Walking in Daylight | Hekiganroku Case 41

There’s so much wonder in this expansive practice. Sometimes it’s difficult to say a word about it—about practice, about awakening. And sometimes, we just want to go back to sleep. Things can be hard. Our lives throw us curveballs, bring challenges. And it gets particularly difficult if our idea of life is paired with a narrative of goal-based mentality—one that has us always looking to be on the increase.

It’s important for us to check in from time to time and bring ourselves back. What is our intention as we enter each moment? How are we approaching our life? When we work to manifest our intentions, rather than striving toward some distant goal, the quality of our life and the quality of our practice changes. It opens up.

There’s a short exchange about this in the Blue Cliff Record, Case 41–Joshu’s Man Who has Died the Great Death. In it, Joshu asks Toshi:

“When one who has experienced a great death returns to life, then what?”
Toshi replies:
“It is not permitted to go at night. One must get there in daylight.”

It seems rather cryptic.

So, we have Joshu—many of you have met him, right? I see a lot of eye rolling going on—“Oh, Joshu’s back.” Yeah. He’s a way of guiding us to power by using words beyond their ordinary meaning to point to the essence of our lived experience. And he can reach through centuries to do that. Joshu seems to be adept at knowing exactly where you’re standing and sitting right now.

And then there’s another character here—Toshi. In Japanese, that literally means “Great Master.” So we’re likely talking about an experienced teacher, maybe even a bodhisattva. The most likely candidate is Joshu’s own teacher, Nansen, whom we’ve seen in other cases.

And you know Nansen—he has a very grounded wisdom and a sharp teaching style. So sharp, in fact, that he once halved a cat in one of his teachings, right? To bring folks out of their place of confusion and have them show up in the present moment—not with Zen tricks or Zen finery, but with compassionate action. He shocked people out of their conceptual attachments.

So these two are talking about the “great death.” This isn’t the death when the light of our eyes is fading. It’s not necessarily our final breath. It’s something more subtle, more profound.

The great death is that moment when everything we cling to—every scaffolding we use to build the small self—drops away. When our attitude of certainty or control collapses, that’s where we find ourselves. And we think, “I don’t want to go to the gallows. I don’t want to experience this death.” But when the trapdoor falls, what actually happens is that we come to life.

That’s hard to see at first.

Because there’s a story inside each of us—a way we explain who we are, where we’ve been. A glue we use to hold this incoherent narrative into one story of self. But when tragedy hits—sudden loss, betrayal, illness, or even a long quiet season of despair—these stories begin to fracture. The glue loosens.

And what’s our natural instinct? Patch it up.

Right after we grieve, of course—we patch that narrative back together. We stitch the old pieces, reweave a self we recognize from all the karmic elements that were there before. But if we keep doing that, we enter a cycle of repeating our old patterns. This habit energy has us chasing our own tail.

This koan is pointing somewhere much more radical. It doesn’t ask us to repair the old self. It’s asking: What happens when we drop it off completely? When we stop reaching back for a version of who we were before things fell apart—and instead step forward with no mask, no script, no past to defend, nothing to be ashamed of. Step forward in true daylight.

Toshi’s reply is very precise:
“It is not permitted to go at night.”

It’s not a path of hiding. It’s not bypassing. It’s not about residing in some rarefied notion of emptiness or equanimity. It’s not about retreating into cleverness or passivity. It’s about full, exposed presence. Vulnerability. A kind of presence that has nothing left to lose—because it’s grasping nothing. It’s already died. And in dying, it came alive.

But this kind of return requires a certain courage—not the courage to defend the old self, but the courage to recognize your true self in everything. In the wind blowing the chimes punctuating this moment. In the rise and fall of the breath of the person sitting beside you. You can find it in the grief you thought would drown you and the laughter rising from a subtle joke shared in passing.

You are what reveals itself in the clear light beyond the great death—your true self.

Dōgen spoke of this. In the Tenzo Kyōkun, which we recently studied, he says:

“When you encounter hardships, think of them as the body of the Buddha. When you meet with suffering, think of it as the face of the Tathāgata.”

He’s not being poetic, I promise. He’s speaking with precision about where awakening resides. The pain you carry, the moment everything fell apart and you weren’t sure you’d make it—that’s the face of awakening. That recognition that nothing will be the same and there’s nothing to hold onto—that’s where awakening lives. That’s where we practice. That’s the Buddha showing up in the very form we’re most tempted to turn away from.

There’s a case in the Mumonkan where someone holds up a dried stick used to wipe oneself and says:
“This is Buddha.”

Dōgen is speaking not just to monks. He’s speaking to the Tenzo—the head cook—the one who feeds everyone and cares for the body of the Sangha. He has to work with what’s available: a bruised radish, some spoiled rice. He still has to nurture and feed the assembly. Sometimes it’s a broken heart. Sometimes it’s an unexpected snowstorm. Sometimes it’s something unfathomable. It’s all Buddha’s body. It’s all one face.

And we look at that with some degree of revulsion. We say, “That’s not possible.” And yet, without that stick to wipe your tail, I promise you’ll suffer much more!

To live this way is not to return to some abstract idea of life, or some platitude about fixing oneself, but to return to this actual life—as it is—right here in the daylight.

When the bottom falls out of our story, we may still try to move forward—but half-heartedly. Sometimes under the cover of darkness. We function in a guarded way, stepping back into the world with an edited version of ourselves. This koan is telling us: move beyond that form of survival.

To meet the world in daylight is to say:
“Here I am. This is my life. This is what the great death has revealed. And I’m going to savor it. I’m going to walk directly into it—without hiding, without pretending to be unchanged.”

It’s not easy.

But I never promised any of you it would be easy!

There’s a kind of silence that comes after suffering—it’s different. It’s not the silence of absence. It’s the silence of presence—so vast it doesn’t need to explain itself. Nothing left to protect. No one left to impress.

When we encounter someone who’s walked that path—like Joshu, like Nansen—even in the gap between their words, when nothing is said, we feel it. There’s a steadiness that’s clear and present. And that light does not come from having avoided adversity. It comes from having walked through it—without denying what was seen—and fully integrating it.

When we stop looking for ourselves in the mirror of memory, we begin to see our own face reflected everywhere: in the smile that passes between strangers, in the sound of the rain. We were never missing—just clinging too tightly to a particular form of what we thought we were.

So today, as we rise from a wonderful morning of practice, I invite you to look closely.

Look closely at where you’re trying to sneak forward in the dark.
How often are you stitching together something that would be better left unsewn?

When we reenter the world, we reenter not as someone who survived, but as someone who is born anew—moment by moment—awakened through the very things that once overwhelmed us.

Master Hakuin said of this case:
“This is the great death—far from delusion, but also far from enlightenment, too.”
Not because it lacks enlightenment, but because it’s far beyond any idea of it.

So: recognize the body of the Buddha in your hardships.
Embrace your suffering as the face of the Tathāgata.
Let your life—just as it is—be present in the daylight.
And walk it fully.