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 Baby's Practice!

January 18, 2025

Recorded January 18, 2025.

Fundamentally, Zen is not about becoming some better you. You are it, just as you are. Even a baby knows it. Maybe only a baby knows it. Perhaps the clearest take on this, koan-wise, is Blue Cliff Record 80 — “Chao Chou’s(Joshu’s) A Newborn Baby.”

“A monk asked Chao Chou (Joshu), ‘Does a newborn baby possess the 6th sense or not?’ Chao Chou (Joshu) said, 'It is like a ball bouncing on swift-flowing water.’

The monk later asked T’ou Tzu (Tosu), ‘What is the meaning of a ball bouncing on swift-flowing water?’

Tosu said, ‘Moment by moment it flows on without stopping.’”

In his teisho on this, master Yuan-wu says that of the 16 forms of meditation practice, the baby’s practice is best. Voidness is not biblical in the sense of all was Void on the waters of Creation. Moment by moment, it flows on without stopping — as T’ou Tzu says. No sticking. This is it; right now is IT. “Form is emptiness, emptiness form” — the fundamental realization of non-dual prajna wisdom. We don’t have to go out and get to it, as if it were elsewhere in either space or time. An analogy might be living on planet Earth; we are just as far out in space as any planet in the universe. We don’t have to go anywhere to be out in space. Emptiness, too, is not something we have to get to.

The fresh eyes of baby practice restores us, and all things. Jesus said you must become as a child again, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Yuan wu says this, too — right in the Blue Cliff Record: “A person who studies the Path must become again like an infant.” Why? Do you see the point?