Unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment anyone?

(This article is a Dharma talk given by my dear friend Tom Daimon Wardle at the July 18th, 2026 Empty Moon Saturday sit. Tom is a Dharma Holder in the Harada Yasutani koan Zen lineage.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Hult International Business School. He is also a graduate of the Zen Peacemaker’s Seminary for Socially Engaged Buddhism.

Tom is passionate about koan, lay practice, and the integration of the dharma into daily life. He currently teaches with Empty Moon Zen. You can connect with Tom here.)

***

Yunmen taught, “I do not ask you about before the fifteenth of the month. Come, say something about after the fifteenth.” And he himself responded, “Every day is a good day.”

Blue Cliff Record, Case 6

I came to Zen to fix myself. I was prone to anxiety, depression, and anger, so it was fairly clear to me that I needed some significant improvement, and Zen seemed like a good way to do it. All the talk of enlightenment really appealed to me, these miraculous promises of total transformation, of everything being OK. I think that was what I was really after: a sense that everything was OK, including me. I imagined that if I could just get a little of that enlightenment juice for myself, it would flip a switch inside me and I would go on to live a life of happiness and success. I even imagined that it would be effortless: once I was enlightened, I wouldn’t have to try hard, things would just happen. I would succeed. People would like me. I would like me. Heck, after enlightenment, I probably wouldn’t even need to meditate anymore!

What I really wanted was for Zen to change me, to turn me into someone else, someone better, who would live my life in my stead, and do a much better job of it than I ever could. I was lost in a curative fantasy. I thought that I could use spirituality to bypass all of the struggle in life, to magically do away with the parts of myself I didn’t like or that made me uncomfortable. I thought, I hoped, that I wouldn’t have to deal with my shit, but, that just isn’t how it works.

A friend of mine once took a Buddhist tour of China, and one of the places they visited was a small temple on an island in the middle of a big lake. The temple was kept by a lone monk who had been there, by himself, for over 40 years. My friend asked the monk: “You’ve been here so long, what have you learned?” After a brief pause, the monk said, “Many decades of practice, still the same old me.” Yeah brother. This is very much to the point.

If I am the first to break it to you that all of those promises of complete, perfect, unsurpassed and remainderless enlightenment are just marketing, I’m sorry. I hope you’ll stick around anyway.

Most religions acknowledge the value of peak experiences. Whether called enlightenment, awakening, epiphany, seeing god, or even becoming god, these experiences are often the end goal of spiritual practice. If you get there, congratulations, you’ve won the game! OK, sounds good... what next? Happily ever after? That’s precisely where the problems start, because life goes on. Life goes on after you reach the mountaintop, and you can be absolutely sure that things will happen that will knock you clean out of that spiritual bliss. You’ll stub your toe, the store will be out of the thing you need, your mom will do that thing that drives you crazy (again!), or some asshole will cut you off in traffic. Can you still see god now?

I do not ask about before the fifteenth of the month. Come, say something about after the fifteenth.

Every day is a good day.

Zen may be unique amongst the spiritual traditions of the world in teaching that enlightenment is just the beginning of our work. And let’s leave that word aside from here on, it’s too pretentious and carries too much baggage. Whatever that experience may be, let’s call it awakening, and I’ll remind us all that although we awoke this morning, we will have to awake again tomorrow, just like we did yesterday.

Zen teaches that your first deep experience of awakening is profoundly important, but it requires ongoing practice to mature into that experience and integrate it into how we live our lives. We call that first deep awakening kensho, which literally means “seeing one’s true nature.” What a nice idea, but perhaps a little grandiose, so let’s think of it more as glimpsing our true nature. One of the models for the process of spiritual development that we use in Zen is the Ten Oxherding Pictures, and kensho, that first glimpse, is the third picture. This is very important: It is just a beginning. Even so, it is an experience worth having.

So how do we have that experience? The truth is, nobody knows. Experiences of awakening, the divine, the absolute, happen every day to people all over the world and they always have. There is no formula to bring about an experience of awakening, but Buddhism offers us over 2,000 years of field notes from our forebears about what they found useful and what they didn’t. Our ancestors offer pointers for us to find our own way, and amongst these pointers there is broad consensus that it really helps to have a practice. There are many helpful practices, but Zen focuses on meditation.

Awakening can strike completely out of the blue or creep in slowly and quietly, and although the tendency is to talk about it in grandiose terms (bolts of lightning or walls falling down are common images), how it comes to you will be unique, so don’t worry about what it will be like, just stay open and pay attention. Assiduously pay attention, because, with all credit to James for this turn of phrase, awakening is an accident, and our practice makes us accident prone.

If you would like to experience this accident for yourself, start by showing up. The sangha will guide you and support you as you develop stability in your meditation practice. I’d suggest making it easy for yourself at first by just focusing on attending sittings with the community. In time, you will likely find a desire to expand your practice. Good, that is necessary, but home practice is extremely hard, so a few words of caution: With all the myriad demands and distractions, it can be difficult to stick to that lofty commitment to sit a 25-minute period or two every day on our own. When we struggle to do so, it is all too easy to fall into self recrimination, and that is entirely unhelpful, so if and when you do try to establish a home practice on your own, take our great ancestor Hakuin’s advice: five minutes a day. When you have the inclination to sit longer, do so, but let five minutes be enough. The commitment will grow naturally in time.

Once you have deepened into your meditation practice and made a home for yourself there (build a grass hut where there is nothing of value), we have many tools to support you and continue expanding your practice. Retreats are particularly valuable, and I encourage all of you to sit multi-day retreats whenever possible. In our family, we also use koan, an utterly unique form of literature that has proved invaluable to generations of practitioners in having that first awakening experience and then deepening into it. Our way is to study a curriculum of koan across many collected volumes, a tradition that comes from that great ancestor Hakuin (who died about ten years before the American revolution), but it is perhaps more traditional to work with just one case or perhaps two or three across an entire lifetime of practice. Whether through many cases or just one, Koan have no bottom, just like you and me.

The first koan, usually the famous “Mu”, is used to help bring about our first big taste of awakening, our first kensho. This can take some time. If you were a monk in a Japanese monastery, it would be at least two to three years, and that is as a full-time monastic sitting a seven-day retreat every month. In my case, it took the better part of ten years, off and on. Don’t rush it, but don’t be complacent, either. No rice bags in the zendo!

Zen takes effort, but if you read much of the Zen cannon, you will quickly come across lengthy passages about the effort of non-effort and the need to let go of our striving for awakening. What gives? How do we practice with no goal when the goal is pretty explicitly this awakening-kensho thing?

Unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment anyone?

Every day is a good day. How can you NOT want that kind of equanimity and joy? How can you not strive for something like that?

Inevitably we will strive. We have to strive, but we should come to understand the nature of that striving and what it says about how we are engaging with our practice, our world, and ourselves. Striving has an inherent adversarial quality: we are trying to gain, to win, to defeat, to domineer. This is the approach of the ego, of the triumphant self that reinforces our separateness. It is understandable why the motif of the “spiritual warrior” can be so appealing, but between you and me, it’s total bullshit. There needs to be a shift, because truly there is no attainment and nothing to attain. Perhaps I should say “nothing to obtain.”

Zen isn’t about gaining or attaining, it is about intimacy, an intimacy that isn’t created but is always present, if we but notice. Pay attention. The striving is just a device, a tool that you will wear out with time. Once it is worn out, you will discard it naturally and find new ways of relating to your practice, but until it is worn out, use it and use it well. Important things happen in that striving. Our striving is where we encounter ourselves and where we can work with all aspects of ourselves, even the ones we don’t like. Through our striving, we can metabolize our karma, encountering our shit and learning to become comfortable with it, taking responsibility for it. Through our striving, we come to know ourselves anew again and again. In time, we come to see the activity of our minds with greater clarity, even as that activity continues to play out. We recognize through our own vivid experience that the ground of our truth, of our experience of reality itself, is not our thoughts nor our perceptions, but our feelings. We acknowledge and take responsibility for the fact that our experience of reality is a fabric woven of stories, just stories, and with any luck, we stop falling for our old tricks. All we have to do is notice. Again and again and again, just notice. Just...

And when you do notice, I hope you appreciate it fully, but watch out! There is a trap in that first experience of the deep. Don’t think, “This is it!”; Don’t think, “I am awake.” The work goes on. Again, that great ancestor Hakuin offers us a pointer: late in his life, he said, “At this point, I have had a few dozen major awakening experiences and more minor ones than I could count. It doesn’t matter; the practice continues.”

The poem that accompanies this case offers us further guidance:

Give up primal unity, and find the wild multiplicity of things

above and below in every direction. There’s nothing like it:

to amble along in regal ease, tracing the sound of streamwater,

to gaze far and wide, soaring free along paths of birds in flight!

Rich confusions of grasses

among hazy veils of mist:

there, you’re emptiness-born amid cliffwall paths, wildflower profusions, and a mere snap of the fingers erases that old emptiness.

Now, don’t move an inch!

One inch, and I’ll give you thirty blows!

Accident after accident, one continuous mistake. How wonderful!

So in the spirit of Yunmen, I wish you all a good day. Now go wash your ears!

The image of a man and a woman contemplating the moon is by Caspar David Friedrich, 1824