..續本文上一頁ou will get attended by synchronistic events, perhaps. Many people are. You know what people are thinking and things like that, but that”s not very interesting. The great magical event of zen is the joy that comes out of the simplest and most natural thing. The joy that comes out of just standing up and sitting down. Everything. "Walking is zen; sitting is zen." Eating, drinking, making love, sleeping, being miserable on your cushion is zen. Having your knees hurt in the long, hot afternoon is zen.
Darkness is a kind of foundation, actually, the darkness that we find arising in us. When Bodhidharma was asked, "What is the first principle of the holy teaching", the emperor asked him, Emperor Wu, he didn”t say suffering. He said, "Vast emptiness. Nothing holy." This is what the Heart Sutra says, too. The Heart Sutra says, "Things are founded on emptiness." This means really that things don”t truly have a cause. Things have a virtue in themselves beyond anything we can say that causes them. So you have a virtue in yourself beyond anything that brought it about. Any suffering that arises in you because of your history, any gifts you have because of your history, these are strong things, yet they are also just a pure appearance of Buddha nature. Even your suffering and also your joy. I think in some sense we can”t take credit for either. We just have to learn to love our lives so deeply that we welcome whatever comes. Zazen teaches us that love.
Different people had different kinds of difficulty, I think. You will find various kinds of fragmentation of attention, I think, perhaps that deepest kind of difficulty that we have. You will notice that when you are suffering, your attention suffers, too, and you don”t have a lot of it. And that if you are complaining about yourself or others, which is easy to do, if you begin to turn your attention inward, to go against that easy current of complaint, you will then find that your attention has not been very good. And that way you go into the darkness. You begin to attend to your situation. You begin to notice what is going on. This is the great lesson of zazen. Is to do nothing. To stop doing things and then you notice what is going on. And as you begin to notice, you”ll find that the suffering transforms and you do not suffer the way you did. Because the suffering is something added to it.
Torei-Zenji with his poem, "Bodhisattva”s Vow", talks about the nature of this inner transformation, I think. He talks about the right attitude to have to bring about this inner transformation. I never much liked "Bodhisattva”s Vow" for many years. I still think it”s kind of over written, but it”s very beautiful and powerful, too. I always thought it was kind of sentimental. I came out of a rather fierce political-activist tradition. Wasn”t inclined to blame myself when somebody blamed me. But the enormous value of looking at our own part in a difficulty in our lives is so wonderful. Sometimes your own part might be that you”re being a wimp and you”re not standing up to somebody. So it”s not just a matter of a sort of overly sweet compliance with life. You can fight with life, too, if you want. But to look at our own part is so valuable and powerful. He talks about the great virtue of abusive words. Think about that next time you run up against some petty office tyranny or you”re jerked around by somebody you trusted and feel betrayed. The virtue of abusive words.
There is a koan in the Book of Serenity, "The Diamond-Cutter Sutra”s Revilement", Number 58.
The Diamond-Cutter Sutra says, "If someone is reviled by others, this person has done wicked acts in previous ages and should fall into evil ways (will probably fall into evil ways), but because of the scorn and revilement of people in the present ag…
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