..续本文上一页you know. I”m not telling you anything he hasn”t written about publicly. I think that”s something precious and dear about him. A true donkey. He trained with great teachers--with Soen Roshi and Gempo Yamamoto Roshi and Hakuun Yasutani Roshi. They kept handing him down saying, "Train this guy." Finally, Koun Yamada Roshi inherited him and he was sitting there listening to a story about a koan about a rhinoceros where Enkan (I can”t remember his Chinese name, [Yen-kuan Ch”i-an (Jap. Enkan Saian)]) says, "Bring me the rhinoceros fan." And his attendant said, "It”s broken." Enkan says, "Well, bring me the rhinoceros." And Aitken Roshi said, "I could bring him the rhinoceros." This wonder came over him. He told one of the leaders. The leader said, "Well, you”d better have a talk with the Roshi. I”ll arrange dokusan." Yamada Roshi said, "Well, you”ve had an experience of some kind, perhaps, long ago, but only now has it come to fruition." There was no great emotion for him.

　　If you read the enlightenment stories of the people who became great teachers, they”re always flamboyant enlightenment experiences; but if you read the history of those people”s sanghas, the sanghas often suffered a lot and their character work often wasn”t done and often they exploited their students in various ways. Aitken Roshi”s been very good about that stuff. So there”s something to be said for being a slow, foolish person, That when it goes in, it goes deep. As YŸn-men says, "It”s better to have nothing than to have something good.". So be very patient with who you are, be very honest with who you are. It is enough to be truly and deeply and utterly who you are. That will always open the way for you. Trying to be somebody else or to have somebody else”s enlightenment experience is just another veil in front of you and you can”t ever get there from here. Naturally, there will be veils and that”s okay, too. Be patient with yourself and your veils.

　　I have spoken so intimately and candidly today to try to encourage you. I don”t want this tape distributed and I”d like you not to talk loosely about the kind of experiences I”ve told you today, if you don”t mind, because people will misunderstand hearing it out of the sesshin context. We don”t want to mislead people. People always cling to the flamboyance of the experience and they forget that it comes from just this moment, just being who I am. "The wall meets the floor!" That”s it. That”s it. Oh, now, the bell goes and it is time to cook. That”s it. I go and cook.

　　You know, when I had my experience, I was a server and the head server was a woman, who is still a buddy of mine, who had had an enlightenment experience under Koboyu (sp

　　) Roshi [Kobori Roshi

　　 - tmc] in Japan years before, but she had had a great emptiness experience and it had never really flowered. In that sesshin she became happy and got the joy of it. We could tell something was going on with each other and we were both sitting up late at night out on the porch among the mosquitos and neither of us cared. We were just sitting up there. Every night I”d come out and she”d be there, or she”d come out and I”d be there. We started to laugh a little about this. She whispered to me when we were serving once, "There”s nothing to realize! There”s nothing to realize!" I didn”t have a clue what she meant, but I was very pleased she took me into her confidence. Years later I think I know what she meant. But I could tell she knew it; she understood.

　　So, those are a few stories for you. It was always the ordinariness. I think compassion is something that gets opened in the way, when we are really into the way. That is something. You can check in on your own compassion and see how your doing. That”s another judge. There should be a kind of spontaneous se…

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