In this episode of **Awakening Streams**, Sensei Michael Brunner takes up **Case 94 of the Book of Serenity (Shōyōroku), “Tōzan’s Illness.”** When a monk asks the seriously ill Tōzan whether there is “someone who is not sick,” Tōzan answers yes—and then turns the question toward care, presence, and the limits of identity. The talk explores how easily we confuse our diagnoses, fears, judgments, and personal narratives with the whole of who we are. Illness may be real, anxiety may be real, suffering may be real—but none of them fully define the person experiencing them. Sensei Michael reflects on the difference between receiving care and becoming imprisoned by the identity of suffering, and on what it means to meet difficult circumstances from a place deeper than the small self. Tōzan’s response, **“This old monk is able to look after others,”** becomes a teaching on remaining fully alive, responsive, and available to the world even in the midst of illness. The invitation is not to deny suffering, but to stop making it the boundary of our being—and to discover the freedom to act with compassion from whatever circumstances are present.
In this episode of Awakening Streams, Sensei Michael Brunner takes up Case 94 of the Book of Serenity (Shōyōroku), “Tōzan’s Illness.”
The case begins with Tōzan seriously ill. A monk asks:
“Are you sick? Is there someone who is not sick?”
Tōzan answers yes.
The monk then asks whether the one who is not sick looks after him. Tōzan replies:
“This old monk is able to look after others.”
And when the monk asks what it is like when Tōzan looks after others, Tōzan says:
“Then the having of sickness is not seen.”
From this exchange, Sensei Michael explores the way we construct identities around our circumstances. We name people, situations, illnesses, emotions, and even ourselves, then begin to mistake those descriptions for reality itself.
A diagnosis can be useful. So can language. But trouble begins when a condition becomes the total definition of who we are.
The talk asks us to examine what happens when we say:
“I am sick.”
“I am depressed.”
“I am anxious.”
“I am a failure.”
The condition may be real, but the identity we build around it is another matter.
Sensei Michael emphasizes that Tōzan is not pointing to some permanent spiritual self hidden beyond the body, nor to a separate realm where suffering disappears. The question is more immediate:
Can sickness be present without becoming the boundary of your being?
The teaching then turns toward care.
When we are struggling, it is natural to want the world to accommodate our suffering. There are certainly times when we genuinely need help. But Sensei Michael draws a distinction between receiving care and making suffering the center around which everything else must revolve.
This leads to one of the talk’s central questions:
What seat are you sitting in?
Are you sitting in the seat of victimhood, where everything confirms the story of suffering?
Or are you sitting in the place of your true nature, where you can meet the circumstances of your life without being confined by them?
The small self is shown as something constructed out of memories, judgments, expectations, fears, and accumulated ideas about who we are. Practice allows us to see that construction more clearly and care for it without being imprisoned by it.
The talk also emphasizes attention with intention. Practice is not about entering some special state of consciousness. It is about attending to the actual life that is here.
When we are sick, we attend to sickness.
When we are frightened, we attend to fear.
We do not have to deny experience in order to be free within it.
Sensei Michael then makes a crucial distinction about awakening:
Enlightenment is not a state of mind. Enlightenment is a state of activity.
If something is hungry, feed it.
If something is crying, comfort it.
Practice is expressed through what we do in the circumstances that are actually present.
The case returns to Tōzan’s final response:
“The having of sickness is not seen.”
This does not mean the illness disappears.
It means the possession of illness—the story of “my sickness,” “my suffering,” “my fear”—no longer defines the whole field of experience.
When the fixed boundary of the self begins to loosen, we become freer to respond to life as it is.
The talk closes with the verse from the Shōyōroku:
“When the field’s water drains, autumn’s wet recedes, and when the white clouds dissipate, the old mountain is chilled.”
Things become as they are.
The invitation is to look directly at the boundaries we have constructed around our lives and ask:
Is there someone who is not sick?
Not as a belief.
Not as an idea.
But as something to investigate directly in experience.
In this episode:
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