“In the well-formed teisho, the roshi organically unifies the unique struggles, insights, concerns and contexts of those in the zendo and other intimate matters. These are composed into a living exploration-speech whose form and presentation inclusively enlightens and instructs. Not with declarations, diagnoses, or evaluations, but with figures whose powers to elicit novel understanding and transformation lie precisely in the difficulty one has in making them concrete — coupled with their clear familiarity.

Like the intimations and fluidity of identities in dreams, the fluid intelligence of the teisho comprises at once a medicine and a music whose personalized novelty becomes itself a catalyst for the most unexpected leaps of understanding or perspective. And more, it is playful, and redolent of mature versions of the astonishing forms of sudden insight common to our experience during childhood.”

— an a i