[By Genpo Roshi, excerpted from a live video conference, November 22, 2020]

 . . . If there’s a koan — “How do you stop suffering?” — of course many of us can pass the koan, we just be suffering.  That’s passing it, but between that and doing it completely, it’s the difference between a kensho and dai-kensho.  You know, I sometimes feel the only thing that’s going to take care of this for many people is dai-kensho.  And I come back to our roots, which is what the great masters say.  There’s all this fiddling around with the leaves and the branches of the tree, but until we get to the root of the problem — uprooting, that is the dai-kensho, the great opening — until we do that we’re just going to keep fiddling around with the branches and the leaves.

 Sometimes it feels almost like — too much.  Because I know what it takes to have dai-kensho. . . .