..續本文上一頁 before I did so much zazen." Well, this may be true. I think we notice our condition and what is in us begins to work its way to the surface when we do zazen. Usually at first things get better when we start to do zazen but there always comes a time when things get worse, fortunately, and that”s not because we are insufficiently honouring the questions, it”s really because the question is spreading through our whole life and we realise that we are trying to live in one illuminated corner of our universe but that we must go into the shadows as well. We must honour the whole of the mandala and not sit in one corner of it.

　　We will have temporary achievements like the person I spoke of if we sit in one corner, and often we will seem rather brilliant and you can probably think of people who are like this, but it is a miserable life ultimately, just getting by. So this is what pain is good for, we learn to include rather shut things out, it gives us compassion so that we embrace others, even people very different from us.

　　And when someone else is in pain and acting very weirdly, our first thought isn”t to get that person out of my hair, our first thought might be, "Oh, I remember ...."

　　So the heart naturally begins to open and this too comes from the inward life, from that moment of turning, at the bottom of the interior life. And then we find that it is rather luminous down there. I have the image of a coral reef with colourful creatures pulsing and crossing to and fro before our eyes.

　　Then we begin to value the reality of the Tao, even though we have no mastery of it and sometimes we think of it as something that is happening to us. We can see its workings. If we are happy, we notice it and we count it and put it in the scales too, we don”t just pass it by obliviously. If we are sad, we live it. In a large sense our happiness and sadness are a dream, just as everything is a marvellous dream, but in the small sense, if we ignore the place where we are standing, then we can”t answer the questions and we cannot encompass this great dream.

　　We must acknowledge that where we are, this is the sense of place. Then the sacred, luminous quality of the inner life becomes very evident to us. Everything changes, our instant reactions, our dreams, our whole sense of who we are and where we stand.

　　Fu Da-shi, an early Zen figure, who lived most of his life very poor as a labourer, would hire himself out in order to get money to give to the poor. He kept giving away all his money and the people who cared about his Dharma found it hard to keep him fed. He said,

　　"Empty-handed I work with the plough, while walking I ride the water buffalo."

　　There was a sense of complete ease in everything he did - riding the water buffalo, playing the flute,

　　In a well that has not been dug, someone with no shadow or form is drawing the water.

　　- little poems so strong that we use them as koans still. He saw the magical quality of that well that we draw from, the pure empty quality.

　　Strange things start to happen around this time when we”re at this place. Sometimes they”re rather entertaining. A woman who was preparing for a retreat told me this story. She had been working at a Hospice for a long time. Hospice workers usually burn out after a few intense and florid years but she had endured by keeping her head low and being anonymous.

　　She had decided to take time for a retreat and was preparing for it, talking to me. She had spent these many years being present while people were dying and that was her job and she”d found it both marvellous and draining and she had found how wonderful, how rich a part of life dying can be, and also how miserable and disappointing an event it can be sometimes. The family starts taking drugs and having fist fights over the body. …

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