Losing My Religion
Before I changed my mind about rituals, the 5:00 a.m. chanting at our retreats always felt like a pointless chore—except the final sutra. That “sutra,” though, wasn’t really one at all, but a long poem called the Hsin Hsin Ming, or Inscription on the Mind of Faith, attributed to Chien-chih Seng-ts’an (Jianzhi Sengcan), the third Great Ancestor of Chinese Zen. […]