“If I were to save only two books from the whole world of the mystics, one would be Sosan’s Hsin Hsin Ming,” Osho says. “It contains the quintessence of Zen, the path of awareness and meditation…the very soul of Zen.”

Step by step, Osho unlocks the meaning within each of Sosan’s verses, laying out a clear understanding of such puzzles as the difference between mind and consciousness, between meditation as practice and as a state of being, and what “choiceless awareness” really means. Each verse of Sosan’s text is illuminated with examples from ordinary life and its common conflicts, problems, and self-created dramas, offered up with a mix of unflinching honesty and light-hearted humor that brings us to the point where problems simply dissolve...often first into laughter, and then into silence.

The Hsin Hsin Ming, Verses on the Faith-Mind by Sosan [Seng-t’san], the third Chinese patriarch of Zen, is considered to be the first Chinese Zen document. As such, it is extraordinarily straightforward in its message, cutting straight to the point of what Zen practice really means and where it aims to take the practitioner: “If you wish to see the truth,” these verses begin, “then hold no opinion for or against… The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.”

"We will be entering the beautiful world of a Zen master’s no-mind. Sosan is the third Zen patriarch. Nothing much is known about him – this is as it should be, because history records only violence. History does not record silence, it cannot record it. All records are of disturbance. Whenever someone becomes really silent, he disappears from all records, he is no longer a part of our madness. So it is as it should be.

Sosan remained a wandering monk his whole life. He never stayed anywhere; he was always passing, going, moving. He was a river; he was not a pond, static. He was a constant movement. That is the meaning of Buddha’s wanderers: not only in the outside world but in the inside world also they should be homeless – because whenever you make a home you become attached to it. They should remain rootless; there is no home for them except this whole universe.

Even when it was recognized that Sosan had become enlightened, he continued his old beggar’s way. And nothing was special about him. He was an ordinary man, the man of Tao."