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This talk is from the summer of 2019, when Open Source Zen teachers and communities gathered together for a week-long meditation retreat. Here's the koan that accompanied us throughout the retreat:

   Mujaku was widowed at thirty-two. She couldn’t get over her grief and became a nun. She came to the teacher Bukko and asked, “What is Zen?”
   Bukko replied, “The heart of the one who asks is Zen; you can’t get it from someone else’s words.”
   At that moment a deer at a nearby stream gave a cry. The teacher asked, “Where is that deer?”
   The nun listened. The teacher shouted and asked, “Who hears?”
   At these words Mujaku had a flash of understanding and left. At the water pipe from the stream she picked up a lacquered wooden bucket that was full of water. She saw the moon’s reflection in it and composed a poem, which she presented to the teacher:

The bucket catches the stream,
and the pure moon behind pines
appears in the water.

   Bukko glanced at the poem and said, “Take the Heart Sutra and go.”
   After that, she had interviews with the teacher, coming and being sent away, until in the end the bottom fell out of the bucket, and she presented another poem of this realization:

The bottom fell out of my bucket,
and now there’s no water,
no moon.

   After Mujaku’s death, the nun Nyozen of Tokeiji meditated on this poem. When she grasped the essence of Zen, she presented her own poem to her teacher:

The bottom fell out of that humble woman’s bucket,
the pale dawn moon caught in the rain puddles. 

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