Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 112, I am your host Noah Rochetta, and today I'm going to talk

about the importance of community.

As always keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist,

you can use it to learn to be a better whatever you already are.

So let's get things started with a discussion about the Zen Kohan that I shared in the

last podcast episode.

So this Zen Kohan was titled Nothing Exists.

Yamaha Techu as a young student of Zen visited one master after another.

He called upon Doku-an of Shokoku, desiring to show his attainment.

He said, the mind, Buddha and sentient beings after all do not exist.

The true nature of phenomena is emptiness.

There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity.

There is no giving and nothing to be received.

Doku-an who was smoking quietly said nothing.

Suddenly he whacked Yamaha-aka with his bamboo pipe.

This made the youth quite angry.

If nothing exists in Koyadoku-an, where did this anger come from?

Now this is a fun one to visualize that story.

Here comes this student really trying to show off to this new Zen master he found, how smart

he is and how much he understands the concept of emptiness.

So he lays it all out and gives him the answer and the master hits him, smacks him with the

...