There are those who say that Zen is too dry, too detached from everyday life to be relevant in today's world. To them I reply, "Oh yeah? You clearly haven't read this passage in the Shoubougenzouzuimonki, smart guy!" And then they say, "What passage? Stop using demonstratives without a clear referent." And then I say "Why don't you look in your pocket?" and they do, and discover a beat-up old printout of this blog entry. "Oh my God was that there all along?!" they cry, and I just smile mysteriously. Anyway:

Dogen said: Once, a growth appeared on Dahui Zonggao's bottom.
"That's a big problem," said the doctor when he saw it.
"A big problem as in I'm going to die?" asked Dahui Zonggao.
"Very likely," replied the doctor.
"If I'm going to die young," said Dahui Zonggao, "I need to meditate a lot more before I go." And so he sat zazen with even greater determination than before -- so much that the growth was squashed into nothingness and no longer a problem.

Ew, right? Dogen follows it up with an anecdote about how when he was the boat to China, he got the runs, but then there was a big storm and he forgot about his illness, upon which it quickly went away. The moral is: throw yourself into zen so hard that you forget everything else, because diseases go away by themselves if you just ignore them. Kind of like grade-school bullies.