The Zen Master and The Rabbi
No Self vs Unique Self By Marc Gafni
I'm gonna tell you a great story.
So there's a great guy named Junpo Roshi, who passed away a few years ago. He was a fairly well-known Zen master teacher, and he was a wild man. He had been part of a particular moment of the 60s—I think he did prison time for selling drugs—this was part of his hardcore persona. He was also a hardcore practitioner, a hardcore realizer, a profound, badass Zen motherfucker. Junpo Roshi was extremely committed to No-Self or some version of No Self; he called it Mondo Zen.
Our website has a recording, so I'm not making this up. We had just published The Unique Self book and were finally going to have our big showdown. For those familiar with the old American West, it was like the showdown at O.K. Corral, right? You know, they're wearing tombstones, right? And in Zen, they call it Dharma Combat. It was like Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp and Morgan Earp. You know, on the other side, you got Billy Claiborne. You get the idea. And Junpo Roshi expects precise logic to blow away No Self. But the Goddess took over as Goddess does, and I said:
“I have straightforward, irrefutable, unimpeachable evidence for Unique Self. It's not just No self; it's Unique Self. I will give you a direct transmission, and you will know it.”
So he looks at me like I'm crazy. He’s yawning like Mr. Badass Junpo Roshi—a beautiful man, by the way. He's just a fantastic human being.
And so now it gets very quiet. I said, are you you ready? He said, I'm ready. So everyone's waiting.
Here it is:
Junpo Roshi!!!
That was it.
And he looked at me.
He said, Oh my God, you're right.
And that’s a very big deal.
In other words, Junpo Roshi is not just No Self. The guy was all badass personhood of this very unique quality and texture, right? This unique taste. And what I was saying to him is that this Junpo Roshi is not just the social, psychological, and cultural conditioning that happened to form this dude who kind of wound up selling drugs and going to prison and talking about monogamy …
There's this quality in Cosmos called Junpo Roshiness, right? It isn’t just No Self. It is an irreducibly unique expression of love, intelligence, and beauty. Of all that is living in, as in, through Junpo Roshi that never was, is, or will be ever again. Junpo Roshi himself, in his irreducible, gorgeous, stunning texture of uniqueness, is evidence of Unique Self.
Note: Join Dr. Marc Gafni for Unique Self 2.0 – Portal 2: Beyond Maslow: A New Hierarchy of Needs Begins Sunday, March 16th 2025
