..續本文上一頁u suddenly become something, from no one you suddenly become some one. But that is not possible. Before the sheet of paper was born, was it nothing
No, it was a tree, it was the sunshine, it was the rain. If you look deeply into the sheet of paper, you will identify the rain that helped the trees to grow, you will identify the chlorophyll, you will identify the gases in the air, you will identify the cloud, and you will identify the sunshine. So it was not really born. You begin to see that the sheet of paper is only a moment of continuation, the moment of your birth is only a moment of continuation, you have been there before you were born, in one form or another. Before the cloud was born, it was there already in the form of the ocean, the heat helped the water in the ocean to become a cloud. So its former life was water, and in its present life it is a cloud. Maybe the next life will be snow, or ice, or rain.
Every moment of transformation is a continuation, and on your birthday it makes sense to sing: "Happy Continuation Day to You." That can apply also for the moment of your so-called death. That is also a moment of continuation. The process of continuation takes place every moment. I”m very mindful that, when in the process of teaching my students, monks, nuns and lay people, I am re-born every minute in them. My job is to transmit my joy, my insight, to them. That is done in every minute, not by Dharma talks, but by living my life: walking, sitting, eating, talking, smiling are acts of transmission. My students have carried me in them. Someone might like to shoot me down, as they have shot Martin Luther King, or Gandhi. They thought they could reduce these men to nothingness, but you know that these two people continue among us, stronger than ever. They are reborn. They lived their lives, and they get reborn every moment. It is not easy to follow their journey—just as when you burn the sheet of paper, it”s very hard to follow its journey. You have to go to the sky to observe the clouds, you have to go the cosmos to observe the heat, you have to go to the earth to observe the ash, and in a few months the sheet of paper might be seen in the form of a tiny flower in the grass. Tomorrow you may get a drop of rain on your head, and that may have been the sheet of paper that you burned today. "Hello there again!" And you may see a little flower in the grass in a few months, and that is a continuation of the sheet of paper that you burned today.
In Zen circles, sometimes you may be offered a subject of meditation such as: "Disciple, tell me how you looked before the birth of your grandmother
" That is a very nice invitation for you to go on a journey to look for yourself, for your nature, the true nature of no-birth and no-death. The true nature of a cloud is the nature of no-birth and no-death, no beginning and no end. That nature goes by the name of "Nirvana." Nirvana means extinction; extinction means the extinction of all notions. First of all, the extinction of all notions like birth and death, being and non-being, permanence and annihilation—all pairs of opposites are erased by the insight of Nirvana. Your true nature is the nature of no-birth and no-death. You may call it God if you like, but in the Buddhist terminology, it is Nirvana, the extinction of all notions. When conditions are sufficient and something manifests, you call it existing, being. And if some condition is lacking, and that something hides itself away, it does not manifest anymore, you call it non-existing, no being. But the reality transcends both being and non-being.
Metaphysics is described as the "science of being," the study of being. L”Etre entend qu”etre. But in the light of the Buddhist teaching, being is just an idea, and non-being is just …
《Taking Care of our Mental Formations and Perceptions》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…