Nao’s words came back to her just then, or were they Jiko’s? To study the Way is to study the self. No, it was Haruki who’d written that. He’d been quoting Dgen and talking about zazen. It made some kind of sense. From what Ruth could tell, zazen seemed like a kind of moment-by-moment observation of the self that apparently led to enlightenment. But what did that even mean? To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an
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