“The practice of Zen is the perfection of character.” ~ Yamada Koun (1907-1989)
“I wish to become like a great tree, shading all beings.” ~ Yamada Koun
June and I started our first Zen Center, the Zen Center of Hawaii in 1994. We were living on the Big Island of Hawaii, and I had the good fortune during these years to study with Robert Aitken Roshi, whose teacher was Yamada Koun Roshi. Someone once asked Aitken Roshi about the meaning of Zen and he replied, “Floss regularly and mind your own business.” And yet, Aitken Roshi was an avid peace activist who worked in prisons and helped establish the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He was a wonderful role model for me and and exemplary Zen teacher who demonstrated the perfection of character in his words and conduct.
Most spiritual and ethical teachings describe something we are supposed to acqure. But these teachings are about losing what we have sought to gain. This approach honors emptiness and invites us to empty out ourselves in order to find ourselves.
The Six Paramitas are an ancient teaching of Mahayana Buddhism. They are guidelines for character work and describe the ideal actions and conduct of a Bodhisattva, one who takes a vow to save all sentient beings. They are principles to live by. As we say at our Zen Center, they are what a Zen-inspired life looks like. The six are dana (generosity), sila (ethical conduct), kshanti (patience), virya (wholehearted effort), dhyana (meditation), and prajna (wisdom).
The word, paramita is sometimes translated as perfection, but its etymology is richer. One derivation comes from parama, meaning highest, primary, or most excellent.
A second divides the word into pāram: “the other shore”, and ita, the past participle of the Sanskrit verb. meaning “to go.” Read this way, paramita means “that which has gone to the other shore,” or “that which has gone beyond itself”. So we say they are self-transcendent.
They are transcendent because they are not really a method. They are already here. They are the formless precepts the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng, spoke of. Where is the other shore? It is right here, when the self has been forgotten. The work of Dana paramita, for example, is not your own personal accomplishment. It is the grace that arises from the other shore, generosity that is natural and uncontrived.
The Buddha’s revolutionary insight was that the way we identify with a separate “me” is itself the engine of our suffering. So he proposed a path that opens to emptiness, allowing us to live in a larger way, with grace, mercy, and wholeness.
These teachings cannot be understood in a merely intellectual way. They are meant to be practiced and lived. And this requires that we empty out.
There is a beautiful story about this in the Gospel of Thomas. It says:
The kingdom is like a woman who was carrying a sack full of grain. While she was walking along a road far from home, the bottom of the sack developed a hole, and the grain poured out behind her onto the road. She did not notice what had happened, and when she got home, she put the sack down and discovered that it was empty.
It is shocking to read “the kingdom is like . . .” and find no lavish, opulent, richly adorned place with jewels, food and abundance. Rather, it is like an empty sack.
At our center, we often speak of this as the gap. We all experience gaps in our everyday lives, small ones and large ones, that happen when things don’t go as we expect. Someone stands you up for a lunch date. You accidentally leave your favorite candy bar at the checkout counter only to discover it is gone when you return to fetch it. You go to get the tests back from your doctor only to discover you have stage four cancer. These are gaps, some small, some large. They are all dharma gates waiting to be opened.
We do not respect emptiness in our culture. We are busying filling in the gaps. We do this through constant distractions, entertainment, and compulsive thumbing on our cell phones. We never allow ourselves to be bored or uncomfortable. We stay busy as a way of running away from ourselves.
The empty sack is a gift. It is at the heart of what the paramitas can teach us about moral and character development. They are not a self-improvement project. They are about the self that remains after the grain has all fallen out on your way home from the grocery store.
If we allow the gaps in, they can open us to a whole new reality beyond the one we have been so busy planning. Let go and empty out and you will find your true self has always been here, closer than your own nose.
This is what Yamada Roshi was reaching for when he said he wished to become like a great tree, shading all beings. The tree does not strive. It does not plan. It stands rooted where it is, giving shade away to whoever passes underneath, and asking nothing in return. That is the other shore. It is the secret of joy to be in service to something larger that gives your life meaning and purpose. This is the perfection of character. This is the kingdom of an empty sack.
~ Roshi Robert Althouse ©2026
And to think of all the sentient beings that had the spilled grain to nourish them❤️