Declining Ownership of the Ego
April 13, 2020
by dogo
In his great book of calligraphy and commentaries, Moon by the Window, Shodo Harada Roshi writes, “We cannot throw our ego away completely, but we can decline ownership of it. To awaken to our origin prior to ego is the subtle flavour of zazen.”
We have feet, but we're not our feet. We have personality traits, but we're not our personality traits. The transformation that Zen practice brings isn't a tweaking of our quirks, an attempt to change — improve! — our personality. It's no longer identifying with that personality. We don't have to identify with our own personality traits any more than we identify with someone else's.
I talked about this on an episode of the Zen for real Life podcast.
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