..续本文上一页I”m condemning someone else for what they did, but I puzzle, and I worry, and I”m interested.
10. QUESTION: There is a contemporary Christian teacher, Brother David Steindl-Rast, who talks about how we can translate our spiritual life into our everyday life. One of the things he said was to cultivate a sense of surprise everyday throughout our daily activities. What would be the parallel for that Buddhist thinking or in Zen Buddhism
How do you do that in painful circumstances
JOHN: Brother David, as you know, has had a lot of interaction with the zen world. It”s a rather zen thing to say about cultivating surprise. It”s a bit like one of those `be spontaneous” double binds, isn”t it
But there”s a truth there. I think that we are open. If you come home every night and you see your child, it”s very easy to stop seeing your child and you just see your expectation and your image and don”t realize that this child is unique at this moment and has a unique gift and request for you. And if you”re just attentive and don”t come home with the idea that you need to read the paper or you need to do whatever it is, but are open to that child, then something will surprise you, surely. Attention leads to surprise or astonishment.
The other thing is that there are times when you are in darkness and you can”t--Maybe one of the features of the dark descent that everybody needs to undergo at some time is that we can”t be surprised any more at that moment. Perhaps that”s one of the losses of the descent. A true descent is such a powerful process it just takes us over and we don”t have a lot of choice. The darkness is very thick. Not until we honor that and start to acknowledge that does it start to thin a little. I think it”s quite important to honor the fact that part of the spiritual path is often darkness. The darkness doesn”t come just at the beginning. You may have a round of it when you”re quite far along. It can, in its own strange way, be a blessing, but it”s a very hard blessing sometimes. The fierce reality of that I stand for as well.
11. QUESTION: (I was just wondering if you felt it was possible to live a life of perfection and also if
)
JOHN: If I say, yes, what will you do
QUESTION: (Cont”d) (That the realization understanding is something that”s not quite matched with the fact that one is human. . . )
JOHN: Yes, you see the really most important way you can engage with a question is to really live it. I”m an inferior substitute for that. Anything I say. It”s really important. If you have a question about perfection, which is a classic koan kind of question you”ve just brought out and I suppose that”s why I have this impulse to answer you very seriously, that you must live that question. Ask yourself before you go to bed at night and when you get up in the morning ask yourself that question and find out what it means and find out how the question transforms and do zazen holding. As Rilke said, if you”re very fortunate and very faithful, you will live your way into the resolution of the question. If you are fortunate and faithful, I”m not quoting accurately here, you will live your way into the resolution of the question. I don”t think so much of perfection as a goal in zen, really myself, but I think that you have that question is marvelous and if you really honor it and are sincere with it, it will chase you around and it will make something of your life. Flora Courtois, if anybody knows of her, was a woman who just followed her question and had an enlightenment experience. She”s got this really badly produced little book somebody put out called An Experience of Enlightenment, which shows a good example of some naively following a question and being too stupid to know that she shouldn”t get enlightened that way, so she g…
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