..续本文上一页rd." But let me mention it and I”ll wash my mouth out later.
The idea of enlightenment is the idea of a transforming experience and the experience transforms our point of view. A lot of people focus on the ecstatic qualities of zen experience, but in the tradition we”re not that interested in ecstatic qualities. We”re somewhat interested in them as a kind of consequence of a real experience, but they themselves are not diagnostic of whether the experience is real. People can get ecstatic over the most amazing nonsense. Look at the history of any religion and you”ll find these wonderful ecstatic people who have not a clue about anything. Running around killing each other because their enemies are heretical. But there is a characteristic of the experience as joy. Tung-shan”s master asked him, I think it was Tung-shan”s master, said, "Are you joyful yet
" And he said, "It”s as though I found a pearl in a pile of shit." You see, what”s the pile of shit is the mind road itself. Again, you see the Hua-yen, the idea that the mind, the great eternal ground, the original face itself appears in you. It appears in the grass. It appears in the old piano in the corner. It doesn”t appear anywhere else except in a pile of shit; fortunately, doesn”t appear anywhere else. So there is no way beyond where you are that you”ll find eternity, but you will find it if you look. So that was his joy.
The other thing is that enlightenment seems to afflict some people whether they look for it or not. And occasionally you”ll find somebody, Mrs Flora Courtois is a good example in the (zen) literature. She just sweats life and has an enlightenment experience. Because they worry about eternity so much it somehow comes over them. Some people will just walk into a zendo and just sit for. . . I knew somebody who came to a zendo and at her first zazenkai she came along and was chanting the "Kannon Gyo" and had an enlightenment experience. She didn”t even know the words. She had to hold the sutra book and that”s one of the easiest sutras to learn, so you can see how new she was. This was the first time she”d ever chanted and she had an enlightenment experience. But that”s kind of a disadvantage when that happens. I think it was for her, or she felt it was, because there”s not enough containment yet to hold it. And what she realized, she saw that everything was taken away. She saw the emptiness side of things and she burst into tears and she didn”t have the joy. While she could see something, it wasn”t yet enough.
I think what happens with the enlightenment experience is that we do our zazen faithfully and we work within the structure of the precepts however we can. I think that structure is very helpful and gradually we deepen. And some people work with a koan, which I think is very helpful, and some people have these Boom! experiences, Kaboom! And other people don”t. Other people just gradually open wider and wider. Some people don”t even work with a koan and they just open wider and wider and they become very deep and serene and very clear in that way. So there is no orthodox way to become enlightened.
In zen the idea of sudden enlightenment has been very strong. There is a truth to that because if you”re going to change your stance in the world, it completely changes. The suddenness refers to the utter nature of the change. If you”re not going to follow the mind road anymore, you just don”t follow the mind road and it”s a complete change. It”s like an egg can”t be partly rotten. It”s all rotten. It”s not good in parts. So there is a suddenness for some people, but for other people in time the suddenness is the complete change of view, but actually they change very slowly and then deepen and get richer over time and sometimes this is a better way because all th…
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