..续本文上一页lows us that necessary foolishness which is essential for all learning and which is spoken about by many great teachers when they have emphasised the value of the mind of the child -- that open, clear sight.
A woman told me a story recently that I thought very typical of the process of the Way for some of us. This was a deep vision she had had, many years before she told it. It had ruled her life ever since, and was only just starting to transform, which is how she came to remember it and so to tell it to me. This is the vision: There was a desolate, post-holocaust city, a science fiction city, ruined and devastated after a war. On the outskirts of the city, in a desert, was a young prince, standing up. In some way this young prince was the woman. All the young prince had was one of those ornaments in which, when you turn them upside down, it snows. She thought this a strange vision to have: a ruined city, and a young prince standing with this ornament. In the vision, the prince looked at the devastation in the city, and he could not bear the suffering. And he looked at his little ornament with its snow scene and pines and its mountains, and he thought, "What a stupid thing this is; it is just a mechanical thing. There is no hope." He threw it down, and it shattered.
When she told me this my body shook a little. There was such despair in that gesture of throwing down the one beautiful thing. What I thought about her state of mind was that at the time of the vision there was nothing for her to hold on to, nothing at all, and that somehow she needed to go further into the pain, to experience more fully the darkness, and that for her throwing away this ornament was the movement even further into the darkness, into the suffering. I think there are times in zazen when we just have to accept that we do this. We fight with the zazen so much: we just have to bear it and endure any way we can, and we go into the difficult times. Quite often I have known people to leave a retreat at such times, but then come back; and sometimes good people leave and come back. I think it is very important to stay if you can. But even Hakuin, one of the great teachers of the Japanese lineage, gave up zazen for a while. He had a great fight with his zazen and lost. He decided his life was miserable and he would get what few pleasures he could by carousing and reading poetry. And eventually, as is the way of things, the zazen seduced him and led him back. He could not quite leave it alone: he had not resolved his koan and brought him back.
But there is another possibility which just began to occur to this woman, which is why I think the memory of the vision came back. This possibility is that all is not lost. When we see the suffering in the world, there is still a treasure in our own awareness, and that treasure relates to our attention. There was an opportunity in that little ornament, with its trees and its snow scene, which was to understand that it was the source, the talismanic source. It is the koan. And out of the koan the whole city is rebuilt or recreated, the entire world restored, pristine and beautiful, over and over again. So the great universe, with its joy and sorrow, peace and light, returns, even after suffering, in spite of the vastness of human suffering. Sometimes we can only get to this restoration by going through the darkness, and character is the willingness to hold in the darkness and to be held in the darkness. Some people have told me that in the hard times in zazen they call upon everybody who is wise that they have ever known to sit with them, and somehow that holds them. And that can be very helpful, can”t it
Other people have had just spontaneously old teachers come to them while they are sitting and hold them. I have had th…
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