The Buddha Leaves Home, (and how this relates to our own Zen practice!) Artwork

Endless Path Zendo | Roshi Rafe Martin

Endless Path Zendo, is a lay Zen Buddhist community. Intimate and non-institutional in atmosphere, we are dedicated to realizing the Buddha Way in the midst of our own ordinary lives, finding our center of gravity in the creativity of Zen, and the Way of the Bodhisattva.

Zen teacher (roshi) Rafe Jnan Martin began traditional Zen practice in 1970, becoming a personal disciple of Roshi Philip Kapleau, author of The Three Pillars of Zen. After Kapleau Roshi’s retirement, he practiced with Robert Aitken Roshi, founder of the Diamond Sangha, then from 2002-2016 worked intensively with Danan Henry Roshi, founding teacher of the Zen Center of Denver and a Kapleau Roshi Dharma Heir as well as a Diamond Sangha Dharma Master.

Rafe received full lay ordination in 2009, and in 2012 received inka—recognition of his successful completion of the Diamond Sangha/ Harada-Yasutani koan curriculum, along with authorization to begin teaching. In 2016 he received full Dharma Transmission as an independent Zen teacher.

An award-winning author and storyteller whose work has been cited in Time, Newsweek, The NY Times, and USA Today, Rafe has a master’s degree in English literature and literary criticism and is a recipient of both national and state awards, including the Empire State Award for the body of his work. His writing has appeared in Tricycle, Lion’s Roar, Parabola, The Sun, and Inquiring Mind, among other journals of religion and myth. He has given talks at Zen and Dharma Centers around the US and Canada, as well as such venues as the American Museum of Natural History, Zuni Pueblo, and The Joseph Campbell Festival of Myth and Story.

His most recent books are A Zen Life of Buddha (Sumeru 2022), The Brave Little Parrot (Wisdom Publications, 2023) and A Zen Life of Bodhisattvas (Sumeru, 2023).

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Endless Path Zendo | Roshi Rafe Martin

The Buddha Leaves Home, (and how this relates to our own Zen practice!)

December 07, 2024

Record December 7, 2024

This teisho, the opening teisho of our two-day rohatsu sesshin, itself the culminating event of five previous days of heightened daily practice, is on the Buddha’s leaving home and its relation to our own maturing Zen practice.

According to legend, when at the age of twenty-nine, the long-sheltered prince, Siddhartha Gautama, left his comfortable palace to explore life in his home city, he suddenly saw an aged person, a sick person, a dead person, and a homeless truth-seeker and his life was irrevocably changed. Traumatized by this collision with reality, he didn’t turn and run, but became determined, instead, to get to the root of it.

With lay Zen practice we leave home without leaving home. What we learn to leave is our unconscious, self-centered habits regarding relationships, family, meaningful work. We abandon nothing but our own painfully dualistic habits of mind. Home leaving is actually the beginning of coming home. The Korean ex-Zen monk poet Ko Un, wrote – “But surely you can only come home/if you’ve really left home, can’t you?”

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Photo: Old wooden Chinese Buddha at Endless Path Zendo by Rafe Martin