As a younger man, I never sought enlightenment—I sought salvation. I desired resolution, not awakening; a story of fall and redemption, not of emptiness and form. But as the vocabulary of certainty faded, I found myself grasping for new terms—first subtly, then overtly. Salvation gave way to transformation, transformation to awakening. In time, I realized I had merely changed the names of my longing. As Thích Nhất Hạnh writes, "People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don’t suffer anymore." I was still clinging to views, still trying to package the ineffable into something doctrinal.
I began as a Christian and earnestly attempted to be a Buddhist. In the end, I could be neither in name. The identities, with all their historical and institutional weight, proved too rigid. But in practicing Zen—particularly Sōtō Zen—I found space. I found permission to sit without pretending to understand. As Jack Kornfield so aptly summarizes: “In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived. How well we have loved. How well we have learned to let go.” Zen gave me the letting go. Not as an abandonment of meaning, but as a relinquishment of control.
With the passing of time, clarity has come to feel less like a spotlight and more like moonlight through broken stone—dim, soft, and indirect. It is not the blaze of certainty, but the whisper of sufficiency.
It was in this spirit that I encountered Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s woodblock print, The Moon Through a Crumbling Window. The image captures a turning: the historical figure of Bodhidharma (Daruma) wrapped in his iconic red robe, seated against the ruins of a shattered temple wall. His eyes are hollow but penetrating, his posture meditative, and behind him—hovering in the sky like a second, silent face—is the moon.
The composition is vertically constrained, lending it a sense of weight and stillness. The red of Daruma’s robe glows with symbolic intensity: power, vitality, disruption. In contrast, the crumbling architecture speaks of impermanence. Ivy pushes through the cracks—nature’s quiet insistence that all forms are temporary. The moon behind him is not merely decorative. It evokes the Zen metaphor of truth as the moon, and teachings as fingers pointing toward it. But here, the moon is glimpsed through decay—truth glimpsed through what has collapsed.
Following my departure from the Christian tradition, I found myself in a prolonged intellectual and spiritual wanderlust. I read voraciously—psychology, mysticism, comparative religion. I devoured the Tao Te Ching, Jung’s Red Book, Tillich, and Tilopa. I craved a system or figure who could validate what I felt but could not articulate. And then, without warning, I encountered the koan: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It was a thunderclap.
Attributed to Linji Yixuan, the phrase is not a nihilistic rejection of the Buddha, but a warning against spiritual idolatry. The moment one turns the Buddha—or any teacher—into an object of final authority, the pursuit is lost. Alan Watts echoed this sentiment when he wrote, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” I had been chasing reflections, not reality.
In this moment of disorientation, I turned to Bodhidharma, the monk credited with bringing Zen to China. His story—severe, spare, unsentimental—cut through my noise. He taught two gates to the Way: ri, or insight through principle, and gyō, or realization through practice. These mirrored my own path—intellectual excavation followed by embodied stillness.
From Bodhidharma, the Rinzai and Sōtō schools emerged. Rinzai, with its paradoxes and shouts, felt theatrical to me. But Sōtō, with its insistence on silent sitting and daily repetition, resonated. The practice was the path. The ordinariness was the awakening. Farmer Zen, they call it. Planting, sitting, waiting. As Eihei Dōgen wrote, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.”
Yoshitoshi’s Daruma, then, is not merely a subject—he is a koan himself. A question without an answer. A figure whose presence challenges me not to interpret, but to remain. His silence is not ignorance. It is volition. He chooses to sit among ruins. And in that gesture, I find a model.
Zen teaches that there is nothing to attain because there is no separate self to attain it. Practice is not cumulative but recursive. One does not climb toward awakening. One circles the same breath, the same posture, again and again. The Dalai Lama once said, “There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”
In the Zen classic The Blue Cliff Record, case after case resists resolution. The stories are not fables but provocations. They are not puzzles to solve but mirrors to unsettle. Their beauty lies in their refusal to close. Like moonlight, they flicker. And yet, they remain.
I return to the artwork. Yoshitoshi’s Daruma no longer appears as a relic of the past. He is present. Vital. Waiting. The wall has crumbled. The roof is gone. But the moonlight, indirect as it is, remains.
He neither explains nor commands. He does not evangelize. He does not escape. He simply sits. The ruins around him are not a problem to be fixed but a condition to be embraced.
And so, I return to my own life. To my fractured beliefs, my imperfect rituals, my unresolved questions. I sit. I practice. I tend to the stillness as one tends to a garden—without expectation, but with care.
I sit.
And the moonlight finds me.
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” —Alan Watts