Zen Essences I-III
The sickness of wanting enlightenment and the advantages of working with imperfect teachers, plus three fresh ID Music mixes
Over the Winter Solstice holidays I spent a few afternoons in a nursing home with Linc, my teacher and former Indianapolis Zen Center housemate. The last time I saw him was in spring 2025. I live an hour away from IZC, so while I sometimes drop in on Linc during the day when I’m in town running errands, at best I only make it to meditation practice a few times a year. I didn’t know that Linc had a T2 diabetes-related medical emergency over the summer, and ended up doing an extended hospital stay. By the time I tracked him down in November, he was on the mend in a rehab facility, but hadn’t walked for several months.
Seeing his physical deterioration on my first visit was a shock: He’s in his 80s, but I’ve always known Linc as a hale and hearty guy. His schedule had slowed down, but he was still working as a contractor earlier in the year. The confused, skinny man with a sloppily shaved face yelling at nurses from a hospital bed looked 20 pounds lighter, and though he recognized me, he was pretty out of it. It was hard to see someone who has taught me so much about patience, and remaining present with discomfort, struggling with the profound impatience and discomfort that accompanies physical decline, exacerbated by the United States’ sadistic healthcare system.
After the nurse left I said “This is the kind of suffering we’ve been practicing for, right?”
Conversation was hard to maintain, and he seemed exhausted, so we sat together quietly for awhile until he asked me to read to him from Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, a 1989 collection of writing by Chinese Zen Masters of the 10th-12th Centuries, as translated by Thomas Cleary. I opened the ragged paperback from his bedside table to the bookmarked page where the previous narrator had left off, a section of teachings from Zen Master Yuanwu. I’ve included a few of these readings on this series of Inter-Dimensional Music episodes, originally broadcast on Marfa Public Radio in November and December 2025, and available to download or stream down below. Or click here to stream the first episode as you read along:
Also! To be clear in case my sloppy switching between past and present tense makes it unclear, Linc is still here with us in the provisional realm of names and forms—albeit with a better view, having relocated from Indianapolis to the Bay Area—as of this writing in January 2026.
Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. When you are working on this, penetrate the heights and the depths.
— Zen Master Yuanwu
Linc has been an important teacher for me because his approach to Zen practice isn’t dogmatic. I want to call his teaching style non-traditional, but it’s more like he’s deeply orthodox in adhering to Zen concepts of unorthodoxy. Interacting with Linc could be like living a koan, his humor, stubbornness, and intentionally frustrating actions often leading down inscrutable paths to unexpected wisdom. I like to say that the most profound thing I learned living at the Zen Center was how to not be a shit head when it’s my turn to do the dishes. But the deeper lesson came from learning how to not be a shit head when it was Linc’s turn, and he’s insisting on washing the dishes with a decrepit sponge in cold water without soap, and “drying” them with a damp and dirty kitchen towel.
I’d get confused about why Linc and I had so many conflicts over kitchen rules, things like what food needs to refrigerated, or how to properly wash your hands before cooking. I’d look to lines from foundational Zen texts such as Affirming Faith in Mind for guidance: “When preferences are cast aside, the Way stands clear and undisguised.” Was I too attached to my understanding of the difference between expiration dates, sell-by dates, and best-by dates?
John Melvin, another teacher, former housemate and lifelong dharma brother was helpful here, assuring me that preferences for such things as non-spoiled milk were okay to cling to, especially when we were serving meals to our guests. “‘The milk’s gone bad’ may sound like a value judgement, but it isn’t really an opinion.”
On subsequent visits to the nursing home over the next few weeks, I watched Linc’s condition improve. He still wasn’t walking, but it was clear that he knew who he was, who I was, where we were, and how he got there. I brought him the Taco Bell order he wanted, but was met with spirited disdain for delivering fried egg rolls when he requested fresh spring rolls. He was sometimes in deep conversation with other visitors when I walked in the door, and I was glad to give up my chair to newly arriving friends as our conversations wound down.
Linc was one of the first students who gathered around Seung Sahn—the Korean Zen Master who brought this lineage to the West—when he arrived in the US in the early ‘70s. He became a founding member of the Kwan Um School of Zen, and worked at Seung Sahn’s side as an organizer, carpenter and sometimes fixer. He also served for years as the abbot of the Providence Zen Center—one of the headquarters of Kwan Um’s rapidly expanding global network. He came up alongside well-known Buddhist celebrities like Roshi Joan Halifax, Jack Kornfield, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Catch him in the right mood and he’ll serve half-remembered and possibly apocryphal stories about their adventures in those heady days when traditional forms of Buddhism were becoming hybridized into a component of Western bohemianism. Who’s up for dropping acid and hanging out in a cemetery with some Korean monks?
Years ago I brought him a weed gummy from a shop in California, handing it over with a warning to “be careful, maybe take a quarter of this, go for a walk on a sunny afternoon.”
Linc eyed the button-shaped edible with wariness. “Peyote?” he asked.
“No, it’s just weed,” I assured him. “I’m not as cool as you think.” He smiled, shook his head, and handed it back to me. By the time we were living together, his preferred indulgence was to taste test the questionable fruit wine he brewed with a fellow neighborhood gardener, or maybe crack open a can of lukewarm suds—he insisted the small fridge in the “dharma-free zone” of the garage where he sequestered a slowly-dwindling six pack of light beer didn’t need to be plugged in since it was in the shade—to go along with the homemade fireworks he’d put on display for July 4, Buddha’s Birthday, or Linc’s Birthday.
When your original reason for studying Zen is not right, you wind up having labored without accomplishment. This is why ancients used to urge people to study Zen as if they were on the brink of death.
— Zen Master Yuanwu
Linc could also be painfully honest about the damage he took from his commitment to his teacher. Among other things, dealing with the scandal that followed the revelation in 1988 that Seung Sahn had been engaged in consensual yet highly unethical sexual relationships with several students led to a mental breakdown, after which he walked away from the school for awhile. He says these involvement with Kwan Um also played a role in the end of his marriage: His ex-wife Zen Master Soeng Hyang (aka Barbara Rhodes) was involved with Kwan Um from the beginning as well, and became the school’s figurehead after Seung Sahn’s death in 2004. They’re still on good terms as far as I can tell, and Linc gets emotional talking about her work as a hospice nurse. “She knows how to sit with people who are dying,” he tells me. “Not everybody’s willing to do that.”
These experiences informed his decision to not seek the title of Zen Master—or that’s the story as he tells it—so his official appellation is Ji Do Poep Sa Nim, or “dharma master” if gee d’oh poh-ep sah neem doesn’t roll off the tongue. The JDPSN designation gives him the authority to lead meditation retreats and guide students through koan practice, but he doesn’t claim the “soen sa nim” honorific, and given the lack of documentation of his vernacular stream-of-consciousness dharma talks, it seems unlikely that he’ll be remembered with an anthology of correspondence or his own Wikipedia page. And he’ll correct you if you refer to him as anything other than “Linc.”
It’s one thing for Zen Master Yuanwu to proclaim "If you have the idea of superiority and are proud of your ability, this is a disaster" from across the centuries. It’s another to skip the awards ceremony, exchange ceremonial robes for a paint-spattered thrift store T-shirt, and make fun of yourself for that time you sat alone in a remote cabin eating nothing but rice and beans on a solo 90-day meditation retreat. As Yuanwu asks, “How could anyone show off and claim to have attained Zen?”
While many members of Linc’s OG American Buddhist cohort have ascended to the heights of the mindfulness world with name-brand apps, impressive bibliographies, academic credentials, and influential positions in prestigious Buddhist organizations, Linc spent the the last decade as the abbot of a ramshackle residential Zen Center in a Midwestern Buddhist backwater. He is still best known locally as a reliable contractor, proud beekeeper, outlaw compost hoarder, and the sort of open-minded food upcycler sometimes known as a “dumpster diver.” As a result of his diverse community engagement, the Zen Center was the site of first contact with Buddhism for many of our guests. On the other hand, his unpredictable teaching style and contempt for dogma came across as heretical to conservative members, many of whom left the sangha, sometimes on less than friendly terms. One of whom allegedly tried to have him “excommunicated.”
When I got involved with IZC in 2016, I worked with Linc and the two remaining dharma teachers on diversifying our outreach efforts to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities that are often underserved by a profit-minded mindfulness industry catering to suburban yogis making “self-care investments” determined to “find your Zen.” As a native Hoosier and former Evangelical Christian I had a lot in common with many of the young seekers whose spiritual journey detoured into our dharma room, and I looked for ways to make our practice more accessible to first timers. Eventually fresh sangha members occupied the cushions of those traditionalists who couldn’t tolerate Linc’s free-wheeling dharma, but the zeal of fresh converts may not be as reliable as the steady hand of long-suffering acolytes when it comes to the institutional stability of a 501(c)3 religious nonprofit.
Whenever I talked with Linc about working on a book, recording his dharma talks, or documenting his legacy in the way that Kornfield, Roshi Joan, or Kabat-Zinn have, he would reference a line from the Heart Sutra that we chanted at each meditation practice: “If you’re trying to make money or get famous selling the idea of non-attainment, you may not understand the practice of non-attainment.”
No ignorance and also no extinction of it,
and so forth until no old age and death
and also no extinction of them.
No suffering, no origination,
no stopping, no path, no cognition,
also no attainment with nothing to attain.
This wariness of spiritual hierarchies was also part of Seung Sahn’s idiosyncratic teaching style. “Be very careful about wanting enlightenment,” the Kwan Um patriarch wrote in Dropping Ashes on The Buddha, a 1976 anthology of letters and dharma talks. “This is a bad Zen sickness. When you keep a clear mind, the whole universe is you, you are the universe. So you have already attained enlightenment. Wanting enlightenment is only thinking.”
As Linc tells the story, at the end of his life Seung Sahn only agreed to cooperate on a final anthology of teachings if it was given the title Wanting Enlightenment Is a BIG MISTAKE (Shambhala Publications, 2006). Taking his cue, Linc skips over the publishing negotiations altogether and will tell you that wanting enlightenment is a big mistake on your first visit. Then he’ll clap his keisaku and move on to whatever dumb jokes his buddies at Habitat for Humanity were telling at the job site, as we pass around a plate of the stale pecan sandies that he picked up from the reject table at the food bank where he volunteers.
Let go of all your previous imaginings, opinions, interpretations, worldly knowledge, intellectualism, egoism, and competitiveness; become like a dead tree, like cold ashes. When you reach the point where feelings are ended, views are gone, and your mind is clean and naked, you open up to Zen realization.
— Zen Master Yuanwu
Another thing that I learned as a Zen Center resident hosting longtime practitioners, novice seekers, and whoever else showed up at our door for one of six weekly meditation sessions, is that most people are already familiar with the idea that acquiring money, power, and fame does not guarantee happiness. But this is different from the practice of passing on actual opportunities to acquire money, power, or fame.
For all of his faults, Linc is someone who chose to live and teach in accordance with some of the most important, but least celebrated, Zen values. Non-striving, non-attainment, non-self help ethics that are at odds with the exhausting messages that metaphysical entrepreneurs and spiritual braggarts have used to turn ego-eroding practices into mindfulness maxxxing.
A weekend workshop at Roshi Joan’s Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe can cost upwards of $500, with an additional $300 for a bunk in a shared room. Weekend retreats at IZC are available for a $25 “good faith” donation, but nobody’s patrolling the zafus checking receipts or reservation numbers. Staying overnight on a couch might cost you $20, but pitching in with yard work will cover the bill if you’re broke. As Zen practitioners we vow to save all of the numberless sentient beings regardless of financial status—and somebody’s gotta pay for all that green tea and incense—but the overall sangha vibe is going to be different when the cushions are mostly occupied by people who’ve got a thousand bucks to drop on a weekend of sitting quietly, doing chores, and eating small plates of minimalist vegan fare.
It’s fitting that the abbot of a Bible Belt meditation center was a carpenter who rejected patriarchal privilege to embrace a life of relative poverty, surrounded by a dysfunctional, squabbling congregation of idealistic seekers. It should not be a surprise when such an abbot welcomes a mentally-distressed homeless friend to meditation practice as an honored guest. But contempt for ambition and the veneration of downpressed outcasts are traits perhaps more likely to be encountered in one of King Hu’s classic Zen wuxia than at contemporary Buddhist meditation centers.
Linc’s a good teacher because he’s flawed, and has lived a life that is more like a raunchy koan about toilets that you solve by burping at your teacher, than the life of an ephemeral bodhisattva as recounted in a flawlessly chanted sutra. He’s still got quite an ego, but that means he’s continuing to struggle with the rest of us sufferahs down here in the grubby provisional realm of names and forms, rather than playing the role of venerable guru, emanating rays of pure benevolence while levitating wisely above his cushion.
All of that being said, Linc’s treatment of the other dharma teachers could go from “mischievous sage” to “abusive mentor” pretty quickly. That behavior was the subject of many arguments that were more consequential than our squabbles over storing leftovers uncovered in the microwave overnight. During one of the last conversations I had with him at Christmas—shortly before he departed Indianapolis with his daughter, bound for a nursing home California—he told me that he decided years ago that he wasn’t going to argue with people anymore. But he made an exception for me. “You were worth arguing with,” he tells me, both of us tearing up in the empty nursing home cafeteria, holding on to memories of bickering in the kitchen over the use of thrice-recycled cooking oil, the placement of cat litter boxes, or the time he referred to one of the dharma teachers who had been struggling with a writing project as a “retired poet.” A sick burn is a sick burn, but elderly dharma masters are not always happy to have their students quoting the temple rules prohibiting sick burns.
The 1000-year-old Chan Buddhist writings—the Chinese tradition that preceded Zen’s migration to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—such as those found in Zen Essence are the sort of simple texts that Linc returns to after his sometimes confounding improvisational dharma talks based on random newspaper clippings that he finds in his pocket, or derived from one of the scribbled post-its folded into his dog-eared notebooks. As with the living koan practice of moderating kitchen hygiene in a slop-style spiritual commune, one-thousand-year-old Zen aphorisms are not easily appropriated for productivity hacks, management seminars, or other McMindfulness schemes.
During the time that I lived with him at IZC, Linc never encouraged me to become a dharma teacher or take the Buddhist precepts. He still asks if I’m doing Inter-Dimensional Music (yes!) the radio show that I produced in my Zen Center room for years, or the Basking in Gravity yoga sessions (no! but maybe again if I can find the right venue?) that started as bendy interludes during IZC retreats. He’d roast me mercilessly if I asked him to evaluate my progress toward enlightenment. The only thing he’s ever encouraged me to do is get in touch with a friend who supervises the Clinical Pastoral Education program at an Indianapolis hospital. Auspiciously, I ended up meeting this chaplain when she dropped by on my last visit with Linc before his departure for California.
If your teacher is an asshole sometimes, it’s easier to separate the wisdom of the teachings from the failings of the teacher. This makes it easier to accept the fact that you’ve been an asshole sometimes too, and to do the work of being an asshole less often in the future. An enlightened shit head is still a shit head, and since we’re all already enlightened—we just need to wake up to our enlightenment—then we’re also all shit heads. The only way to recognize both of these states is by watching your mind. While also remembering Yuanwu’s observation that “As soon as you try to chase and grab Zen, you’ve already stumbled past it.”
Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.11.16
Zen Essence I: Practice
download / stream
Just still the thoughts in your mind. It is good to do this right in the midst of disturbance. When you are working on this, penetrate the heights and the depths.
For this week’s practice, we’ll immerse ourselves in an hour of death meditations, including blackened goth dubbing, an occult brew of atmospheric jazz, electro-chaabi street rave abstractions, and long-form psychedelic doom jamming.
Our practice begins, and eventually comes to an end, with an excerpt from Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort, a synthesizer drone elegy for her son, inspired by the root text of the Bardo Thodol.
Language throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Yuanwu as translated by Thomas Cleary in the collection Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom.
artist — work
Éliane Radigue - Kyema
UNKLE - Time Has Come [Portishead Plays UNKLE mix]
Carrier - Slow Punctures
Miles Davis - Sanctuary
Iceburn - Dahlia Rides the Firebird
Jay Glass Dubs - Interlude I - New Teeth Dub
Aeson Zervas - 14
Shackleton - Death Is Not Final (T++ Remix)
Éliane Radigue - Kyema
Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.12.07
Zen Essence II: Motivation
download / stream
When your original reason for studying Zen is not right, you wind up having labored without accomplishment. This is why ancients used to urge people to study Zen as if they were on the brink of death.
For this week’s practice, it’s an hour of free-form Hungarian space rock, East African free jazz cosmologies, post-punk iration, wooden techno, and other percussion-forward post-world musics.
Listen for non-self help aphorisms throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Yuanwu as translated by Thomas Cleary in the collection Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, and read by your host.
artist — work
Massive Attack V Mad Professor - Cool Monsoon (New Bass & Drum)
Don Cherry & Latif Khan - Air Mail
Psychedelic Source - Three Golds Reward II
Boredoms - (omega)
Bunny Wailer - Solomonic Dub
Lagoss & Abagwagwa - Cayeñero
Marc-Antoine Barbier - Tropique
Autechre - si00
The Clash - Straight to Hell (Extended Unedited Version)
Holy Tongue - Between the Vessel and the Light
Massive Attack V Mad Professor - Cool Monsoon (New Bass & Drum)
Inter-Dimensional Music 2025.12.14
Zen Essence III: Liberation
download / mixcloud
Let go of all your previous imaginings, opinions, interpretations, worldly knowledge, intellectualism, egoism, and competitiveness; become like a dead tree, like cold ashes. When you reach the point where feelings are ended, views are gone, and your mind is clean and naked, you open up to Zen realization.
For this week’s “live-to-FLAC from the yoga mat” mix, we’ll sit with an hour of astronomical forecasts from New Mexican Stargazers, vintage interstellar livity, organic industrial percussion, a log xylophone in dub, soporific psychedelic folk music, and cosmic slop straight from the source.
Listen for 12th Century non-self help aphorisms throughout the broadcast from Zen Master Yuanwu as translated by Thomas Cleary in the collection Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom, and read by your host.
artist — work
NEW MEXICAN STARGAZERS - MOTEL ROOM THUNDER
Tradition - Planet Play/Laser Games
DEAFKIDS & TEST - Novos Métodos
dominique dela cola - open your eyes
Leslie Winer and Jay Glass Dubs - No Famous Actors
Eveylen Greene - | SMELL |
Funkadelic - Cosmic Slop
Nakibemebe Embaire Group & Naoyuki Uchida - Oteranga Waira
Mabrak - Drum Talk
Graham Nash - Another Sleep Song
Brightblack Morning Light - Star Blanket River Child
You can find more music from many of these artists in the Inter-Dimensional Music library on Bandcamp. Feel free to get in touch if you’re looking for specific song IDs. And you can catch Inter-Dimensional Music in the wild on Marfa Public Radio in Far West Texas each Sunday night at 11pm (CT).
Great rendering of the scene! Thanks!
This is good. I subscribed for free and look forward to paying you if and when I discover if I can keep up with reading another thing regularly