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I gathered my shoes and wallet on the other side of the metal detector and took a last glance at my father, who was still there, still waving.That mangled finger had always been a symbol of his shortcomings and deformities to me, but now I saw it was also a testament to all that he'd sacrificed for our family.He'd lost that trigger finger building the business that had fed and clothed me. I imagined he was not only waving me goodbye but waving me forward with that symbol of his own woundedness.

—Shozan Jack Haubner

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family sacrifice business fatherhood
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About Shozan Jack Haubner

Shozan Jack Haubner is the pen name of a Zen monk who has written two books and a number of essays for The Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, Lion's Roar and the New York Times, and the Best Buddhist Writing series. He won the Pushcart Prize in 2012. Haubner's books, portions of...

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Zen attacks that one last thing you hold dear: your precious self-conception. It unravels any notion of a freestanding, unconditional "I" and shows it to be a lie, a fabrication, a construction. True realization, the old masters tell us, takes bone-crushing effort. We pulverize the very skeleton of ego—upon which the meat and skin and organs of our illusions hang—and we do it through intense, hurtle-yourself-off-the-cliffs-and-into-the-chasm practice.

—Shozan Jack Haubner in Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk

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perception effort Buddhism Zen self-conception I
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