Talk Two: The Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage | The Widening of the Hermit’s Vision

Delivered by Sensei Michael Brunner during the 2025 Ango Opening Sesshin at One River Zen, Ottawa, IL

The Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage

by Sekitō Kisen (700–790 CE)

I’ve built a grass hut where there’s nothing of value.
After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.

When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.
Now it’s been lived in—and it’s covered with weeds.

The person in the hut lives here calmly,
Not stuck to inside, outside, or in between.

Places worldly people live, he doesn’t live.
Realms worldly people love, he doesn’t love.

Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.
In ten square feet, an old man illumines forms and their nature.

A great vehicle Bodhisattva trusts without doubt.
The middling or lowly can’t help wondering;
Will this hut perish or not?

Perishable or not, the original master is present,
Not dwelling south or north, east or west.
Firmly based on steadiness, it can’t be surpassed.

A shining window below the green pines—
Jade palaces or vermilion towers can’t compare.

Just sitting with head covered, all things are at rest.
Thus, this mountain monk doesn’t understand at all.

Living here, he no longer works to get free.
Who would proudly arrange seats, trying to entice guests?

Turn around the light to shine within,
Then just return.

The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers; be familiar with their instructions.
Bind grasses to build a hut and don’t give up.

Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely.
Open your hands and walk, innocent.

Thousands of words, myriad interpretations,
Are only to free you from obstructions.

If you want to know the undying person in the hut,
Don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.

Part Two Talk:

Good morning, everyone.

So, yesterday we built the hut. It was simple, it was fragile, it was built from what was at hand—and what’s at hand is sufficient.

And then, in building the hut, we witnessed the weeds growing, and we let them grow. We saw that calm abiding doesn’t come from fixing the garden, but from realizing that the weeds are part of the garden. We learned to live in a way that bends instead of breaks, and today we move into the second part of the poem—the widening of the hermit’s vision.

The hut that once seemed small now opens to allow in the entire world, and the self that once sat quietly within it dissolves into something vast and unbounded.

Sekitō picks up with:

“Realms worldly people love, he doesn’t love.”

So here’s another turning.

Yesterday he told us that places worldly people live, he doesn’t live. Now he deepens that renunciation and begins to speak about the realms they love—the mental spaces they cling to that hold no sway over him.

He’s not talking about the love that liberates—the compassion of a bodhisattva, the willingness to allow all in. He’s talking about the smaller love of attachment, the kind of love that’s actually grasping in disguise. It’s the kind of love that wants things to go our way. The love that insists on being right, being admired, or finding some niche or cubby in which we’re secure.

And when he says “worldly people,” he’s not talking about bad people. He’s talking about people hypnotized by their preferences. When we pick, when we choose, we create a good and a bad, a self and an other—and in so doing, a heaven and a hell. We never seem to fall into the right realm from that place. That’s what Sekitō means by worldly realms.

The hermit, by contrast, lives nothing in that way, and so he loves everything. His love is not partial. It’s not self-referential. It’s not “I love this, I don’t love that.” It’s love without an opposite.

And this is where compassion begins.

Compassion begins where clinging ends. When we stop needing life to match our ideas—to align with our preferences—we discover it was worthy all along.

So in our practice, every time we let go of an opinion, a judgment, or a little agenda about how things should be, that’s a seed—an opening to this love.

When our heart pushes its boundaries so far that everything is included, this isn’t emotional—it’s spacious. There’s nothing to prove here, because everything is sufficient as it stands. It proves its very own self.

Sekitō continues:

“Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.”

Now the poem bursts open. What looked limited now reveals its true boundlessness.

We started with a ten-foot shack and a solitary monk, suddenly revealing its vastness. In a sense, form and emptiness have now traded places—or, better yet, have shown themselves to be identical.

From one perspective, the hut is tiny and humble. From another, it’s so vast that it holds everything. There’s no contradiction here.

The vast and the small interpenetrate.

Dōgen once wrote, “Each thing, each moment, is all time and all existence.” That’s what Sekitō is showing us.

The grass hut, the tea bowl, your achy tailbone from sitting on the cushion right now—each one of those things contains the entire world in it. Nothing stands outside of it.

When you sit in meditation, you begin to glimpse how the boundary between inside and outside starts to blur. Sounds, sensations, thoughts—they all pass through the same gate. And eventually, the gate itself disappears.

Then you begin to understand what it means to say: Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.

When we stop trying to hold the world, it’s fully encompassed. It completely permeates us. When we stop grasping at the vast, the vast flows freely through the small.

To reinforce this, Sekitō continues:

“In ten feet square, an old man illumines forms and their nature.”

One of the most beautiful lines in the poem—perhaps in all of Zen literature. Ten feet square—smaller than many prison cells—and yet Sekitō calls it a place of illumination.

It’s hard for us, when we live in the abode of the small self, to lose the notion that we must go somewhere else to find wisdom: a monastery in Japan, a mountain cave, a longer retreat, a better ten-foot square.

There’s always something else to see.

But Sekitō says the whole cosmos is right here. Right here in this place.

He’s not speaking metaphorically. The nature of reality doesn’t expand with square footage. It’s as present in this very moment, in this very breath, as it is in the entire galaxy.

The old man—Sekitō himself, or any awakened mind—illumines forms and their nature without moving an inch.

When we sit in stillness, when we become patiently observant and really see, form and emptiness reveal themselves—not as two sides of the same coin, but as one and the same thing.

Each weed in the garden, each noise from the street, each passing thought—they all carry their own light.

When we see them as they are, they are illumination.

As we sit, we remember that the enlightenment we often seek is already shining—right here, through the windows of this small room, through the depths of your own awareness.

You don’t have to enlarge the hut. It will do so of its own accord, when you open your eyes and recognize that there’s nothing outside.

But this takes something—a quality we don’t often discuss. We could call it trust.

That’s the sanitized Zen word for it. You could call it faith.

Sekitō goes on to say:

“A great vehicle bodhisattva trusts without doubt.”

Pause here. Breathe deeply.

Having witnessed that the small contains the vast, we are open to the way the path emerges. We find ourselves on it. We find ourselves in it. We find that the path is us.

The Great Vehicle, or Mahāyāna, is not a sect—it’s a way of being, a state of heart. It’s the way of those who vow to free all beings before themselves, because they’ve dropped the illusion of an independent existence.

It’s a compassion big enough to include even our confusion, even our lack of understanding about how things are going to work out.

To trust without doubt isn’t blind faith—it’s an intimacy with reality so deep that questioning falls away.

We find that all the answers were already present.

The bodhisattva doesn’t need a guarantee. She’s pulled forward through the activity of compassion itself. That’s the kind of trust this practice demands—not belief, but courageous action.

In some ways, this line is the hinge of the entire poem.

Sekitō’s hermit has passed through simplicity and weeds and calm abiding—and now he throws his whole life into the vow. He no longer waits for certainty.

He simply acts on what’s here, from a trust born of deep connection with all that is.

It’s the same trust we invoke every time we chant the vows:

Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

In the realm of the knowing mind, these are impossible promises—audacious promises—and yet we make them because we trust without doubt.

To take the next step, knowing the path will rise to meet you, is only half of it. You actually have to take the step and witness it. And that requires trust.

This is the patient faith of the simple hut dweller—not in dogma, but in the living fabric of this moment.

The grass bends, the wind blows, and his notion of self bows with it—knowing it’s all one movement.

Sekitō likely anticipates the doubts that emerge at this level of trust.

So he writes:

“The middling or lowly can’t help wondering: Will this hut perish or not?”

He gives voice to the question that haunts us on the cushion: Will this hut—this body, this mind, this life—endure? Am I enough for the task?

In this context, “middling or lowly” doesn’t mean social rank—it refers to a stage of insight.

When we sit in the abode of the small self—when we create subject and object—we divide ourselves from what is whole.

But what Sekitō is talking about was never built. It’s made of the action of this very moment—the rising and falling of awareness placed with compassion, through simple acts of trust, stepping off the pole and making a difference.

Nothing that was never born can ever perish.

We say everything changes: we’re born, age, and die; ideas come and go; projects begin and end; even this retreat will one day close.

But in the absolute sense, there’s no separate self to perish. The “I” that fears dissolution was never solid to begin with.

The hermit’s calm arises from seeing through all these fleeting notions—all these grasping ideas.

Impermanence is not a threat—it’s a doorway.

When we let go, we recognize that every ending is really a beginning. Each falling leaf causes the forest to bloom anew.

So when we wonder, Will this hut perish or not? Sekitō would just smile.

He knows that in the question, the answer is already present.

Sekitō continues:

“Perishable or not, the original master is present, not dwelling south or north, east or west.”

Whether the hut stands or collapses, the true master remains.

This is the heart of the poem’s second movement—the realization that what we think we are cannot last, but what we truly are cannot be lost.

And the question arises: Who is this original master?

It’s not a god. It’s not a person. It’s the unborn awareness that sees and hears right now—the mind of the universe itself, so vast that it contains everything.

When we see through the eyes of this original master, we’re seeing through the same eyes as the universe. We’re all witnessing the same thing.

Sekitō says it doesn’t dwell in any direction—it’s not contained by space or time. It contains all of space and time.

You can’t point to it, and you can’t step outside it. It’s the thought that arises before I am, and it’s still present when that thought fades.

This line carries the same wisdom as the Heart Sutra:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

Perishable or not, the original master is here—patiently breathing, patiently sitting—woven through the hut and the weeds and the grasses, through you and me.

When we touch that awareness directly, fear loses its footing.

We begin to sense that even our notion of death is just another season in the field.

The original master never perishes, yet recognizes time and season. That recognition gives rise to an imperative: we must live.

We all need to gather the rosebuds while we can. Make that phone call. Pick up the one who has fallen. Rise patiently to meet the circumstances of your life.

Today we’ve watched the hut dissolve into the world.

It began as a refuge, but now its true boundaries are revealed—boundless.

The hermit who once built it now recognizes that his abode is everywhere.

He doesn’t love or hate the realms of the world; he simply includes them.

He doesn’t need to enlarge his dwelling—there’s nowhere to enlarge it to. He sees that it already holds everything.

There’s no fear in perishing. But when we lose the fear, we recognize the imperative of impermanence.

We can trust the master who was never born—and yet we recognize that this season is the important one, the one in which to let our doubt go and begin to act selflessly and boundlessly.

This moment, we awaken to our true nature—what’s always been there—and begin to step off the pole and enter the realm of the living.