..續本文上一頁my practice I had to try because I would have just stopped practicing otherwise. Then this experience just came over me then. I just couldn”t help it. I was just sitting in the dojo laughing. Aitken Roshi had just asked me one of his silly questions that he was always asking me. Only this time I went back to the dojo and started laughing at the question. I still didn”t know the answer, but I just laughed and laughed at the question. He asked me, "What is the height of the Mu

　　" I remember. And so I laughed and laughed quietly to myself because I didn”t want to disturb other people and it came over me, "I know the answer to that question." And I thought, "Well, there”s no need to go in and tell him, is there

　　" So I sat there for a day or so laughing to myself and eventually I went into dokusan and answered his question and his eyes got big. He asked me a whole lot of other questions which I could answer, but I still didn”t know what I was answering. So this went on for a few dokusan and he asked me Hakuin”s question about the sound of one hand, which had always rather terrified me. I”d always thought, "I hope I get through koan study without having to do that one." Knowing I”d never pass it and it would embarrass me horribly. I”d be proved to be a fake. This is true. When I was in Australia and I was working without a teacher and I was working on Mu, I was going under general anesthetic for some minor surgery and I decided that it would be a good time to really work on a koan and I chose that koan. And I still remember going under the anesthetic going, "What is the sound a single hand

　　" sort of circling around me which absolutely wasn”t any use at all, of course. I don”t know. Maybe it helped. I came out with the koan, too, I remember. I was still stupid. Anyway, Aitken Roshi held out his hand at one stage when he asked me this question and the whole world opened up for me. I was in the dokusan room, this very little room on Maui. I remember the stars and the great wind of the universe. Everything was in that room. He was Hakuin and then I was Hakuin and I met Hakuin in that fashion. I answered all his questions, but it took me a long time to digest that. I actually went out and made a complete mess of my life for a few years. I think that”s a common experience. That in a way I couldn”t hold it. I didn”t know what to do with my inner character work to hold this experience I had had. I, in fact, avoided being a leader for a long time even after I”d had that experience because I felt I just wasn”t fit to help people and I had to digest what had happened. And so it goes on like that. That you have to really let it go and throw it away. Anything you hold onto really becomes another veil in front of you. This is one of the deepest truths of zen. It is not so hard to realize the world of emptiness, but to really express it is the great thing and the great work. That is why we can make mistakes and be stupid afterwards. But the bodhisattva way says that we actually have to make that mistake. We have to go out into the world to try and help beings and gradually we learn and the enlightened action does comes more truly through us.

　　I”ll tell one last story because it occurs to me I forgot to tell a story about a woman by mistake. This is a neat story about a friend of mine who had her enlightenment experience. I was training with her and she had hers about six months or so before I”d had mine. She was a person who as a child had been very unhappy and had a very difficult childhood, but had lived on the edge of town and had gone out into the forest alone a lot, or into the woods alone a lot, and had had certain experiences, of the kind we had in childhood, you know, most of us have had, where the subject-object difference broke down and she j…

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