“Don’t be deceived by the body, the mind, the world, or Buddhist teachings.”
— Tōrei Enji
This morning I plucked one of my old journals at random from the shelf, a volume covering Fall 2012, and found this quotation copied on the title page as an epigraph. It is by the famed painter and calligrapher, the 18th-century Japanese monk Tōrei Enji, who is often referred to as one of two “genius assistants” to the great Rinzai master Hakuin.
Those acquainted even slightly with Zen practice will recognize the acuity of the first three deceivers: the body, the mind, and the world. We all know how the body can deceive us with its aches and pains, its distractions and desires and demands. We know how the mind can deceive us with its useless anticipations, its nervous imaginings, its self-serving excuses, and its whinging justifications. And we know how the world seems incapable of leaving us in peace, taunting us to desire what we don’t need, to fear what is harmless or irrelevant or absent, and goading us into premature action and unnecessary reaction.
But Tōrei’s punchline, so to speak, is directed at these very Zen practitioners who are in danger of being deceived by the very Buddhist teachings that taught them to beware of the delusions of the body, the mind, and the world. The lore, of course, is full of paper dragons, painted rice cakes, and fingers pointing at the moon. Even the Heart Sutra warns us that Buddhist teachings are empty: no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end to suffering, no path to lead us from suffering.
It is difficult to imagine other religions telling its followers to beware of being deceived by that religion’s teachings. And yet we see those religionists being deceived all the time because they have found too many answers and not enough questions.
Zen practitioners are not exempt from this sort of self-deception. We often find a certain enthusiasm in Zen practitioners that takes the form of a mimetic cleverness, a taste for shallow paradox, a tendency to cite koans and quotes attributed to the Buddha. This is a particularly insidious form of self-deception because these expressions may have a convincing ring of enlightenment. But the ring is only an echo.
That’s the problem. If we are finding answers in Zen, beware. We need to pay most attention to the teachings that present us with unanswerable questions. To be able to sit in silence and stillness with the unanswerable questions: this is the core of Zen practice.
Richard Collins, Stone Nest Dojo, Sewanee Zen, 24 April 2025
