Accepting Things As They Are...
Here's a nice video made by one of the people who practiced with Nishijima Roshi. Its message is very direct. Unfortunately, like many other philosophies, Buddhism has spawned a lot of religious hype, unreasonable ideation, and other such magical thinking. 'Nirvana', the Buddhist idea of being completely free of suffering, is one such idea that we might like to think offers some easy escape from our life, and unscrupulous teachers and cult leaders have preyed on this understandable human weakness - it's much more comforting to believe that I can escape from and avoid my mental suffering than to face up to it and accept it squarely as a reality of our human life. Zazen is just dropping 'good' and 'bad' and seeing and accepting things directly as they are. It's not an escape from the reality of our life, it's aligning ourselves with how it really is at this time... which is not a theory nor an idea.