Inner Truth - Tanks and Pears, by John Tarrant, Roshi

　　Sometimes it is good to ask ourselves "What is the most important thing

　　" I think the most important thing is the sense of inner truth, the knowledge that when you begin to set things right at the centre, you can then trust that other things will fall into harmony. When we set things right at the centre, our hearts are at ease, and we may leave the rest to the Tao. And if things are not right at the centre, somehow they don”t go well at the periphery.

　　In one of his novels, Milan Kundera has a young Czech man talking about his point of view and his mother”s point of view. He is always very focussed on the tanks coming over the central European horizon, as they always are, and endlessly concerned with this and involved with the great events, with his friends. And his mother is always focussed on the bowl of pears on the kitchen table. And from her point of view, tanks are small insect-like things crawling far off, way behind these enormous pears, not relevant to her deep and intimate concerns. After many years of scorning his mother as an ignorant peasant, this man was beginning to see, he said, her point of view. In a sense this is what we do in zazen. We attend very closely to the pears. And I think the idea of garden produce is a very appropriate metaphor. Another image I have for zazen is of a garden, that we make a garden. At least initially we make a medieval walled garden, hortus conclusus, I think, that has a fountain at the centre, that energy that comes out of the centre of the universe and various other things, usually a unicorn or a maiden. Perhaps a lamb.

　　Zazen is rather like this, I think. Attention to the garden is the important thing and we do it for its own sake and there the spiritual life flourishes. We can”t really measure what we get from the garden, although if we do attend to it, our lives will change for the better in subtle ways and even the lives of those around us will change for the better in subtle ways, especially if we are not trying to get them to change. And in this garden our desire, which is so ragged, always diffused and scattered all over the earth, wanting so many things, begins to become focussed.

　　It is said that all love is the love of the way and this is true, and in the garden this becomes obvious, that all the things we wanted were really this one thing. Our love is for our true home and also I think for the journey home, which is itself precious. And this is why we meditate, out of that great love and desire, and the meditation channels and deepens the desire. And we begin to understand that the object of desire and the desire itself and the one who desires are one. The three wheels, as they say in Buddhism, are pure. There is no difference between the desiring one and Tao itself.

　　So, especially in difficult times when the tanks are on the horizon, it is good not to neglect the pear and the garden. This will not always help with the tanks. One famous Zen teacher, Yen-t”ou, was run through by barbarians while sitting in zazen in his temple, a long time ago. But in a sense he is still teaching. He was willing to be run through by barbarians. It helps with the most important thing, the inner truth.

　　Inner truth happens to be the name of one of the hexagrams in the I Ching, number sixty one. And a couple of the notes on this situation are relevant here. "The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. The visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves. This indicates a heart free of prejudice and therefore open to truth." The character for truth used in this hexagram is the picture of a bird”s foot over a fledgling, and suggests the idea of brooding.

　　I have, in a casual sort of way, begun to collect images for …

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