..续本文上一页 you”re enlightened. That is one thing that is very true. Yamada Koun Roshi was one of my teachers, my grandfather, who David and I shared as a teacher. He was very strong on this. If somebody was visible in a crowd, they weren”t enlightened. His idea was that he had to go and shuffle into the subway like everybody else in Tokyo, smoked a cigar. He embodied that very beautifully, I think. `The stink of zen” is an old zen saying. That people with their fresh enlightenment experience are kind of obnoxious in some way. That it needs to be tended like everything young. It”s beautiful; it”s marvelous and it needs to grow old like everything else.
Our fantasies of enlightenment are rather mechanistic. That we think that everything grows and changes. We”d never approach a work of art the way that we approach our minds. But we think that if I have an enlightenment experience, something static will happen. But nothing static ever happens. It”s a river. It”s always changing. Your contact with your enlightenment experience will die to the extent that you hang onto it in my own experience. So there”s a lot about letting go and then you can have multiple enlightenment experiences. In the tradition. Today. Over and over again we have to let it go. We have to be a person--Lin-chi called it a person without rank. Because if you”ve got rank, you”re a person walking around with a hat on, a fancy hat of some kind. A red barretta (sp
) or something. And some of your role and you”re not living. And the ecstatic is there everywhere. It”s in every moment. It”s not just in an enlightenment experience.
4. QUESTION: The question might have been what”s the movement of the whole thing. What”s the direction of the whole business
JOHN: What”s our fantasy of development
QUESTION: What”s the purpose of enlightenment in humanity, or would you say there is one
JOHN: What”s the grand vision here
Grand visions are not my strong point, but I”ll try. I think it”s a noble question. I think that we can have. I think there are a number of things. I really do want to emphasize that the first purpose has always got to be--In Buddhist tradition the fantasy of the bodhisattva, it”s a legend, is the person who actually puts off their own complete enlightenment in order to save other beings. Because if they became completely enlightened, they”d just disappear off the planet somehow. That”s obviously a fantasy, but it”s a very interesting fantasy to me. In other words, what makes the bodhisattva way is the person who has their floors and knows them, is doing character work in that way. And that the grand vision always comes from the very simple integrity happening now in your meditation practice, in your life. You do something stupid; somebody busts you; you can lie and get away with it, but you don”t lie. It”s a very important task. The more inpidually we can do our work that has ripple effects. If you really do your zazen, you have consequences beyond what you can see. They”re invisible to you. I do believe that although it”s a nutty belief. It”s really true. We can”t measure what those consequences will be. North Americans have a progressive fantasy where the graph goes up like this. I have an associate who is an Argentinean zen master and they have this fantasy. Where everything is going down to the dogs and that”s why you need to practice Buddhism. It”s just so hopeless. Our fantasy is that we need to practice Buddhism because it will make everything better for everyone. And that”s my fantasy. I think that there are possibilities of greater consciousness without splitting--I suppose that”s why I”m talking tonight. You can split off and leave all this mess or you can try and not split off so much, not be so pure, and try to have the whole thing get a little bit mo…
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