Dai-funshi

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Dai-funshi (Jap., ‘great resolve’). One of the three pillars of zazen, the determination to counterbalance, through development of the bodhi-mind, dai-gidan, ‘great doubt’. Dai-gidan is not mild scepticism, but rather the necessary concomitant of enlightenment certainty: the more one knows by experience the truth of Zen, the more insistent the continuing presence of pain, strife, and suffering in the world must be as a question. The question is not to be evaded, but wrestled with from the perspective of dai-funshi. The third pillar is dai-shinkon, ‘great faith’.