..续本文上一页cing all certainty and protection, in a sense, in this life. And there was very much the idea that lay people didn”t quite make it. They had to wait for a favorable rebirth when they could be become monks or nuns.

　　As Buddhism progressed some people stopped taking renunciation so literally and started to see it more as an inner matter. There was a great split in Buddhism and these people founded the Mahayana school, which we are members of. And they thought that you could actually be quite asleep, you could follow all the monastic rules perfectly and still be a donkey. And while there can be a laudable intention in renunciation, it doesn”t always achieve what is wanted by itself. The Mahayana was founded on the renunciation, but was something else. It was a castle built in the desert. And the Mahayana came out with the idea that whether you are a lay person or a priest or a nun, enlightenment is equally available to everyone no matter what your circumstances. There is no special fortune you must have in this life that makes enlightenment available to you. So you can see this is a very democratic move in some ways--that you don”t need to have any special fate. Enlightenment is always available. Renunciation, then, came to be seen more as sort of inner fasting. You might call it a fasting of the heart rather than of the body in which we just don”t cling to things. The old zen saying is, "The great way is not difficult, if just avoids picking and choosing." It avoids comparison. It avoids praise and blame.

　　So there is a great discipline in renunciation as the foundation of zen. I think it is very much an inward matter. At first, I think the primary element of the renunciation is in our attention. We stop following the mind road so that when you hear a bird call and you begin to think of the last time you heard a bird call, and you remember when you were in a forest and saw a beautiful pheasant, and then you think about a caged bird and feel sorrowful for all the caged birds in the world, and then you think, well, maybe I”m a kind of caged bird, and then you think well I can sing anyway. That is the mind road and it”s not much use. So there is a renunciation that needs to happen there where we don”t follow that well-worn groove in the mind. That the mind when it is doing that is not lively. It is not immediate and vivid. It is just plodding along like the old donkey it is. Sort of like an ox grinding corn in a traditional village. Just plodding around and around and wearing a furrow in the ground. So we renounce that sort of ox-headed quality about our lives. And actually, that”s the great difficulty, the most difficult thing to renounce, really, truly. Who knows how active the mind is in offering routines to us and sort of conventional things. Flaubert, the great French novelist, actually made a dictionary of received ideas which he thought were those idiotic, pompous things that everybody believes. And it”s rather shocking when we begin zazen to see how many of those received ideas we just have and how much we just run our lives by them and make major decisions by them. In zen we let go of those opinions. An opinion and ninety cents will get you a cup of coffee. So we let them go. And then you can see that in renunciation there is an act of courage because we have to let them go without knowing what will take their place. Because if we know what will take their place, we”re not letting them go. We can”t get there from here. And what will take their place is something very magical and shining and vivid, but we can”t have it until we let go of what we”ve got.

　　I think, again, it was YŸn-men who said, "It was better to have nothing than to have something good." So that is the renunciation of zen. And that”s the equivalent of Shak…

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