ABSTRACT
There has been so much talk of satori that Westerners have come to think of it as Satori!! Actually, the closer one gets to Zen Buddhism the less he hears of satori. That is, as he moves from the literature on Zen to talking to people on the fringes of Zen Buddhism, to talking to Zen Buddhist monks, to talking to a roshi, the less he hears the word 'satori'. Hakuin wrote an autobiography and other works in which he related his experiences with Zen study, for example, the experience of "solving" a koan. In one of these books, the Orategama, he reports that he had later and deeper mystical experiences after he "solved" his first koan, some of which came with reading verse. Rinzai Zen Buddhism is sometimes called ladder Zen. In the study, one moves up step by step. In the other metaphor: zazen is like an onion, though harder to get through.
