Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, explores the possible meanings of several Buddhist and Christian concepts:

• Pranyaparamita, or “the perfection of transcendental wisdom.”

• Sunyata, or the emptiness that emptiness constitutes ultimate reality. Not adding, but taking away.

• Avataṃsaka Sūtra, which comprehensively describes the powers of meditation and emptiness.

• Anapanasati - awareness of that before you, of your breath.

• Or when Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Your ego must be reduced to ashes. And emptiness remains.

• Thomas à Kempis, a German-Dutch Augustinian monk, wrote in the Imitation of Christ a strange teaching to “Truly to know and despise self.” But that is not to hate oneself, but one’s obsession with oneself.

• As the Buddhists teach, eating, bathing mechanically—not mindfully—is doing these activities with disrespect.

• The Ignorantine Friars of the 1500s taught that the more ignorant you were the better off you were. To not read or write.

• But Lao Tzu reminds us how precarious it is to chase ideals. “Man on tiptoe is not steady.”

Ananda noticed the Buddha never changed position during the night, so one day he asked him: "Do you sleep?" His reply: "When the mind is silent, the body sleeps. Awareness does not."

July 1, 1984