simplicity: setting the bundle down

talk 1 , silent retreat Bali, May 2026

As you may have noticed, because we’re a small group, Lucas and Nora were not able to

join us today, as they are both sick. We wish them a quick recovery. It’s not pleasant

to come to a retreat and fall sick on the first day — but such is life.

We will have three talks during this retreat. They won’t be very long. In these talks,

I’ll try to offer some context for those of you who may be new to the practice zazen so that you may have some understanding to accompany this practice that we call “just sitting.”

In Buddhism, the notion of understanding is important. That’s why we study the texts, we study the teachings. But unlike other intellectual endeavors, where the mind tries to first absorb then assimilate a body of knowledge or information — which later becomes part of the mind’s memory, of what it has learned, and the more we learn, the more we accumulate— the learning in Buddhism is not really of the same nature. It is a kind of paradoxical learning. The more we lean into learning, it is as though we were moving toward toward unlearning.

Already, that notion of unlearning is something the mind cannot easily grasp. The mind is

comfortable with the idea of, “This is what is proposed to me, and I will try to learn it.” But

if you propose to the mind a thing such as unlearning, the mind immediately faces a blank.

And that is the paradox. We use the mind to unwind, to decondition, to declutter the mind. But what we study the most in Buddhism is the mind itself. We could say the process of learning about the mind is at the same time one of allowing the mind to unlearn itself. This is a simple way of talking about unlearning.

We have all heard that in Buddhism — but also in other traditions — there is this notion of attaining enlightenment. This sounds like a huge thing. And many people who get involved with deeper self-enquiry, spiritual or meditative practices, think that at the end of the day, all this is about is a preparation to replicate the deep and radically transfmative experience the Buddha shared with us as his legacy. His experience of that is the very beginning of a teaching, a school, a tradition called Buddhism — and that is enlightenment.

Enlightenment is something, but is not a thing, if anything it would be more of a no-thng, that at the same time seems inaccessible and distant and quite simple and near. It cannot be something complex in the way our minds are habituated to complex ways of thinking, problem-solving, looking at a situation from

different angles, trying to figure things out — as that would not be aligned with what we are calling the process of unlearning here. The radical experience of unlearning, ungrasing is what Master Dogen calls dropping body and mind: shinjin datsu raku.

Here comes to mind an old story from China. Many of these Zen stories — in China the tradition is called Chan — come to us from ancient China. This story is about someone who had heard about the transformative potential of meditation: that is helps with both clarifying and pacifying the mind and in the process, if earnestly pursued, at some point could lead to an enlightenment experience. He had heard that the best way to practice — and this was common in those days — was to isolate oneself from society, from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, to go to a mountain cave and sit there in solitude, practicing meditation for as long as it takes.

He decides to go to nearby mountain well known to the meditators and hermits who

retreated there to practice. As he is on his way, on the foothills of the mountain, he sees an old man coming from the opposite direction. His face looked luminous. There was something quite serene about him.He makes the deduction, from his demeanor, that this must be someone coming down from the mountain after years of practice after having a great spiritual realization. He approaches the old man — slowly walking by, with a small bundle on his back of whatever he has, his few belongings — and asks him, “What is enlightenment?” The old man looks at him, and without saying a word, takes the bundle and sets it down.

At that moment, the young seeker's mind is jolted and he has a sudden realization. That simple gesture of

taking the bundle and setting it on the ground feels quite significant and evocative to him. It

is a gesture not accompanied by any words, by any discourse. It is a very simple gesutre, it could not be more simpler than that: What is englightenment? You pose your bundle down. The young seeker is shaken by this simple move. Enlightenment is then is some way like setting your bundle down— whatever we

conceive what bundle symbolically represent. It is not just what we carry with us; for that mountain hermit it was only his few belongings, but it symbolizes all the things we carry in our lives: our views, our opinions, our ideas, the stories we carry about ourselves. And there are layers and layers of these. We carry them without even knowing what we are carrying— until a point when they begin to feel too heavy. It's exhausting. Or, we may have a meltdown. We may hit rock bottom. Then we begin to ask questions. Then we become interested in understanding as a way to unpack some of this baggage we have been carrying for so long.

Maybe it is such a question that brings some people to want to do a silent meditation retreat, without exactly knowing why they want to come or what to expect. But maybe there is a deeper calling — because it sounds quite simple when you go through the program. There is a lot of simplicity in it. And maybe that strikes us, appeals to us.

So the young seeker realizes: “That’s what it’s about. It’s about dropping everything I have been carrying.” And of course, that realization, that deep insight, does not make the bundle go away. The

bundle is also another way of talking about our individuality, our personality — all constructs, all things we have slowly built with the help of our culture, our environment, our peers, our education, our parents. And the more we have built layer upon layer of these images, self-images, and identities, the more complicated we become — which removes us from where we began this journey, as children. If you have any recollection of your own childhood, it tastes of something very simple, it was easier for us to experience things in a more direct way.

So along the way we lose that simplicity. We become these beings who thrive at doing different things at the same time. And the better we get at doing several things at once, the more our psyche, our mind, becomes complex, more layered. So the seeker comes to understands that it is about dropping what he has been carrying. Once the initial sense of astonishment, of awe, begins to fade, once he has had his realization — the mind jumps to the next thing. And the next thing is: Now what? “Now that I have understood this is about unpacking and dropping everything I have been carrying, about simplifying my life — what’s next?” So that is his second question to the hermit: “Now what? What do I do now with this realization?” That question, what now, what is next, is the natural impulse of the mind as it finds it challenging to just be with the moment. The moment needs to lead to something else; to another moment. Hearing that, the hermit takes the bundle, puts it back on his shoulders, looks at him, smiles, and walks away toward the nearby town from where the seeker had come.

An importnat aspect of the teachings is condensed in that one moment of exchange. Now if you go and get interested in Buddhist or Zen teachings, the literature is vast. A lifetime is not enough to go through it. Even in the time of the Buddha there were so many sutras, so many commentaries on the sutras — and then, generation after generation, teachers and masters came and added their own understanding, their own commentaries, to the texts that preceded them. The teachings are rich, very complex, very dense. And yet, at the heart of it, there is something very simple. What this hermit teaches, without using a single word, is this: first you set down your bundle, you place it in front of you. You examine it, you unpack it, you detach yourself from it, you see through it. And if the bundle is also a representation of our personality, our individuality, of how we need to operate in the world, of how we need our ego to function in the world — then it is about completely revisioning, revisiting, and simplifying thispersonality. But we cannot continue our journey without a personality, without that bundle, if you will. So we put it back on. But the bundle we put down and the bundle we pick up may look the same from the outside— yet they are entirely different experiences.

(Silence.)

That gesture of placing the bundle on the ground is very different from carrying the bundle

with us all the time, without ever examining it. It simplifies what we carry. We discover that there are things we can leave behind. And another word for simplifying what we carry is that it makes it lighter. The bundle doesn’t feel so heavy anymore. And then the story ends with the hermit walking toward the town — which means that after some time, there is no point in staying in the mountain caves. You need to come down. You need to become part of this greater life to which you also belong: your community, your

friends, others, the people around you, and in a larger sense, the world.

(Silence.)

And what has the most value in Buddhism, ultimately, is to be of benefit to others in some meaningful way. Now, that notion of being of benefit to others again sounds very simple, but it is hard to

put into practice. Because our self-views, our self-identities, our ego-consciousness most of the times, we work in view of something that has a gaining aspect for me to it, something that in some way will benefit me. We all naturally ask that question whenever we undertake anything: “What is there in this for me? What can I get out of this?” Operating from the me as the center, self-centeredness is our default way of functioning in the world.

It is rare for us to do anything without asking that question.This is what we call in Zen the gaining mind.

There is nothing wrong with the gaining mind — we need to gain things to live in the world. But if the mind

has only that one track, that one direction, and only seeks to gain — which in Buddhism is what we call to grasp, or to crave — then it is very difficult for me to open to this dimension of being, where I feel I need to be of benefit to others.That notion of being of benefit, of striving for the well-being of others, is called compassion in Buddhism — karuna in Sanskrit. That compassion liberates us from the bundle we carry as we slowly become less self concerned, as we begin to forget ourselves a little bit. Because no matter how much we work in life — trying to reach goals, to reach objectives, to get from here to there, from one position to another, accumulating this and that: prestige, name, wealth, reputation — there is no end to it. There is absolutely no end to that craving. That craving mind is fueled by something the Buddha called, in Sanskrit, trishna. Trishna means thirst. But this is a thirst that is never quenched by anything. When we are thirsty, we drink water, and for a while the thirst goes away. But the mind that craves, the mind that wants more — the grasping mind, the thirsting mind — moves from one object to the next. It can never settle and be satisfied, because it does not know what simplicity means. It only knows that it needs more.

Now, this may be a bit of a caricature, but I think it bears some truth to it. We have all heard that

some of the wealthiest of the wealthy, whose fortunes are beyond belief — they have enough

to buy and get whatever they want — and yet what does that trishna, that thirsting, do? They

still want more. But they reach a point where they know it is not about gaining more wealth;

they have all the wealth in the world. What do they want then? They don’t want to die. They invest millions into programs to see if there is something they can hack, some code in the aging process, so they might become immortal — because they think they are too good to die, too special to die. Everyone else can die, but not them. That is what trishna does. You will never have enough .What I am saying does not go against the fact that we need to take care of our lives, to be prosperous, to accumulate what we need. But if trishna, thirsting, is in the driver’s seat, then we are going down hill.

So, going back to zazen. What zazen slowly allows us to realize is this discernment that can see through all the desires,the wants, the ideas we create. That discernment is an aspect of prajna, wisdom. It helps us see through things that the mind creates. What meditation offers us —the deeper insight that lets us see through the workings of our own mind, our discriminating mind, constantly busy and preoccupied with objects, some of which it wants and wants more of, feeling if it has more of them it will become content, a happy person, and others that are undesirable, unpleasing, dislikable, that it pushes away, thinking, “If I rid myself of these, I will find peace” — that mind is never settled. That mind never finds peace. Because it is bound to this cycle the Buddha called samsaric existence — the cycle of birth and death.

And birth and death are not only physical birth and physical death; they are the multitude of

things that arise and fade in our mind, moment after moment, that cover the surface of the

mind like ripples on the surface of a lake, like waves on the surface of the ocean. And we are

always battling, always engaged, with these waves, with these ripples. What meditation allows us to discover is that while on that surface level of existence we are constantly struggling — engaged with situations, struggling at times with others, with ourselves, wanting certain things, wanting to push other things away — we forget that this ocean has a bottom. And at the bed of this ocean there is a deep tranquility. It is never disturbed. That movement of being able to see through the ripples, the waves of the mind, through a practice such as meditation — and there will be more on this later— is called wisdom, prajna in Sanskrit.

So, to take the metaphor from the story I shared at the beginning — the bundle we set on the

ground after some time, and the bundle we pick up after some time, and the difference

between them, and the lightness that comes after we set the bundle down and examine it —

this is the difference between what is on the surface of the ocean, which can sometimes be

quite turbulent, quite wavy, the churning of the waves — the stories, the events of our lives,

the busyness — and the deep peace that lies at the bottom.

The two are not separate. What lies at the bottom of the ocean and the movement happening

on the surface belong to the same body of water. You don’t need to eliminate the waves to

reach the bottom of the ocean. You just need to be able to see through the waves. So we step back, we pay attention. The waves will always remain. And another metaphor for the waves is our thoughts: when we sit, we are confronted with this endless stream of consciousness, all the thoughts that arise from moment to moment. And if we think there is some technique we can learn to make these thoughts go completely away, so that we can wake up to this peace and quietness at the bottom of this ocean — that would be like wanting to remove the waves from the sea. It is a rather vain effort. Because it is in the nature of the ocean to create waves, and it is in the nature of the mind to create thoughts. What we learn in the process of meditation and practice is how to drop these thoughts, moment after moment.

Either we get carried away by the mind and what it creates — the thoughts, the stories — or

we set down our bundle from time to time and enquire, and look into what the mind

fabricates. And we begin a process that is profound, but also very simple. It begins with

this simple understanding: that we do not need to take whatever the mind tells us seriously.

And yet, when we are submerged in our thoughts, and in all the emotions that arise from a

mind that is very active, sometimes agitated, restless, we believe: “This is the reality of me.

This is who I am.” So that is one thing on the path, the journey of simplifying. It starts with realizing that: Yes, my mind tells me many things, creates many stories, many emotions — but I can take it with a grain of salt. Sea salt. It’s not that serious.

(Silence.)

So another way of understanding “not taking our thoughts seriously” translates into what we

actually do in zazen, which is, as I said at the beginning, this very simple practice of letting

go of thoughts, and coming back again and again to the present moment.

Now, going back to that metaphor of the waves and the ocean: that letting go of thoughts is

letting go of the waves. And the moment we let go of the waves, or they let go of us, we find the calm, the

peace that is the wakefuleness always present in the depth of our own being, knowing our being is not something we ever own, fully know or can keep. Impermanence would be another name for it.

(A long silence.)

(The singing bowl chimes.)

We can go now and enjoy the bonfire. Thank you very much for your presence, and for your

attention.