I’m trying not to overdo blogging anymore. I’m trying to generally not post more than an item per week on the average. When I found this item from Woodmoor Village Zendo, though, I decided to break my guidelines, at least temporarily. The excerpt below from Finite Beings and Selves makes an important point that I’ve seen many misunderstand. First the excerpt.

We are finite beings, and even though in Zen we may frequently talk about the illusions and delusions of self, we need a healthy self, even if one that increasingly realizes that the notion of a separate self is one to transcend, in order to live with the realization of impermanence. To realize that we don’t have a separate self, but rather that we inter-are, requires first an understanding that being is process, not static entity, a concomitant realization of the embodied nature of our beingness, and an appreciation for the fact that the flow of being that animates our sense of selfhood (as process) is impermanent.

Zen and Buddhism are not about any putdown or denial of the self. A bhikkhu remarked once in an interview that he thought it unlikely that anyone could even start to make progress as a Buddhist until he loved himself. He was not talking about narcissism, but a genuine compassion and warmth for the being one is. As the above excerpt points out, the Buddhist teaching about the self is not that the self is to be deprecated or denied. Realization cannot be achieved by some sort of mental belief or affirmation that the self does not exist. And it has nothing to do with some sort of mystical subsumption into a grander being by means of abnegation. Rather, as the excerpt indicates, the usual mistake is the belief in the substance of the self rather than its existence only as a flux of being that is as transient as the moment itself. Momentary being is all that really is.