Question
Hello, Master Kosen.
Here is another question that I hope you will answer.
It concerns the name the master gives during bodhisattva ordination.
Perhaps I am wrong to be attached to it, but I love it, and it has served as a koan to meditate on ever since I received it. Should we be attached to it? Use it?
Gassho.
Franck
Answer from Master Kosen
I had a friend in Formentera who always said, “That’s what my name is called, not me.”
Ordination names in Japanese are a wonderful thing. Sometimes I give them in Chinese. They allow us to open a new space in the brain that we had never entered before,
and to be a new person, a new potential version of ourselves. I have many names myself.
Kosen