..續本文上一頁willingness not to be grand all the time and not to be perfect. In this boy”s case, suddenly he still had the role of being psychotic; it was thrust upon him even though he did not have the inner experience. Ceremony is quite a good teacher for me it this way. One of my friends who is a senior Zen student and is often tanto in his particular group is really terrible at ceremonies and has been a wonderful teacher for me. I”m not very good but I can fake it, and he can”t even fake it. He stands up to hand me the incense, and he breaks it; so then he”s really careful the next time and he doesn”t break it, but he trips on his robe and he falls into me, and I fall into the altar, and the incense gets knocked over. And things are like this, things are demonic. Just as for some people their feelings are demonic, for him things are demonic, and they don”t stay still. When he walks into the dojo the incense pot has moved overnight. He has been a great teacher for me to be at ease with that part of myself, so that I can just go and do the ceremony as best I can. Often the incense falls over, but there is a kind of relief in that. It is good sometimes to be small. Then I really learn too from those of my friends who are much better at doing the ceremonies than I am. Perhaps they need to learn some other things; ceremony is not a problem for them. We perhaps symbolise this willingness to be small, to be nondescript, by the black, the raggedness The inner raggedness is so characteristic of zazen, when we begin to attend and the mind just won”t take any notice of our intention to attend. There is nothing much we can do with it; we must just trust the mystery of this unfocused, raggedy mind, this moth-eaten mind. Something plain and commonplace and very ordinary. So it is good not to be afraid of our smallness.

　　Another longtime Zen student who is a marvellous artist told me a story that bears on character. She was on the metro in Paris, and a man who was very, very drunk got on. He was a young burly man who had no shirt and had tattoos all over his arms. He lurched on to the car and came past my friend and stood between two women on either side of the aisle. One of the women was strikingly beautiful, and he leaned over this woman and began to abuse her. My friend, who is Asian and petite, became afraid and began to do the prudent thing and edged back towards the door of the car. And then she saw the woman sitting across the aisle from the beautiful woman reach up and take the man”s hand. Her hand just floated up. As if out of the emptiness of the universe her hand floated up and took his hand, and he burst into tears, and softened immediately. That woman remembered the name of Avalokiteshvara; she was open to it. My friend said she felt she had missed something; she felt a little ashamed of her prudence at that moment. I think we can all recognise when we have done something like this. Of course, sometimes edging towards the exit is the right thing to do. But still, there was something even better than the right thing to do, which was to remember the name of Avalokiteshvara.

　　When we are willing to be open, and rather small and ignorant, the great joy comes of its own, and in a sense it is none of our business anyway. It is just our business to walk the Way and to remember the name of Avalokiteshvara. The temptation of being all-wise is not really very interesting once we give in to it. Sanghas of course have a rhythm where they get really good at something, and then that creates its own tightness and difficulty, so there is some upheaval and they get awful at things for a while but they are rather exciting and new; and then there is an opening and a gradual rise until we get good at something, and then we fall apart again. It is the same in ou…

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