..续本文上一页hing well. We must have a relationship with our questions. We must value them and not think of them as stupid because we can”t answer them. My grandmother always thought the car was a stupid thing and would not last, and still thought that in the fifties when I knew her best, because she didn”t understand the car, she understood horses and carriages that she had grown up with. But just because she had not grown up with the car, or just because she did not understand it, did not mean that it would not endure. Perhaps she was right in the long run but in the medium term she was not. She was a sage but not recognised in her time.

　　So we must honour these alien, repulsive questions when they appear.

　　What is it

　　 Who am I

　　 Where am I going

　　 Who is this one who walks about and eats breakfast

　　 Why do I feel such anguish for no good reason

　　 Why does this person not love me the way I love them

　　 All these questions. We must honour the one who hears and sees and tastes and walks about. Only if we honour own lives can we approach the question. We cannot answer the question if we do not value it and if we do not value our own lives, then it”s not worth answering questions to clear up our own lives. So the question inevitably leads us inwards. Leading us to value the inner life. Knowing that just because it is not always visible, does not mean it is not important.

　　It”s like the pumpkin flower that grows in the night. Suddenly there it is in the morning, in full bloom with bees all around it. So the question as we hold it and love it and care for it, it begins to refine itself of itself, whether it is one of the great questions or one of the perhaps simpler, but in a way often more perplexing questions, such as "what should I do for my career

　　" or "will this relationship work or not

　　"

　　If we just do not know, then that is a very pure thing, the value of the haziness in the mist. And our intimate "not knowing" creates the place in which the questions become valuable and this is where we can stand while the question changes itself. And as it changes itself, we discover it in ourselves in a much deeper way than we thought. We discover that we had always asked it from the beginning. This is the tricky part of the method.

　　I was seduced into zazen because I wanted knowledge and clarity. The idea of wisdom was not so strong in me. The idea of having a better character was not so strong in me. So gradually I was seduced. I”ve mentioned how the development of conduct in our culture has often a rather Victorian air to it. We have become aware of how hypocritical many of the virtues that were handed down to us have been. But it”s not that the virtues were bad, but that they weren”t upheld. They were breached, rather than observed. But out of the inwardness, out of the going into the centre of things, I”ve come very much to trust that character also transforms and it transforms slowly over time. It has a vegetable speed to its processes. I think of it in terms of peristalsis, something slow and digestive. Nobody wakes up and overnight has become a better person. When people come to the zendo and spend two weeks and say, "It has changed my life", usually we say, "Oh, I”m so glad, it hasn”t changed mine."

　　So we trust in duration. We trust that the Tao is working for us. And this is what the question does, it holds our attention while the Tao works in us and changes us from the bottom up, from the cells out.

　　We don”t necessarily originally want to be changed from the bottom up, perhaps we want a solution. We want to be treated the way sometimes we treat medicine, please give me a drug and make this pain go away. But we have to live the pain, and we get something greater than what we asked for.

　　Daesetz Suzuki, whose name means Great Donkey, in one of those…

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