Emma Roy - What Did You Think This Was?

Angel City Zen Center - Beginners Only Podcast

Emma takes a deep look at the necessity of goallessness in practice. Reading from a piece about gaining ideas from Suzuki’s “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind,” she asks the biggest conundrum in Zen. If there’s no goal, why are we doing this? It’s an encouraging talk of discouragement, a reclamation of the value of reality as its own reward, an exhortation towards an attitude of pure practice. “Do you think the purpose of practice is to become a better person?” she asks. And yet as Suzuki remind us, “When everyone understand the value of pure practice, we will have peace in the world.”