The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So I want to share with you a kind of story of gratitude that comes from one of the one of the very significant scholars of religion,

professors of religious studies in the United States named Houston Smith.

And he was he did a great amount of work,

spending a lot of time living in different countries

entering into some of the major world religions and participating in them and studying them in a very

deeply appreciative way and having deep kind of personal relationship with people in all kinds of religions over his very long

career and and he tells the story of practicing Zen in Japan at a very strict Zen monastery and he was there for a month engaged in this practice and ended with a week-long intensive Zen retreat where

you get some like three hours a night of sleep, very intense. And it was certainly challenging for him. And,

and, um, but then at the end when he was going to leave he went to pay his respects to his teacher,

his lady Abbott, Goto Roshi, and he was a bit stunned by what he was told.

He had been working, as a Rindzai Monastery,

he had been working on comans, his enigmatic questions that you struggle with,

and I'd been meditating a lot and the Abbot said to him

Coans these enigmatic questions can be a useful exercise,

but they are not Zen.

So he thought he'd been doing Zen.

And sitting in meditation he went on that is also not Zen. So I think Houston Smith was quite stunned and surprised and what he'd been doing.

He came to study Zen and so much of it was meditation, intensive meditation and

and these comons and those aren't Zans of what was he doing?

And so the Zen master then said to him,

so you'll be flying home tomorrow, right?

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