Poison and Joy

　　John Tarrant, Roshi The title of today”s talk is "Poison and Joy".

　　Please sit comfortably.

　　In the great work that we do what eventually appears is a great fire or light in us that we realize was always there and touches all things with its joy, but we always begin the work in darkness, I think. Buddha, I”m sure, was not the first to observe that there is something very unsatisfactory about life a lot of the time. He made it the first principle of his teaching saying that you cannot escape from suffering. But then he said, "But there is an end to suffering." So already we are getting into paradox very quickly here. And then there is a method. There is a cause of suffering, and an end to suffering, and a method. What we must do, I think, is to attend so closely to our lives that they start to open. We spend a great deal of time skirting around the edges of anything that”s painful. Diligently walking the circumference of our difficulty. And in zen really the way is through. We just go through the middle of it. We don”t need to walk around the edges any longer like an ox in an old-fashioned mill grinding corn, walking around and around in circles.

　　So, the darkness in life appears immediately when we sit down to do zazen because immediately we”ll find out that our best intentions to do zazen well don”t come off. Usually we don”t do zazen quite as well as we want to. And we also find out a curious thing that even when we are very sincere, unbidden thoughts arise, unbidden feelings. Things come out of nowhere that we had no intention of summoning. And usually we spend some time fighting with these. I certainly did. A lot of time fighting with these. And I think some fighting can be good because we can feel our strength and our sincerity, but in the long run you just feed the demon when you fight it. You give it energy. In the long run what happens is that if we just attend, things settle. In that way, I think, we go into the poison. We darken the darkness.

　　Tung-shan was asked, "How do we deal with cold in winter and heat in summer when they visit us

　　 How do we deal with them

　　 He said to go where there is neither cold nor heat. And naturally the student said, "Well, where is that

　　" So he said, "When it is hot, kill yourself with heat. When it is cold, kill yourself with cold."

　　This is a very famous story and I”m sure everyone here has heard this before, but if you think about doing it, it becomes a great thing. Even though it is well known, it still has enormous power.

　　So that when you are sleepy, kill yourself with sleepiness. When you are in despair, that despair, too, is something that has appeared. It, too, has Buddha nature. When your knees hurt, kill yourself with pain in the knees.

　　So when we stop avoiding and holding back from life, then we will find the joy will open. And there is a way in which it opens. I think it only opens when we have been willing to suffer some. Nobody seems to come to meditation without having suffered something. My personal observation. Something that was true for me. But then everybody suffers. We are drawn by the natural course of life to zazen, to seek some simplicity and to find a natural, authentic way. And I think that one of the important things about the difficulty and suffering generally is to allow ourselves to be in it without to much complaint. There is a very strong, sort of addictive longing in humanity. It”s very strong in our culture, but it”s in others, too, of course, but I think it”s just a human thing. Where we have this great longing for life and very little patience in cultivating it. So that we want magic and we want it now. And there is a great, powerful magic in zen, but the strangeness of the magic is after awhile the least interesting thing, I think. So y…

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