Lluís Nansen Salas, 2025, La diferència és l’essència, Ensenyances zen a Lluçà 6, Barcelona, Edicions Zen Kannon
The 6th volume of the collection “Zen Teachings in Lluçà”. “The difference is the essence” has been published. It corresponds to the kusen (oral teachings during zazen) and mondo (questions to the master) given at the retreats in Lluçà and Barcelona during the year the pandemic began, 2020.
In this book you will find the impact of the introduction of Zoom in the meditations, reflections on the impermanence of our lives, as well as the understanding of one’s own difference, and the possibility of becoming intimate with it—until we become one with difference itself, without identifying with it.
From our difference, we penetrate into the essence of the Universe. This is what the Sandokai means when it says “difference and essence interpenetrate.” This is what we experience sitting in zazen.
The book “The Difference is the Essence. Zazen in Times of Pandemic” is the sixth volume of the teachings given in Lluçà (Lluçanès), during the Zen practice retreats (sesshin). In this book you will find those held in the year 2020.
“The Difference is the Essence. Zazen in Times of Pandemic” contains all the mondo carried out during those retreats—that is, the questions asked by the students and practitioners of the Way, and the answers given by the master. The book has been made possible thanks to all the practitioners who undertook the transcription of the successive recordings.
You can find “The Difference is the Essence. Zazen in Times of Pandemic” at the Zen Temple of Gran Via, for 10 euros.
The Difference is the Essence: Excerpt from the Prologue
… This places it in a very special historical context. You will remember that the year 2020 was the year of Covid. The measures to fight the pandemic greatly affected our daily lives. There were weeks when it was not possible to go out into the street, and even less to gather to practice zazen together. It was a real challenge, one we had to face improvisationally in just a few weeks.
Zazen sessions began to be broadcast online in order to keep the community in touch. The Easter retreat could not be held in Lluçà, and was instead conducted online, in Barcelona, with some people present in the temple, who arrived by dodging the street controls.
Later, a retreat in homage to Taisen Deshimaru was organized, both in person and online, which gave us strength and courage in those moments of uncertainty: the master’s biography is full of situations even more difficult than the one we were going through, and his spirit was our guide.
In August it was possible to travel to hold the Lluçà retreat, but until the last moment everything was uncertain; we carried with us safe-conduct passes in case we were stopped at a checkpoint. The most surprising thing was the strong participation under these circumstances: the desire to practice and to leave the city where we were confined overcame everything…
The Difference is the Essence. Zazen in Times of Pandemic
