Question
Do you think the notion of no-hope—I do not mean despair, but the no-hope discussed by Chögyam Trungpa in “The Illusion’s Game” or André Comte-Sponville in “Despair and Bliss”—and the idea of celebrating life as a whole, joy, the ordinary, unease, and so on, are ultimately linked, as I intuit they are? Is this “marriage” part of Zen teachings, as I also intuit?
If you have a little time…
Anonymous
Master Kosen’s answer
Once you make creating your own future a discipline, the notions of hope and despair lose their importance. I do not know what Trungpa means by no-hope either, whether it relates to the unhoped-for or to an inability to create one’s own hope.
Kosen