On Chihuahuas, violets, and Zen Self-Acceptance
No one prepares you for life with a Chihuahua.
Our dog, Eevee, weighs less than a sack of flour but struts around the house with the confidence of a drunk Viking. She barks at clouds. She growls at the printer. In her mind, she is a Great Dane.
She also loves us fiercely. Unconditionally. She demands that her tummy and chest be worshipped at regular intervals throughout the day, and she lets us know when it’s time. She is, without question, completely herself.
But she is also always trying to be something more. Tougher. Bigger. Scarier. She has this tiny, squeaky bark that sounds more like a chew toy than a threat, yet she puts her whole heart into it. Like a young Simba roaring at the hyenas. And watching her, I cannot help but think: aren’t we all a little like that?
I gave a dharma talk about this recently, early on a Saturday morning before my house woke up. Four kids, a spouse, and Eevee make for a full life, and the zendo before dawn was the quietest room I’d been in all week. What follows is an expanded version of what I offered that morning, woven together with teachings that have stayed close to me in the weeks since. At its heart, this is an exploration of Zen self-acceptance: what it means to stop treating ourselves as unfinished projects and begin inhabiting the lives already unfolding through us.
The Violet’s Mistake
We are, in our own strange ways, completely ourselves. And at the same time, always trying to be something else. We want to look calmer, be more confident, more disciplined, more enlightened. We watch how someone else walks into the zendo, or how still they sit, or how gently they speak, and think: that’s how I should be.
So often we come to the cushion hoping to fix something. But where is the flaw? What is it that’s lacking?
This is where Zen self-acceptance begins. It begins with the possibility that practice is less about repairing a defective self and more about meeting this life without turning away.
There is a passage from Kōshō Uchiyama Roshi that has become a kind of compass for me. Uchiyama was the abbot of Antaiji temple near Kyoto, a disciple of the great Kōdō Sawaki Roshi, and a man whose teaching combined rigorous zazen practice with a deep tenderness for ordinary human life. He writes:
It’s meaningless for a violet to think being a violet isn’t good enough, that you should work hard to produce a rose. However, if a violet doesn’t become a violet, you spoil your life force. This is absurd. Try to express your life force to the fullest. Life is possibility; it’s not fixed. You don’t need to decide what you are. Just live your self and naturally bloom your own flower.
A rose and a violet are both beautiful, but completely different. You would not expect a violet to stretch its petals into the shape of a rose, or a rose to grow close to the ground like a violet. You simply let them be what they are.
That phrase, “you spoil your life force,” points to something urgent. Not life force as some mystical substance, but the plain, real aliveness always moving through us: breathing, sensing, responding, growing. It is not something you have to earn. It is already here.
Zen self-acceptance is not resignation or complacency. It is the willingness to begin with reality, to let the violet be a violet and then allow it to express its life completely.
Sawaki Roshi, Uchiyama’s teacher, put the same insight more bluntly. No one can live your life for you. You cannot hand off your experience to someone else any more than you can hand off your breath. There is no need to compare yourself with others.
Sawaki was known as “Homeless Kōdō” because he never had a temple of his own. He spent decades wandering from monastery to monastery, sitting zazen and offering talks in the kind of plain Japanese that made sophisticated Buddhist scholars uncomfortable. For him, zazen was the act of making the self into the self, of becoming familiar with who you already are. Not more. Just that.
Making the self into the self. Not remaking the self into something better. Not sculpting it into an image borrowed from someone else’s practice. Simply allowing the self to settle as the self.
This is Zen self-acceptance in its simplest form: the self becoming intimate with the self, without comparison and without disguise.
ething better. Not sculpting it into an image borrowed from someone else’s practice. Simply allowing the self to settle as the self.
The Chained Dog
In The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kōdō, Uchiyama tells a story about his early years as a begging monk. He was a beggar by necessity, having inherited his teacher’s “homeless” way of life, and he spent his days being barked at by dogs. One day a spitz went wild at him, growling and leaping as if it wanted to tear him apart. Suddenly the collar chain broke. The dog immediately cowered and whined.
Uchiyama observed that the dog was fierce only while chained. The moment it was free, all that ferocity collapsed into whimpering. He saw the same pattern in people. We posture and threaten when backed by money, titles, or institutions. Strip those away and we shrink. But each of us, underneath all that borrowed armor, is just a person living alone, majestically. No chains required.
I think of this story whenever I think of Eevee. She, too, is fiercest when she feels backed by the couch cushions or perched on the highest piece of furniture in the room. But her ferocity is endearing because it is completely honest. She is not pretending to be powerful for anyone’s benefit. She is just being Eevee, doing what Eevee does.
How much of our own striving is like this? How many of our growls are borrowed from circumstances we mistake for our own power? And how many of our fears are borrowed too, inherited from some idea of what we should be, rather than what we are?
The Jackal and the Lion
Sawaki’s teaching on “True Religion” takes up this theme directly, by way of the Nirvana Sutra. A jackal can spend a hundred years, a thousand years, trying to imitate the lion’s roar, and never find its voice. But a three-year-old lion cub roars naturally, just like its parents. The point, for Sawaki, is not that some of us are lions and some are jackals. It is that the Dharma teaches you how to find your own voice, whatever it sounds like. Whether roaring or meowing, if it is your true nature, it is a life that works for the good of all.
This is the teaching at the heart of the violet and the rose, at the heart of Eevee’s squeaky bark. Whether roaring or meowing. Whether blooming tall or close to the ground. Whether sitting in perfect stillness or fidgeting with a restless mind. What matters is the authenticity of the expression, not its impressiveness.
Too often, Sawaki says, people are in a hurry to become the next thing. The servant wants to be the boss. The student wants to be the teacher. The person on the cushion wants to be the person who no longer needs the cushion. And so we miss it. We miss the life that is right here, right now, being lived.
Who Would You Be?
This hits me on a very personal level. If I am honest, I have spent much of my life chasing achievement. First it was academics, then my career. I have tied my sense of worth to what I have accomplished. And sometimes I wonder: who would I be if I had never been allowed to accomplish anything at all, and still could not? Who would you be if you could not?
I watch my daughters, driven as I once was, and I wonder: have I passed down the habit of tying worth to achievement? Or can I point them toward something different, that their aliveness is already everything, that there is a fulfillment inherent in simply being?
We hear so much about miracles. But the real miracle is not something rare or supernatural. It is the simple fact that we exist at all: alive, conscious, and able to contemplate these very questions. And yet, even in the midst of that miracle, we so easily forget. We shrink our lives down to comparison, trying to sit like someone else, speak like someone else, live like someone else. And then we tell ourselves we are not enough. We look in the mirror and say, “You’re a failure.” I am not speaking from experience or anything. Except I am.
We choke that life force off. We contort ourselves trying to be some other kind of flower. Or in Eevee’s case, some other kind of dog. She will never be a Great Dane, no matter how high she climbs on the furniture or how loud she thinks she is barking. But if she stopped being Eevee, if she tried to suppress her wild little heart, she would lose everything that makes her shine.
You will never be anyone else but you. And that is a truly wonderful thing.
Studying the Self
Dōgen Zenji, the thirteenth-century founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen, wrote what is perhaps the most famous sentence in all of Zen literature. It appears in the Genjōkōan, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi as “Actualizing the Fundamental Point,” the opening fascicle of his masterwork Shōbōgenzō:
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
I have returned to this passage hundreds of times, and it never stops opening. What strikes me now is the direction of the movement. We begin by studying the self, yes. But the path does not end with self-knowledge. It moves through self-knowledge into self-forgetting, and from self-forgetting into a kind of radical intimacy with everything.
To forget the self is not to become a blank. It is to stop holding the self apart as a separate project. When you stop treating yourself as a problem to be solved, something remarkable happens: the world rushes in. You hear the birds. You feel the weight of your own body on the cushion. The morning light falls on the wall exactly as it falls, and for a moment you are not watching it from the outside. You are simply part of it.
This is what Dōgen means when he says that myriad things advance and actualize the self. Not that you reach out and grasp reality, but that reality comes forward to include you. The difference between delusion and awakening, in Dōgen’s telling, is not the difference between ignorance and knowledge. It is the difference between carrying yourself forward, trying to impose your agenda on the world, and allowing the world to meet you where you are.
The Fish, the Bird, the Element
Later in the Genjōkōan, Dōgen offers one of his most luminous images:
A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements. When their activity is large their field is large. When their need is small their field is small. Thus, each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm.
The fish does not need to exhaust the ocean before it can truly swim. The bird does not need to traverse the entire sky before it can truly fly. Each one moves freely in its element, right where it is, and that is enough.
I find this passage unbearably tender. Because it says: your life, right now, however small or constrained it may seem to you, is a complete life. You do not need to reach the edge of experience before you can begin to live. You are already swimming. You are already flying.
But Dōgen has a caveat. If the fish leaves the water, it dies. If the bird leaves the air, it dies. No creature fails to realize its own completeness wherever it is, but the moment it abandons its own element, everything collapses.
What is our element? What is the water in which we swim, the air through which we fly? I think it is just this: our own actual life. Our own actual breath. Our own actual experience of sitting, standing, walking, lying down. When we try to live in someone else’s element, when we try to swim in water that is not ours, we begin to die. Not physically, but spiritually. We lose contact with our own aliveness.
The Conveyor Belt
Part of why this feels so hard is that we are trained to live in sequence. School prepares us for college, college for work. And what does retirement prepare us for? Death? Whatever happened to just learning? Just working? Just doing whatever you are doing?
So often we live as if life is a conveyor belt, with every stage meant to serve the next. Riding it means always looking ahead, always moving forward. Never still, never present. Uchiyama noticed this too. People try to increase their efficiency in every area of life, he observed, but where are they going? Without a clear direction, all that efficiency amounts to nothing more than the buzzing of insects when spring arrives.
Sawaki made the same point with a characteristically earthy image. In Manchuria, he once saw huge dogs pulling carts, driven forward by a piece of meat dangling just in front of their noses. The dog runs like crazy, but it never reaches the meat. It only gets fed after the cart arrives at its destination. Then in a single gulp, it swallows the meat down and starts running again. The similarity to people chasing their next paycheck was, for Sawaki, impossible to miss.
We need to get off the ride. Let go of the comparisons. The question is not how far ahead you are, but whether you are actually here.
Nothing Happens
This is why zazen can feel so disruptive.
Because it is not oriented toward progress.
You sit down, and nothing happens. You are not improving yourself. You are not being productive. You are not getting any gold stars or spiritual credit. You are just sitting.
And it feels so ordinary, does it not? As mundane as washing dishes or watching clouds drift by. Sometimes we resist the ordinary because the world pushes us toward the extraordinary: to be the best, to chase peak experiences, to never waste time. What really is a “waste of time”? If every moment is life itself, how could any of it be wasted?
Sawaki Roshi once said of himself that he had wasted his whole life in zazen. Uchiyama, reflecting on his teacher after his death, pointed out that most of Sawaki’s followers remembered his wit, his courage, his magnetic personality. But Uchiyama insisted that none of those qualities were the point. The zazen was not a means to the greatness. The zazen was the thing itself. Not one person shut up in a corner of the universe enjoying a private respite from suffering, but an expression of life, as natural as a fish swimming in the ocean or a bird flying in the sky.
When we sit, we are not withdrawing from our element. We are returning to it.
The Fan
The Genjōkōan closes with a kōan, a teaching story. A monk approaches Zen Master Bao-che, who is fanning himself, and asks: “The nature of wind is permanent and reaches everywhere. Why, then, do you use a fan?”
The master replies: “Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent, you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”
“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” the monk asks.
The master just keeps fanning himself. The monk bows deeply.
I love this story because it dismantles the most subtle spiritual trap of all: the idea that because our true nature is already complete, we do not need to practice. The wind is always blowing, and Buddha-nature is already present. But that does not mean we can sit back and wait for enlightenment to arrive on its own. The fanning is the wind reaching everywhere. The practice is the realization manifesting itself.
In Sawaki’s terms, roaring or meowing, it must be your own voice. In Uchiyama’s terms, the violet must still become the violet. The fanning and the wind are not two separate things. Practice and realization are not two separate things. Your life and your awakening are not two separate things.
The Firewood and the Ash
One more teaching from the Genjōkōan, because I think it bears directly on this question of completeness. Dōgen writes:
Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is after and the firewood before. You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes before and after and is independent of before and after. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes before and after.
Firewood is completely firewood. Ash is completely ash. You do not call winter the beginning of spring, Dōgen says, nor summer the end of spring. Each stage of life, each moment of experience, is complete in itself. It is not merely a prelude to something else.
This is the antidote to the conveyor belt. You are not the draft version of some future, better self. You are the final version, right now, fully expressed. And you will be the final version tomorrow, too, even though tomorrow you will be different. Because firewood is completely firewood, and ash is completely ash. Both are complete. Neither is waiting to become the other.
Bloom Your Own Flower: Zen Self-Acceptance
So what is the point of this simple yet challenging practice of ours?
It is not to change yourself. It is to live yourself. To inhabit your body, your breath, your life, fully and intimately. Eevee does it. Flowers do it. The fish in the ocean and the birds in the sky do it. Why can we not?
You do not have to know what kind of flower you are. You do not have to be fragrant or symmetrical. You do not even have to bloom on time. Just bloom your own flower. Live your life force all the way out. Not because it is better, not because it is impressive, but because it is yours and you are the only one who can bring you out into the world in this very moment. Nobody else is going to do it. You have to do it.
Not a future version of yourself. Not an idealized version of the Dharma. Just this. This breath. This mind. This crooked little blossom, slowly opening.
Or this tiny gremlin Chihuahua, who barks at balloons like she is saving the world, living the truth of who she is with everything she has got.
Uchiyama wrote, in his commentary on Dōgen’s Bendōwa: “The essence of Buddhism is really the self settling in the self.”
The self settling in the self. Not the self conquering the self, or the self escaping the self, or the self becoming a better version of the self. Just the self, at home in the self, the way a fish is at home in water.
Every breath, every step, every act of showing up: this is where life, practice, and the Way are fully realized. So keep returning to your own life, your own aliveness. Bloom your flower, bark your bark, and inhabit the miracle of this moment.
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