“It’s impossible to fulfill the constant internal deficiency that so nags at us. You can’t find peace in yet another status, achievement or school of Buddhism.” Juliusz Strachota writes about the next steps on his path in the third part of our series.

My Zen teacher repeated: cultivate the thought I DON’T KNOW. But years later, I once again wanted to know. And I kept asking. And I suspected that my teacher just simply didn’t know – in the ordinary sense. That Zen, which emerged about a thousand years after the Buddha, doesn’t really work on the elementary teachings of the master, and my teacher most definitely didn’t work on them. And the teachings of the Buddha that I had read on Wikipedia seemed to be much more understandable than the instructions that accompanied my school’s practice.