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

This is episode number 121. I am your host Noah Rochetta and today I'm going to talk about the idea

of knowing just enough to be dangerous.

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 start out talking about the Zen Kowan from last week's podcast episode.

So this Kowan is called announcement and it goes like this. Tanzan wrote 60 postal cards on

the last day of his life and asked him to mail them. Then he passed away. The cards read,

I am departing from this world. This is my last announcement. Tanzan, July 27, 1892.

This is an interesting one. I picked it because it's a little different than most of the Kowans that

I've shared before. And for me the very first thing to come to mind is what would I be doing with

the time I had on my last day? Would I be writing 60 postal cards on the last day of my life

and ask them to be mailed out? The other thing that stood out to me was all that says is I'm departing

from this world and this is my last announcement, name and date. And to imagine writing him writing

this 60 times, it was comical to me when I read it. And a part of why it was comical is because I

don't know why someone would do that. I don't know if there are cultural understandings of this

that don't make sense to me because of where and when I was raised versus where and when this

story arose. I don't know. But I thought it was interesting to share some of the thoughts that

came from this and the Patreon group and the discussion that was going on in there. So I want to

share a couple of these because I hadn't really thought about it this way. The first thought comes

from Nancy who says I'd like to comment about the Zen Co-On announcement and then she goes on to say

wow to come to the end of your life like Tanzan, this co-on spoke to me about living a life with no

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