..续本文上一页ot envy, it does not boast,

　　It is not proud.

　　It is not rude, it is not self-seeking,

　　It is not easily angered,

　　It keeps no record of wrongs.

　　Love does not delight in evil

　　But rejoices with the truth.

　　It always protects, always trusts,

　　Always hopes, always perseveres.

　　 —1 Corinthians: 13

　　These words melt even a hard heart a little; they offer a generous view of being human. Falling off that donkey now seems to have been a good move.

　　An awakening can happen in the most mundane of circumstances. Here is an account of a Chinese woman that occurred before Zen even established itself in Japan:

　　 Yu was from Jinling and worked as a donut-maker. She used to visit Langya Chi, the Zen Master, and ask him questions along with everyone else. The Zen Master gave her Linji”s saying, “The true person has no rank,” and she kept it with her while she worked.

　　 One day a beggar passed by singing “The Delights of Lotus Flowers”: “If you haven”t heard the song, how can you find the Lake

　　” Just hearing these words, she had a great awakening.

　　 She threw her donut pan onto the ground.

　　 “Have you gone crazy

　　” asked her husband.

　　 “This isn”t your business,” she said and went off to see Langya. From a distance, it was obvious to him that she had found realization.

　　 “What is the true person of no rank

　　” he asked.

　　 Straight away she said, “The person of no rank has six arms and three heads, and is working furiously, smashing Flower Mountain into two with one blow. For ten thousand years the flowing water doesn”t know the spring.”

　　 Yu the donut-maker became famous after this.

　　 —From Pacific Zen Institute, Miscellaneous Koans

　　Yu was with her koan no matter where she was. The song, like the broomstick that hit Hakuin, doesn”t have anything to do with the content of the awakening, and actually she doesn”t mention any particular thoughts that describe what she has discovered. Instead, she herself starts to talk in the language of koans. (It may be worth mentioning that more than one woman”s awakening story has involved disparaging treatment of domestic implements.)

　　Epiphanies, usually meaning an experience that conveys significance and depth and a fresh view, occur outside of the spiritual context too. Here is García Márquez on how he began writing fiction:

　　One night [at college] a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed, I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn”t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known I would have started writing long ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

　　 —From The Writer”s Chapbook, edited by George Plimpton (Viking)

　　At first this might seem different from what happens in a spiritual discovery, but perhaps it”s not. Garcia Marquez was tripped up by Kafka”s opening line the way Hakuin was tripped up by the old woman with the broom. Everything Garcia Marquez thought to be true was reset to zero in a moment and a new life became possible. He found a capacity that he was unaware of and, after that moment, stories began to pour out of him like rivers. It turns out that there is a huge range of ways to begin a new life overnight.

　　Arthur Koestler, a robust and skeptical intellectual, reported an experience when he was in a prison during the Spanish Civil War, facing execution.

　　I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that “this is perfect—perfect.”…Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridge…

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