..续本文上一页n one of his great teachers. And my friend, who was also at that sesshin said, "Now he is gone out into the garden and he won”t come back."

　　So I always think of him and his statue and that playfulness. If you have the high walls around the garden, you really can have the unicorns inside. I think the high walls are things like sitting still in zazen and coming back to the koan. And this apparent rigidity allows this great freedom and spontaneous power. Gary Snyder once said "In a sesshin everybody looks alike but inside they”re all different. Outside everybody looks different but inside they”re all alike."

　　Another friend of mine who died late last year is also with me. His name was Issan he he was a Zen priest and ran a small interesting zendo in San Francisco in the gay district and he had been dying for quite some time of AIDS. Both these stories are about people who have died, but I think in both cases it felt to me it was in the Tao that they died, it was somehow okay as well as sad. When it became clear that Issan really was dying this time, because there had been a few false alarms, there was a big Zen gathering and he handed over the abbotship of his temple to one of his close friends, another priest, and everybody came to say goodbye to him. They put on their flowery robes and things. One of his fellow priests helped him to the bathroom. Issan was very weak and thin at that time. His friend helped him back and was half-carrying the frail body of his old Dharma friend he loved when he became overwhelmed by his feeling and his sorrow and his love and said, "I”ll miss you, Issan." And Issan, in his measured way, looked at him. Issan had enormous eyes and he would look at you and you would fall into them, and he looked at his friend with his large eyes and said, "I”ll miss you too. Where are you going

　　" HE wasn”t going anywhere, he was just going to die. And a few days later, he did.

　　So it”s important not to slight the difficult times. Even in the garden we”re allowed to have difficult times. From the point of view of inner truth, the difficult times can be very important and it”s good in difficult times to hold up your light even if it seems small, and to touch the light, especially if it seems small and sometimes that is all we can do and that is okay.

　　Ramakrishna, another Hindu teacher, said "People weep rivers of tears because they do not have a child or cannot get money, but who sheds a teardrop because he has not seen God

　　" A very deep reason to grieve.

　　But it is not just that in difficult times it is important to hold up our light. Difficult times themselves hold the light. The difficulties really do turn to gold if they are sincerely undergone. There is something - the light is there within the pains of the way, not after they are all over.

　　Rilke wrote a version of his tenth Dueno Elergy and then scrapped it, but the scrapped version is also very interesting and here is Steven Mitchell”s translation of a few lines of it: How dear you will be to me then, you nights of anguish. Why didn”t I kneel more deeply to accept you, inconsolable sisters, And surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair

　　 How we squander our hours of pain, How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration To see if they have an end. Though they are really seasons of us, Our winter enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborne landscape, Where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

　　The pains of zazen and of the Way are just the winter and without winter, what kind of summer could we have

　　 In one of Shakespeare”s plays, he has a line, "How sweet it is to talk about old suffering," but it”s different from that, I think. That is true but there”s something more than that here. It is that the sufferings of the Way and the joys of the Way a…

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