..續本文上一頁nd category, because we always know what”s being officially taught. Everybody hits you over the head with it, but we”re always teaching other things as well.
Everybody, sooner or later in their life, comes up against a question. Usually that”s a wound in some ways. It”s a place of failure or our understanding just doesn”t grip. I think of those times as very, very important because they”re boundary situations where what we know has run out into the sands. They just soak up all the water of our wisdom and we”re left with nothing. Zen and all traditions of Buddhism try to evoke that in a sense. The assumption is that that boundary situation is already there, but we”re not always aware of it, so the tradition evokes it. In our tradition we did that by getting a koan, which is a question to hold. The koan can have many different shapes and forms. It can be a classical story taken from Chinese zen and condensed and something you just hold until you drive yourself nuts with it and something happens. But it”s something that defeats your thinking. It defeats your intellect. Or it can be a question that just arises out of your life. I had dinner with a woman on Saturday who had never taken up a koan officially, but had got obsessed with a particular question in her life, in her work (she”s a writer), and was amazed at--She”d run across the course of miracles, this dictated, channeled, strange book, and she was trying to figure out how this could have happened and what it meant and how phony or real it was and all. She was worrying about this and this somehow became her question about what is beyond our knowledge. What is true and what is false. A neighbor waved to her and she had an enlightenment experience. Everything in the world coming from her neighbors hand. I just mention that because it”s a recent example and a fairly classical example of the spiritual experience. The Buddhist traditions tend to evoke this kind of experience. They”re pressure cooker and keep the lid on in various ways and then you have this experience of insight and it”s a marvelous thing and it”s full of joy and changes your whole life and you”re quite sure you have the answer to everything.
In my tradition you then have to do a lot more koan questions and one of my favorites that comes shortly after this experience is called, "The clearly enlightened person falls into a well." Indicating that maybe something else is going on here. And what that something else is going on is I think is the underground teaching that”s in all great traditions. I describe that as being about character, or I conceptualize that to myself as being about character. That character, or soul is another way, a western way to put it, that character is something that can be good or bad. A person”s character can stink or it can be rather solid and we can stand on it in some way. We can push up against, or we knock on it and it sounds good, or it has a floor. So character is something that is developmental, isn”t it
Insight is really not. When you see into the very bottom of the universe, you see the same thing that Shakyamuni Buddha saw and you see the same thing that everybody else saw, Jane Doe and Joan Blow, for centuries. The vision really is the same. It will be expressed in the terms of your unique universe, but it”s really the same vision. So there is a sense in which insight rests in the eternal and it”s not much interested in development because everything”s already perfect. It”s lovely and we”ll just delight in that, and then we”ll fall into a well.
The western classic opposition is between spirit and soul. Spirit is the transformative function and it”s eternal. It doesn”t learn, I think, really. It”s the way in which we”re all one and it”s the way in which, even when you are--it k…
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