Jun Po Roshi on Anger, Practice, and the Work That Doesn't End

Erik asked him to explain what he meant. Jun Po's answer was to make it practical: drop me into something that tests me and watch what shows up, compassion or the old reaction dressed up as a new one. Go ahead and insult me. That, he said, is the thing Christ was pointing at with turning the other cheek. It was never an invitation to become a masochist. It was more like saying, alright, thank you, now what was that really about?

He wanted to be clear that the capacity for feeling doesn't vanish. I'm furious, he said. I care about this to my bones. It matters. What's changed is that the violence is gone. I'm not stupid about it either. Not the soft, useless kind of compassion, but the real thing. Help me understand what we're going to do here, because this cannot stand, it simply cannot. I'm angry and I'm not going to hit anyone. Could I? Sure.

He brought up a moment with the Dalai Lama that stuck with him. Someone put it to the Dalai Lama directly: don't you hate the Chinese, don't you feel rage, don't you want to strike back? And the reply was a question of his own, whether any of that would actually get him anywhere. Hearing that landed on Jun Po like a hallelujah. The point wasn't that violence is forbidden. The point was that he'd use it if it worked, so why reach for something that doesn't.

Erik moved the conversation toward method. Is there a faster road, he wondered, or do people just have to park themselves on a cushion for two decades before anything shifts?

Jun Po pushed back hard on the framing. Sitting isn't optional. It's how you build the muscle to stay with whatever arises, to remain present when things get difficult. Zazen is seated awareness, and there's also awareness in motion. He compared it to his time studying Viniyoga with Pattabhi, where the question becomes where your attention is moving from as the body moves. Most of us drive every day, so he tells people: you have a car, kill the radio. There's a Buddha on his dashboard. The car becomes the meditation hall. He climbs in and he's practicing. The practice travels anywhere, as long as you also carve out dedicated time and actually keep it. He sits an hour every morning. Practice itself is the awakening, which is why the question people ask (I already got the insight, so why keep sitting?) misses what sitting is for.

Then he started talking about a character he found funny, and Erik got confused about who he meant. It took a few rounds of back-and-forth before Jun Po made it plain: he was talking about Jun Po. From the seat of the witness, Jun Po is an endlessly entertaining figure. Thoroughly conditioned. Changed in enormous ways, and still carrying work left undone.

Which is the whole point for him. The practice has no finish line. There's no morning coming when he wakes up fully arrived with no ego left to manage. Old triggers still fire. He came through stage four throat cancer nine years back and lives with the scar tissue it left, the trouble swallowing. And last year he was diagnosed with Parkinson's.