Hi Alessa
I agree it would not be love but a illusion of desire, a fantasy imagined as being Love.

I don’t know anyone who has not fallen into that trap. And some of them have required that inner ‘slap’ to ‘wake up’. I’m pretty sure most of us have also experienced that “waking up” the hard way as well. 🙂 To my way of reading, its what makes the Zen story relatable. I’ve been shamed by such a slap, I have dressed up desire as love, I have hidden truths from myself that only a ‘slap’ would sake loose… but I am also the gardener who sometimes sees. So their is hope 🙂

Hi
I see the nun as brave & wise.
It takes a lot of courage to stand up in front of your peers & teachers.
She was wise not to keep quiet, this could have been misinterpreted as colluding or encouraging the monk.
This story is still relevant today in our modern world.

Thank you, Thomas 🙏🙏🙏

Commentary by Hogen Bays, Roshi of the Great Vow Zen Monastery on “If You Love, Love Openly” (from 101 Zen Stories):

1. Zen is about openness, not secrecy: The monk wanted to hide his desire. E‑Shun refused secrecy.
Her public question — “If you love me, why not embrace me here?” — exposes the monk’s shame and fear.

The commentary explains that Zen practice encourages transparency, not hiding parts of ourselves.

2. Desire isn’t the problem — hiding it is:

The monk’s desire is human. The problem is that he wanted to act on it in secret, outside the community, outside honesty.

E‑Shun’s response cuts through the secrecy. She forces the monk to see his desire, his fear, his attachment to reputation, his internal conflict

Zen uses moments like this to reveal what we’re clinging to.

3. She exposes the monk’s attachment to image: The monk wanted to appear pure, to appear disciplined, to appear above desire. But he also wanted the nun.

E‑Shun’s public challenge shows that he cared more about how he looked than about truth.

* Zen teachers often use shock or directness to reveal hypocrisy.

4. Her response is compassion, not cruelty: The commentary emphasizes that E‑Shun wasn’t humiliating him.
She was offering him a chance to be honest, drop pretense, face his desire openly and see his own fear.

In Zen, this is considered a gift — a moment of awakening.

5. The teaching: Love that hides is not real love- If the monk truly loved her, he would not need secrecy.
He would not be ashamed. He would not fear being seen.

Her challenge shows: his “love” was mixed with desire, fear, and ego, he wanted her privately, not openly
and he was attached to the fantasy, not the reality

Zen points us toward love that is honest, open, and free of clinging.

In one sentence: The commentary teaches that true love and true practice require openness — not hiding, not secrecy, and not clinging to an image of purity.

End of commentary.

Any comments on the commentary Thomas, Peter, Alessa.. anyone? (I don’t understand the “he was attached to the fantasy, not the reality” part).

🤍 Anita

In my readings – A Zen master’s discipline is about removing what obscures awakening. When discipline arises from that intention, it becomes an act of care. It says: I see your Buddha‑nature, even when you forget it. I will not indulge the habits that keep you small… In this way form is how formlessness becomes visible. Love, in its deepest sense, is not sentiment but the willingness to meet reality as it is. Sometimes that meeting is soft; sometimes it is firm. Both can be expressions of the same heart.

Form corrects. Love reveals. Which one moved you.

“Sometimes form steadies us. Sometimes love uncovers us. When you listen closely, which one stirs your heart.”

Hi Peter:

I need time to process the Form and Love points in your 2 recent posts. From initial reading and using my phone (so, no researching things), “The quiet courage to embody (Dharma)” stands out.

Which I believe you have done again and again in these forums. I’ve seen honesty, transparency and openess in your replies, again and again.

As far (or as close) as I can go, I ask myself: how can I embody the principles (Form) I believe in, how can I be more transparent? what am I still hiding?

About “deserved shame”- I have learned that shame for many people, maybe most (or all?) is so difficult to experience that when it comes to hoping to influence a person (a “sinner” in Christian terms) to awaken and be/ do better- shame needs to be applied in the smallest quantities. Too much and it turns people away from any possible Awakening.

I hope 🙏 I am making sense, Peter?

🤍 🤔 Anita

Peter: “Love, in its deepest sense, is not sentiment, but the willingness to meet reality as it is”-

Loving another person is not a sentiment but the willingness to meet another person as he or she is.

To put away judgment, at least for a little while and just give the person a safe place (within the heart) to just BE.

To not try to fix or reconstruct another person to soothe my fears and accommodate my wishes, but to meet the person where he or she is.

Keeping this in mind, Peter, how to respond to people who are conflicted, Confused and troubled.. I suppose to give them the safe space to express without telling the person what they should think or feel or do?

(I am guessing the answer is Yes 😳).

I’ll pay more attention to this when I reply in the forums and elsewhere.

Still using my phone, will reply further to your posts, Peter, in the morning 🌄 when I hope to have the use of a 🖥.

🤍 Anita

Hi Everyone: As I am also trying to see my own experience, the following is probably going to be more head than heart.

Alessa, your point about everyone having different needs and values feels important. Zen stories often leave space for exactly that kind of multiplicity. They don’t hand us a moral verdict; they invite us to notice the movements of our own mind as we try to assign one. In that sense, “Who is to say what is right or wrong?” becomes less a philosophical claim and more a mirror: why am I so quick to want the answer to be one way or the other? What in me wants certainty, and what in me resists it?

As for the monk’s hidden love, I agree, only he could know why he concealed it. And perhaps that’s part of the koan: we see only the surface of another person’s struggle, never the full terrain.

Anita, your question about objective versus subjective right and wrong touches something subtle. I don’t read Alessa as denying the existence of right and wrong so much as pointing to the difficulty of applying them cleanly to human experience. Even in Zen, where precepts exist, they aren’t commandments handed down to control behavior, though it’s easy to fall into that trap. They’re more like tools for clearing the dust from the mirror. Their purpose is to illuminate, not to shame.

That’s why I agree with you about shame needing to be used sparingly, if at all. Most shame is already present long before anyone “applies” it. When it’s undeserved, it obscures awakening. When it’s deserved, if that word even fits, it tends to arise naturally, like the monk’s blush in the story. Not as punishment, but as recognition: Ah… I see what I was clinging to… I suspect we all have known that moment.

To be candid, my own decidedly un‑Zen intention in engaging with this koan was to address something I see so often in the world: our rush toward judgment and certainty the moment a story is told. The koan felt like an invitation to pause and look beneath that first reflex.

In daily life, rules matter; communities need form. But as observers, we’re also offered a chance to notice how quickly we leap to conclusions, how readily we assume we know what happened, who is at fault, and what the “lesson” must be. That movement is worth noticing as I thing it reveals our own illusions and shadows.

As for embodying form, I’m not sure any of us can answer that cleanly. Zen doesn’t treat form and formlessness as opposites but as interdependent… like yin and yang moving across the same canvas we tend to forget. Zazen has form: posture, breath, stillness. Yet its purpose is to dissolve the very constructs that keep us from presence. In that way, form becomes the means by which formlessness is revealed.

Hermann Hesse once wrote of trees whose deep roots rest in the Eternal Now (the blank canvas), a realm not measured, while their branches and leaves live in the shifting weather of the temporal world. That image feels close to what I mean. The roots are like formlessness, grounded in what simply is. The branches are form, reaching into experience, shaped by wind and season. When we notice both, the stillness below and the movement above, we become more transparent TO the moment itself. Not merely present in time, but presence meeting the moment directly.

Hi Peter/ Everyone:

“’Who is to say what is right or wrong?’ becomes less a philosophical claim and more a mirror: why am I so quick to want the answer to be one way or the other? What in me wants certainty…?… shame is already present”-

Indeed, I’ve been quick to want an answer to who’s right and who’s wrong. The part of me that wants certainty is the part that’s been chronically uncertain and self-doubting. And shame has been heavily involved: if I am bad or flawed or inferior, incapable… how can I trust myself (my thoughts, feelings or actions)?

I read somewhere: When someone feels shaky inside, they may grab onto strict rules, rigid beliefs, or black‑and‑white thinking as a way to steady themselves. The rigidity isn’t real confidence — it’s a shield.

Zen would say that the tighter someone holds onto certainty, the more fear is usually underneath. People who trust themselves don’t need everything to be fixed and definite, but people who fear being wrong or inadequate often rush toward clear answers because ambiguity feels threatening.

In this way, the craving for certainty becomes a way to avoid the discomfort of self‑doubt, even though the real strength comes from being able to stay open and present without needing guarantees.

Any thoughts about self-trust Peter? Alessa? Thomas? Roberta? Anyone else?

️🤍 Anita