Study Hall

With the Tour de France done and dusted, and the visit to Tassajara over, I can get back to my usual study routine. I would say that Shohaku's book is the closest we get to a Zen Center literary phenomenon - almost everyone seems to be reading it or talking about it. I only managed to read the first fifty pages while I was at Tassajara, and am still trying to wrap my head around one of the important concepts introduced in the early chapters: "Everything is prajna paramita because everything is empty. Prajna is not personal, individual wisdom we can possess; rather each thing is itself reality and each thing is prajna, or wisdom".
Mako, the director at Tassajara, told me that she was reading the book to her partner Graham, the tenzo, as their bedtime reading; hearing that, I think it is safe to say that we are not in the Age of Decline.