..续本文上一页yamuni fasting until his bones showed through his skin. His skin just hung on him. The equivalent of those people who cut off a finger to indicate their sincerity (it”s a common thing in some cultures) in the way. You don”t have to cut off a finger. It”s actually much harder to cut off the mind road so I recommend you go straight to that.

　　But the renunciation also gives us, I think, a certain. . . We have to be prepared to renounce. We get a certain equanimity with circumstances in zen that really is like the old ascetics in some way. You know it rains, oh, so it rains; it”s sunny, so it”s sunny. I”m happy today or I”m dying today. That”s very interesting. There is an equanimity with the rise and fall of the waves of the world. And that”s really true. We really do get that. And the wave will come through and something will happen. We”ll be sad or we lose our temper or something like that, but then it is gone and a new wave is coming through and we don”t cling to the past wave. Even if we were stupid, we don”t cling to that. Even if we were very successful, we don”t hold that either.

　　In the Mahayana people built up the idea of the bodhisattva and the legend of the bodhisattva is of one who really knows what her purpose is in this world. It is to enlighten and to save other beings. The bodhisattva in the legend, also puts off her own complete enlightenment. A bodhisattva is greatly enlightened, but not completely and utterly enlightened because that would mean she would instantly disappear from this universe and go and live in a pure land teaching people who are almost there instead of us struggling beings. I”ve thought much about this over the years, this legend, of the idea of putting off your own enlightenment which seems rather dumb, really, when you think about it. How can you help people by being stupid

　　 The very core of zen is the idea that if you are enlightened, your action will be freer and truer and more helpful and if you are not enlightened it”s not much use trying to run around the world acting if you don”t ever take any time for inwardness. Your actions will go sour and your good actions will not help people because your eye will not be clear enough to see how to help people. You”ll be declaring war on things.

　　So what I came to, and I think this is a solid reading of that myth, is the idea that the bodhisattva is open to and vulnerable to the world in order to join with us. That if we are to be a bodhisattva, we have to be open to being touched by other people. Otherwise, we cannot connect with them and we cannot help them. And if we are opened to being touched, of course, we”re open to being harmed and we have to let go of our complete perfection or we”ll never get there. So we have to be at ease in the waves of the world rather than trying to flatten them all out. You can see how this view would lead us to believe that you could practice as a bodhisattva as a lay person rather than just as a clerical person. That you can practice as a bodhisattva no matter what you are doing since all circumstances are equally bad and equally confused and turbulent. You notice how in sesshin we try to control things and sesshin is actually quite a structured environment according to our usual patterns, but you also notice how everything is always out of control in sesshin, too. There is always this sort of creative chaos that goes on in the kitchen and machines go on at the wrong time and obliterate your quiet zazen. Logistics are always breaking down because that is the way of things. Gregory Bateson”s daughter asked him, "Daddy, why are things in a mess

　　" and he pointed out to her that we have very few ideas of what was orderly, but very many ideas of what was messy so things were much more likely to be in a mess than to be ord…

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