Episode
How to enter a gateless gate. Delivered July 6, 1986
- Published
- May 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3343
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Summary
Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, opens with the core question: How does one enter the gateless gate? Lola points to a mountain stream, suggesting that "listening" is entering. She distinguishes between the someone’s simple interest in Zen and the actual acquisition of a Zen mind. Lola says the spiritual path begins only when the soul moves beyond a mild interest in Zen and raises the question: "Who am I?" This inquiry is described as poking a stick into a beehive—it disturbs thousands of inmates within the psyche, necessitating a new way to deal with the disturbance of selfhood. Lola contrasts psychology with Zen. While psychology attempts to study feelings like fear and insecurity objectively, Zen reverses this process. Zen's method is to experience the subject—subjectively, refusing to be lost in external objects or intellectualized solutions. This shift requires a venturesome spirit and the willingness to let go of the hundred-foot pole of ego-safety. Lola explains that the Bible's instruction to "knock and the door shall be opened" is a call for a decisive, total thrust of one's being against the door of reality, only to find that the gate was gateless from the very beginning. Lola outlines two specific methods of entry: Reason and Conduct. Entrance by Reason involves intense mental focus to realize that one's true nature is identical in all sentient beings. She references Bodhidharma's wall-gazing, explaining that the wall is actually the barrier of our own conditioning. To penetrate this wall is to realize there is neither self nor other. Entrance by Conduct is a four-fold path: 1. Requiting hatred through a shift in internal attitude. 2. Understanding the Buddha’s chain of causation (from ignorance to death) 3. Being obedient to karma by acknowledging inherited bio…