In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Michael Brunner explores Blue Cliff Record Case 36, “Chōsha Roams the Mountains.” When asked where he has been, Chōsha replies, “First, I followed the fragrant grasses on the way out. Then I came back, pursuing the falling flowers.” What does it mean to move through life so completely that the small self is forgotten? Sensei Michael reflects on Chōsha’s journey as an expression of direct experience, awakening, and coming home to the life that is already here. Rather than standing apart from our lives and describing them from a distance, Zen practice asks us to enter them fully, beyond our ideas of how things should look or what awakening should feel like. Through the imagery of fragrant grasses, falling flowers, spring, and autumn dew, this talk explores forgetting the self, presence, direct experience, and the practice of returning again and again to what is right in front of us. You do not have to roam far to find what Chōsha is pointing toward. With every step, you are already home.
In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Michael Brunner takes up Blue Cliff Record Case 36, “Chōsha Roams the Mountains.”
When Chōsha returns from roaming in the mountains, the congregation leader asks where he has been. Chōsha replies:
“First, I followed the fragrant grasses on the way out. Then I came back, pursuing the falling flowers.”
The congregation leader responds, “Very much like the sense of spring.”
Chōsha answers, “It even surpasses the autumn dew dripping on the lotuses.”
Sensei Michael explores this exchange as a teaching on forgetting the self and returning directly to life as it is. Chōsha follows the fragrant grasses and later returns with the falling flowers, not as someone standing outside experience and interpreting it, but as someone fully immersed in what is present.
The talk contrasts this direct intimacy with the congregation leader’s more conceptual response. To describe Chōsha’s experience as merely “like the sense of spring” is, as Sensei puts it, like trying to bottle the ocean or referring to a worn picture postcard rather than actually making the journey.
The point is not to admire awakening from a distance.
It is to penetrate life directly.
This talk reflects on dropping away, presence, awakening, direct experience, and the ways our ideas about how life should be can separate us from the life that is actually unfolding.
Sensei Michael returns again and again to the simplicity of the case: the fragrant grasses, the falling flowers, the wind, the warmth of the sun. These are not symbols pointing somewhere else. They are invitations to wake up here.
As the talk concludes, Chōsha’s roaming becomes a way of understanding practice itself. We may think we need to travel far in search of awakening, but with every step we are already home.
In this episode:
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