..续本文上一页ot enlightened.

　　13. QUESTION: Did it answer her question

　　JOHN: I don”t know. It was rather philosophical. She was rather philosophically minded so it was something like `What is life

　　” or something like that. Perfection is a common zen--Some zen masters have taken up that question. I think of integrity as being more of a pertinent goal for me. Perfection is not something I ever felt was in my fate. Integrity is interesting and even that is a sort of approach to wholeness, isn”t it

　　 True wholeness sort of stops. We always need something that can flow.

　　QUESTION: (Question 12 cont”d) (I was thinking of how perfection relates to the living

　　)

　　JOHN: Yes, and really we can only answer those questions from the bottom of our hearts. We must answer it with our own lives, with our own bodies.

　　14. QUESTION: About the darkness that you just mentioned before. You said we have to experience the darkness in our lives, this is part of our lives being in darkness. Confusion.

　　JOHN: It may be anything. It may be cancer. It may be depression. It may be that things just don”t work. It may be something awful happening to

　　QUESTION: (Cont”d) My question was that the way I see it is that spiritual teachings like zen or any other spiritual teaching would have different means to look through this darkness and have this path, have a way to deal with darkness. In that way I was wondering how you understand zen to solve this problem and whether it does do that today for the people of today.

　　JOHN: You can”t go into life thinking you”re going to solve it. It just doesn”t work. There”s just too much of the ego level tinkering going on. It”s like an engineer in a garage in Akron, Ohio making an invention and getting a patent. What we”ve got to is zazen. Do your zazen. You absolutely have to do zazen. If you”re going to walk a spiritual path, you can”t get away without a spiritual discipline. You have to zazen every day of your life and accept that you”re going to do that for the rest of your life. One. Two. Start noticing your life. Sometimes you feel awful when you do zazen. It makes you feel worse. Start noticing that. It”s very intriguing. It doesn”t always make you feel better. Maybe your fantasies about better and worse aren”t so good. Maybe they”re not so important. So it softens our idea of darkness in that way. But if you”re really in darkness and in pain, it will take you over and--It”s like having the right attitude when you”re in a hurricane. Nobody has the right attitude in a hurricane. You”re just in a hurricane and that”s true zen. Be in your hurricane. Some way it will set you down. Something will happen to you in that hurricane. Maybe that hurricane has a beauty and a value that you can”t conceive of because you keep trying to get out of it or adopt the right spiritual attitude towards it. A good hurricane will blow away your spiritual attitude. You won”t have one any more. And then what you”re left with is the true dharma. Something that”s very real and you can really bite into and it”s really solid, but there”s something intransigent about it, too. It”s got to stand up under the worst conditions.

　　Thank you very much bodhisattvas. Some supplementary notes:

　　A book referred to in the course of the Questions & Answers time is: Courtois, Flora. 1986. An experience of enlightenment. Wheaton. Ill: The Theosophical Publishing House, A Quest Book. (tmc 7.03.93)

《Soul in Zen - Q and A》全文阅读结束。