Hi Everyone: As I am also trying to see my own experience, the following is probably going to be more head than heart.

Alessa, your point about everyone having different needs and values feels important. Zen stories often leave space for exactly that kind of multiplicity. They don’t hand us a moral verdict; they invite us to notice the movements of our own mind as we try to assign one. In that sense, “Who is to say what is right or wrong?” becomes less a philosophical claim and more a mirror: why am I so quick to want the answer to be one way or the other? What in me wants certainty, and what in me resists it?

As for the monk’s hidden love, I agree, only he could know why he concealed it. And perhaps that’s part of the koan: we see only the surface of another person’s struggle, never the full terrain.

Anita, your question about objective versus subjective right and wrong touches something subtle. I don’t read Alessa as denying the existence of right and wrong so much as pointing to the difficulty of applying them cleanly to human experience. Even in Zen, where precepts exist, they aren’t commandments handed down to control behavior, though it’s easy to fall into that trap. They’re more like tools for clearing the dust from the mirror. Their purpose is to illuminate, not to shame.

That’s why I agree with you about shame needing to be used sparingly, if at all. Most shame is already present long before anyone “applies” it. When it’s undeserved, it obscures awakening. When it’s deserved, if that word even fits, it tends to arise naturally, like the monk’s blush in the story. Not as punishment, but as recognition: Ah… I see what I was clinging to… I suspect we all have known that moment.

To be candid, my own decidedly un‑Zen intention in engaging with this koan was to address something I see so often in the world: our rush toward judgment and certainty the moment a story is told. The koan felt like an invitation to pause and look beneath that first reflex.

In daily life, rules matter; communities need form. But as observers, we’re also offered a chance to notice how quickly we leap to conclusions, how readily we assume we know what happened, who is at fault, and what the “lesson” must be. That movement is worth noticing as I thing it reveals our own illusions and shadows.

As for embodying form, I’m not sure any of us can answer that cleanly. Zen doesn’t treat form and formlessness as opposites but as interdependent… like yin and yang moving across the same canvas we tend to forget. Zazen has form: posture, breath, stillness. Yet its purpose is to dissolve the very constructs that keep us from presence. In that way, form becomes the means by which formlessness is revealed.

Hermann Hesse once wrote of trees whose deep roots rest in the Eternal Now (the blank canvas), a realm not measured, while their branches and leaves live in the shifting weather of the temporal world. That image feels close to what I mean. The roots are like formlessness, grounded in what simply is. The branches are form, reaching into experience, shaped by wind and season. When we notice both, the stillness below and the movement above, we become more transparent TO the moment itself. Not merely present in time, but presence meeting the moment directly.

Hi everyone
Looking back on my earlier responses, I suspect I played the fool. Zen stories are not usually meant to be explained but to be sat with, allowed to work on us in silence. Yet this is not a typical Zen story, and since I am certainly not a Zen master, perhaps playing the fool can sometimes illuminate what lies beneath.

Like Anita, my attention was drawn to the nun’s action and to the question of how the Zen master might respond. In that moment I felt the tension at the heart of Zen: Zen as a practice has form, yet Zen itself is without form. It is “nothing,” and yet that nothing is fullness. So I found myself wondering, how might a Zen master apply discipline (form) and still remain fully in accord with Zen? Put another way, how and or when is discipline a attribute of Love? A question to ponder.

I also noticed how easily the story echoed the world around us. As Roberta noticed, the nun’s actions can be view as being courageous, the kind of courage that feels especially needed now. Watching the discourse of the day, I witness again and again, how often we fail to be honest about the values we claim to hold. Much like the monk in the story, we profess one thing, in hiding, and enact another. I witness what passes for dialogue, and in those moments feel like calling out:

“If you truly love your neighbor as yourself, then come and embrace them now.”
“If you truly hold the values you proclaim, then embody them now. Bring them out of the darkness and into the light.”

To Anita’s point, that calling out might shame the person who isn’t being honest with themselves. Yet I feel their is a difference between deserved and undeserved shame. In the story I suspect the monk caught in the illusion of his desires blushed. (a symbol of awakening?)

In the end, the story turns back toward us, as Zen stories tend to do. The nun’s challenge is not only to the lovestruck monk but to anyone who holds ideals at a distance rather than living them. Zen does not ask for perfection; it asks for presence. To notice when our words wander away from our actions. To sense when fear keeps us from stepping forward. To recognize that the “embrace” she calls for is not merely physical but the willingness to meet life without retreat. In this way, the story becomes a mirror, reminding us that the Dharma is not found in lofty principles or elegant forms, but in the quiet courage to embody them, moment by moment, in the very places we hesitate to enter.

Hi Anita,

I appreciate the way you’re exploring the nun’s motives. It’s natural to look at the story through the lens of relational and community dynamics as a monastery does have rules and structure, and those matter on a practical level.

On that level, I imagine the master would probably need to speak with both the monk and the nun to bring some light and discipline to whatever desires, illusions, or motivations might have been involved. He might even turn the incident into a Zen Kaon style story to teach others on the illusion behind hidden professions of love.

Such stories tend to avoiding labeling desire or motive as good or bad. Instead, they use moments like this to reveal what’s been hidden. In that sense, the monk, the nun, and even the master aren’t so much “characters” as mirrors for different movements within one’s own mind.

For example, I see the nun as an aspect of myself that wants to help others “see”, yet is sometimes hesitant to confront things directly. And your question also highlights another part of me, the part that has confronted others with a hidden intention to hurt and or shame. The story reflects all of these impulses and desires. Which, each in their own ways become problematic when not ‘seen’. Illuminated, and are a form of desire. In such a story I’m not required to judge or label myself, which is another form of illusion, but notice, and in noticing these aspects of self, soften and even dissolve them.

At the same time, the nun standing up and speaking openly isn’t necessarily only about shaming or correcting him. It’s also the kind of jolt Zen stories are known for. The moment when something concealed suddenly steps into the light. Not right or wrong, just seen. And sometimes such ‘seeing’ requires such a metaphorical slap.

I was tending the garden when the commotion began, a ripple in the stillness, the kind only quiet souls know how to make.
The nun rose like a flame remembering its ancient name.
The monk stiffened, as though the figs he longed for had suddenly begun to speak.

“Ah,” I murmured, “a illusion has stumbled into daylight.”

Her voice moved through the hall and the shadows fled as if chased by dawn.
His silence opened like a gate, and there, in the clearing, desire revealed its true face, dangiours when hidden, wisdom when seen.

I returned to my cucumbers, content with their simple honesty, for they ask nothing of the dark and grow straight toward whatever sun
the day is willing to give.