—or narrating the one who practices?

The koan does not eliminate effort. It exposes the tightening around effort.

Just keep sweeping.

Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner is the founding teacher of One River Zen in Ottawa, Illinois. Through teishō, koan study, and daily practice, he emphasizes direct experience, embodied insight, and the transformation of suffering in everyday life.

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner offers a Zen teishō on Mumonkan Case 9, “Daitsu Chishō.” The koan presents a striking paradox: Daitsu Chishō Buddha sat in meditation for ten kalpas, yet did not attain Buddhahood. The monk’s question—why not?—reveals a deeply rooted assumption about practice, effort, time, and spiritual arrival.

The teishō opens by naming a common experience in Zen practice. When life feels reactive, misaligned, or difficult, we assume something essential is missing. We take up practice with sincerity—sitting, studying, meeting in dokusan, working with koans—often carrying a quiet belief that if we practice long enough or purify ourselves enough, something will finally click. Awakening is imagined as a future result, produced over time.

Turning to the case, Sensei Sōen examines how this assumption shapes the monk’s confusion. Ten kalpas—an unimaginably long span of time—should be more than sufficient if Buddhahood were something attained through effort. Rather than correcting the amount of time, Priest Jō of Kōyō steps completely outside the framework of cause, effect, and spiritual progress. His response—“Because he is a non-attained Buddha”—reorients the entire question.

The teishō explores how the name Daitsu Chishō itself points beyond a personal narrative. Daitsu (“pervading everywhere”) and Chishō (“wisdom”) describe not an individual accomplishment, but the nature of reality itself: a wisdom already complete, already functioning, and never absent. From this essential point of view, Buddhahood is not something produced by practice or time, even though wholehearted practice remains vital and necessary.

Drawing on classical Zen teaching and lived examples, Sensei Sōen points to how reality responds immediately and completely, without deliberation or attainment. Life itself answers—before thought, before explanation, before spiritual achievement. What obscures this is not a lack of effort, but the assumption that awakening must arrive later, under different conditions.

As the talk unfolds, the structure of attainment begins to collapse. Questions and answers lose their footing. The context of the koan shifts from abstract doctrine to lived life itself—work, relationships, the body, and time unfolding as it is. The non-attained Buddha is revealed not as a failure, but as the expression of enlightenment that has never needed to be acquired.

The teishō concludes by returning the koan to the listener. If nothing was ever missing, what does practice mean now? The case does not offer an answer to think through, but an invitation to see directly—by letting go of how awakening is supposed to look and allowing it to manifest exactly where one stands.

Mumonkan (Gateless Gate), Case 9

Daitsu Chishō and the non-attained Buddha

Practice and the assumption of spiritual arrival

Time, effort, and the illusion of progress

Buddhahood as function, not achievement

Koan practice as lived encounter

Letting go of how awakening “should” appear

Awakening Streams is the Zen teaching podcast of One River Zen, a Soto Zen practice community based in Ottawa, Illinois. The podcast features teishō, koan teachings, and reflections grounded in classical Zen and everyday practice.

🔹 Learn more: https://oneriverzen.org
🔹 Teaching archive: https://oneriverzen.org/daily-zen

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Soen Michael Brunner offers a Zen teishō on Mumonkan Case 8, “Ketshū Makes Carts.” This koan from the Gateless Gate raises a deceptively simple question: when the wheels and axle are removed, what is made clear about the cart—and what is revealed about our own lives and practice?

The teishō opens by addressing a common mistake in practice and daily life: confusing foreground and background. We privilege explanation, judgment, and conceptual understanding while losing contact with direct, lived experience. Sensei Sōen explores how this reversal happens moment by moment—how labeling, evaluating, and interpreting quietly replace intimacy with what is actually present.

Turning to the case itself, the talk examines why Gettan’s question resists conceptual resolution. Rather than negating the cart or dissolving it into abstraction, the koan points to function. Without "wheels" and "axle", nothing "rolls", nothing "carries", nothing "works". But, what fails is not existence, but our idea of how something should function. This distinction becomes central to understanding the verse and Mumon’s commentary.

Drawing on dokusan encounters and everyday examples, the teishō shows how concepts—even subtle or “correct” ones—can immobilize practice. Presence itself is examined carefully, not as something to be possessed or stabilized, but as an activity that must remain alive and responsive. The “active wheel” described in the verse moves freely in all directions, collapsing the distance between self and other, practice and life.

Mumon’s commentary—likening realization to a shooting star and spiritual activity to catching lightning—is explored not as poetic imagery, but as a description of immediacy and function. When conceptual separation drops away, nothing is excluded and practice is no longer confined to formal settings or special states.

The episode concludes by returning the question to the listener. What happens when expectations fall apart? When the cart of our assumptions no longer holds together, how do we respond? The koan is not answered for us; it must be met directly through practice and lived engagement.

Mumonkan (Gateless Gate), Case 8

Keichū and the meaning of function

Foreground and background in Zen practice

Conceptual thinking vs. direct experience

The “active wheel” and movement in all directions

Presence as activity, not possession

Koan practice in everyday life

Awakening Streams is the Zen teaching podcast of One River Zen, a Soto Zen practice community based in Ottawa, Illinois. The podcast features teishō, koan teachings, and reflections grounded in classical Zen and lived practice.

🔹 Learn more about One River Zen: https://oneriverzen.org
🔹 Zen teachings & archive: https://oneriverzen.org/daily-zen

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

The 200-Millisecond Gap: Free Will, Karma, and Zen
with Sensei Michael Brunner (One River Zen)

In this episode, Sensei Michael Brunner explores how ancient Zen practice and modern neuroscience converge on the same insight: we often begin to act before we consciously decide.

Drawing on Benjamin Libet’s famous readiness-potential experiments, Sartre’s account of prereflective consciousness, and the Zen kōan Chinyu and the Rice Pail–碧巌録 HEKIGANROKU (BLUE CLIFF RECORD) Case 74, this teaching reveals how karmic momentum moves through the body before thought arises — and how Zen practice opens a brief but powerful space of freedom.

This is the heart of awakening in everyday life: not controlling experience, but learning how to interrupt habitual reactions and allow wiser action to emerge.

Free will and the brain

Benjamin Libet and “free won’t”

Karma and karmic momentum

Sartre’s prereflective self

Blue Cliff Record, Case 74

Chinyu and embodied action

Zen practice in daily life

Sensei Michael Brunner is a transmitted Sōtō Zen priest and the founder and guiding teacher of One River Zen, a Zen Buddhist community in Ottawa, Illinois offering daily meditation, retreats, and Dharma study grounded in classical Zen and contemporary life.

Learn more at oneriverzen.org

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

Primary Text: Emperor Dōkō’s Cap — Shōyōroku, Case 97

Core Theme: Awakening is not achieved through improvement or performance, but revealed when self-seriousness drops away.

Zen practice often becomes another form of identity management: spiritual roles, competence, insight, and authority.

The kōan stages a meeting between political power and spiritual authority—and dissolves both through an ordinary, unguarded gesture.

Emperor Dōkō’s simple act of pulling down his hat strings reveals Buddha-nature precisely because it is unperformed.

True freedom in Zen is not becoming something new, but ceasing to protect an imagined self.

The emperor’s “treasure” is not insight he possesses, but what appears when he forgets who he is supposed to be.

Master Kōke does not challenge or correct the emperor; he invites direct demonstration.

Awakening here is mutual recognition, not victory or defeat.

Parable of the hidden jewel from the Lotus Sutra:

We live as though lacking, despite already carrying what we seek.

Nothing changes except the story we believe about ourselves.

The jewel represents inherent completeness, not earned attainment.

Notice where practice becomes performance.

Observe how self-protection hardens identity and drains joy.

Experiment with dropping the act in small, human moments.

Let spontaneity, play, and ordinary gestures reveal what is already present.

Buddha-nature is not solemn or staged.

Awakening moves, laughs, stumbles, and keeps going.

The invitation is simple: stop pretending and see what remains.

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

Title: The Garuda Trap: How to Master Karmic Momentum and Sustain Presence

Speaker: Sensei Michael Brunner (Founder, One River Zen, Ottawa, IL)

Summary: What happens to your hard-won peace the moment you step off the cushion and back into your life? In this essential Zen talk, Sensei Michael Brunner dives into the perennial struggle of maintaining clarity against the immediate pull of habit energy. Using the compelling imagery of Case 44 of the Shōyōroku (Kōyō’s Garuda Bird), Sensei Michael reveals the Garuda Trap: that instantaneous surge of karmic consciousness that seizes the Dragon (our true, calm nature) the moment it "leaves the ocean" of direct experience. Learn to distinguish between the "imperial order of presence" and the "general's order of strategy," and discover a powerful, non-avoidant method for working skillfully with your reactive patterns. Stop being the "blind turtle pinned under Mount Sumeru" and learn how to make friends with the inner scoundrel to sustain authentic presence in your everyday world.

Key Concepts & Metaphors:

The Ocean (Dragon King): Your natural domain; the calm, steady depth of your true nature, or original mind. The practice is to stay home in direct experience (body, breath, sensation).

The Garuda/Falcon: Karmic Momentum or Karmic Consciousness. The instantaneous surge of thought forms and old habits that seize you. The trap is sprung the moment the "head sticks out"—so drop back in immediately.

The Balcony Test: Identifying the edge where your peaceful presence meets your old habits. A place of revelation, not punishment.

Blind Turtle under Sumeru: A warning against repeating painful, habitual patterns. Do not repeat the pattern.

Imperial Order vs. General's Order: The Imperial Order is the stillness of presence. The General's Order is reaction and strategy. Stay in the Imperial Order; stop chasing the General.

Core Insight: Skillful Action

The practice is not about eliminating karma, but working skillfully with it.

Make Friends with the Inner Scoundrel: Meet all facets of yourself (the aloof one, the avoidant one) from presence.

The Bullfighter Analogy: Don't avoid the "bull" (karma), and don't run into it. Work nimbly with it.

The Practice: If an old pattern surges, look at it carefully. Engage it, but not from your reactive self. Drop back into the body, into the breath, into direct sensation.

Connect with One River Zen:

Sensei Michael Brunner is the Abbot and founding teacher of One River Zen in Ottawa, Illinois.

Website: oneriverzen.org

Location: 121 E Prospect Ave, Ottawa, IL

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

🎧 Awakening Streams Episode Notes

Title: ZEN KOAN: The 2 Secrets of True Compassion | Sensei Michael Brunner

Teacher: Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner, Sōtō Zen Buddhist Priest (Lineage: Dainin Katagiri Roshi through Rev. Dr. Sojun Diane Martin Roshi).

Community: One River Zen, Ottawa, Illinois.

—

CORE TEACHING: Throughout the Body

This talk, given by Sensei Michael Brunner, challenges the idea that Zen practice is limited to the cushion. He connects the deepest spiritual teachings to the tangible work of One River Zen's community missions, Karuna Pantry and the soon-to-open David’s Clubhouse in Ottawa, Illinois.

Dōgen's Teaching: Sensei Brunner grounds the talk in Dōgen's famous quote: "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the ten thousand things." The practice is about being a true person, not a perfected image of a Buddhist.

The Koan of Spontaneity: We explore Shōyōroku, Case 54: Ungan’s Great Compassionate One. The Koan uses the image of Avalokiteśvara (Bodhisattva of Great Compassion) to ask how boundless compassion functions.

Dōgo’s Pointer: Dōgo likens it to "a man who reaches behind him at night to search for his pillow." This is spontaneous, intuitive action, free of thought or strategy.

The Critical Difference: The key is the subtle yet profound difference between two phrases:

Ungan's Partial View: "All over the body are hands and eyes." (Implies compassion is something "I" do or applyas a tool—80% there).

Dōgo's Complete View: "Throughout the body are hands and eyes." (Implies compassion is what this life is—the unobstructed functioning of original nature. It is not applied; it is simply how life operates when the self-story is not in the way).

The Final Invitation: The talk concludes with the understanding that "supernatural" functioning is simply reality without the distortion of the ego. The true Koan for the listener is: "How will you spend the very real currency you possess with your next breath—this currency that is your life?"

—

Connect with Sensei Michael Brunner:

Website: brunnerzen.org

Organization: oneriverzen.org

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

In this episode, Sensei Michael Brunner of One River Zen Center in Ottawa, Illinois explores Shōyōroku Case 19 — Ummon’s Mount Sumeru, a profound Zen koan on how we meet the obstacles of the mind.

When a monk asks, “When not producing a single thought, is there any fault or not?” Ummon replies, “Mount Sumeru.”
What does it mean to encounter life’s difficulties as the mountain itself rather than something to climb over or escape?

Sensei Michael unpacks this question through the lens of the Three Transformative Touchstones — maintaining wonder, including everything, and transforming suffering. Each offers a way of seeing how awakening arises through, not apart from, the very conditions of our lives.

🪷 Taught by: Sensei Michael Brunner 
🏯 From: One River Zen Center | 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350
🌐 Learn more: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

Keywords / Tags:
Sensei Michael Brunner Ottawa | One River Zen | Ummon Mount Sumeru | Shōyōroku 19 | Zen koan | Zen Buddhism | Sōtō Zen | Dharma Talk | Zen Teaching | Sōen Michael Brunner  | Ottawa IL

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen

Zen Kōan on Ego and Original Nature — Mountains, Rivers, and the True Will
with Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner, Abbot of One River Zen (Ottawa, Illinois)

When every movement of the heart leans toward I want or I don’t want, how do we know what direction is true? In this Dharma talk, Sensei Sōen Michael Brunner turns to the final case of the Book of Equanimity — Rōya’s Mountains and Rivers — to explore how ego, will, and awakening unfold in daily life.

Through the unlikely pairing of Aleister Crowley’s dictum “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and John the Baptist’s “He must increase, I must decrease,” Sensei reveals how Zen transcends both self-assertion and self-erasure. This kōan becomes a living invitation to see the original nature that breathes through mountains, rivers, thoughts, and every ordinary moment.

💠 Recorded live at One River Zen, a Soto Zen Buddhist temple rooted in the lineage of Dainin Katagiri Roshi.
🎧 Learn more, view upcoming retreats, or join practice at www.oneriverzen.org.

🪷 Awakening Streams: The One River Zen Podcast
Teachings and reflections with Sensei Michael Brunner (Sōen) of One River Zen Center, 121 E Prospect St, Ottawa IL 61350.

🌐 Learn more & join practice: https://www.oneriverzen.org
🎧 Listen to more episodes: Awakening Streams Podcast
🙏 Support the Sangha: https://www.oneriverzen.org/donate

#SenseiMichaelBrunner #MichaelBrunnerOttawa #OneRiverZen #ZenKoan #ZenPodcast #OttawaIL #SotoZen