Preseverance in the Tao - John Tarrant, Roshi

　　TEISHO delivered during a ROHATSU SESSHIN December 4, 1992 Camp Cazadero, California

　　Please sit comfortably.

　　We do this because we want to be in harmony with the flow of things. We want to have no effort. And we do this because we realize that we struggle all the time and we are not in harmony with the flow of things, which is the first noble truth of Buddhism, that there is suffering in the world. And usually suffering comes upon us as a sense of being out of harmony, out of sync, with our circumstances. Wishing they were different. Out of sync with our own minds. Wishing they were different and wishing our minds had different things in them. So we could say we do this because we have become aware of suffering, but that is not enough because just to become aware of suffering might lead us to give up.

　　At one stage when Hakuin Ekaku gave up in his own training he found out that Yen-t”ou Ch”Ÿan-huo (Jap. Ganto Zenkatsu), one of the great Chinese Zen masters who was a hero of his, had died by being run through with a spear by a bandit when he was sitting in his monastery. The bandits just rode through and he kept sitting and they ran him through like a pig. And this was very disillusioning to Hakuin and he thought, "If even Yen-t”ou can”t escape this kind of death, what hope is there for a miserable creature like me." So naturally he gave up zazen and decided to while away his useless, miserable life reading poetry and chatting with his friends. But then eventually, as you know, he came back to zazen, too. And he meditated and the suffering became his question. He meditated on Yen-t”ou”s death, which is very mysterious and interesting because Yen-t”ou could have escaped. He sent off his students away into the mountains. He knew what was coming. So Hakuin meditated on this for a long time and eventually the question opened up for him and he jumped up and shouted and said, "I am Yen-t”ou alive, unharmed." He realized that Yen-t”ou still lived.

　　But in order to do this, you see, there must be something in us that doesn”t give up. There must be something in us, some intimation that something else is possible. So the first requirement of zen is doubt, great doubt, which is, I think, just a clear sight. And if our sight is clear enough, we will see that people suffer. We will see that we suffer. And we”ll be disturbed by this and this is the doubt. This is that sense of being out of harmony with the Tao.

　　And then the next thing is a faith. We must have the faith that something is possible. We must have some kind of, just enough confidence that there is a way and that we can find it. And what gives us this faith

　　 I think it is just a kind of trust in the world, just a little bit of trust. A trust that the sunlight striking the leaves is beautiful and stirs the heart. The trust that there is kindness in the world. The trust the child has that it will be fed and held. All this goes up to make a trust in the Tao eventually. This an intimation of what we can deeply trust, which is the true way of the Buddha dharma, our own Buddha nature, really, our original face.

　　So we trust that there is something greater than our minds can grasp and we trust that if we pursue it, it will reveal itself to us. And it is hard at first to trust there is something greater than our minds can grasp because we are used to using our minds to grasp things. And it”s the only way we can think of as perceiving something. But when we worry about the question, this is the value of the question, the value of the koan path, really. When a question rises up in us and we start worrying about it, we soon realize the very reason it is a question is because it has defeated our minds, it has defeated our intellect. And this …

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