..续本文上一页of the sixth of the great founding ancestors of Chinese Zen, and maintained it as a shrine. He had no thought about the world except his sweeping. And one day of course, sweeping away, he swept a pebble into a bamboo grove and the pebble hit a piece of hollow bamboo and went "tock!" and he jumped up and down.

　　This "tock!" shook him to pieces and he said, "One tock! and I have forgotten all I knew!" and he composed a number of poems in his excitement. He said, "Last year”s poverty was not true poverty" and another fine line, "This year even the wind can get through".

　　He went rushing back to his teacher and said, "I know, I know!" And Keui-shan accepted his first poem, but Keui-shan”s great student said, "I don”t accept it."

　　Hsiang-yen then immediately composed another poem, in which in the last line he said, "If you don”t believe me, ask the newest person in the Zendo" and this convinced the doubter.

　　So the question was working in him as he lived his devoted life. And questions will do that for us. They are sacred things that open us, they open our hearts. They can of course be misused, or poorly used. Sometimes the question just grinds around in our heads and it really doesn”t seem to go any deeper. We just chase it around and around. And if it is an event that doesn”t really engage us then, perhaps all that happens is that we get a headache. Somehow we are not in the place from which we can answer the question.

　　I think much of zazen is a refinement of the question so that we come to discover what the question truly is in our own lives, rather than in the lives of the people whom we take as our models. And it”s a refinement too of our sense of place in the interior terrain, so that we find the location from which the question can be answered. We accept that perhaps now we are not in the place from which the response comes, but we honour our intimations and we keep working with the question. When we have refined it sufficiently or when it has refined us we may say, this is a reciprocal alchemy going on here, everything that appears becomes the question. Then we can say that we are intimate with it.

　　Rilke has a lovely letter to a young poet, who was not otherwise remarkable except that for some reason Rilke decided among all his letters to respond to him. The young poet asks him many questions, "I would like to beg you to have patience" Rilke says, "with everything unresolved in your heart and to try and love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don”t search for the answers which cannot be given to you now because you would not be able to live them."

　　And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then some day far in the future you"ll gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. That was Hsiang-yen”s mode. You notice that Hsiang-yen didn”t decide just to get drunk all the time and forget about it. He maintained some sort of minimal level of integrity here. And that helped. There are things you can do to yourself that are so harmful and distracting that it won”t allow the question to work in you.

　　Hakuin too gave up at one stage in his practice and decided that he would eke out his miserable existence reading poetry with his friends, drinking wine. But soon the questions drew him back.

　　Rilke was talking about how to become a poet and he thought that this was a matter of doing something from the inside out. The famous last line of "Archaic Torso of Apollo", one of his New Poems, which mark a period of transformation in his work, goes, "You must change your life." In order to be better at something, you must become a better person. He thought everything was a matter of life and death.

　　So to do anything well is to do the great t…

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