With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
It is the middle of the night and I have greeted it’s darkness over and over again with an open heart. The sounds of a sleeping world are my companions. A cooling breeze is my blanket. What’s this? I feel as though I am but a shadow in the corner . The fox and the monk are one as karma is the product of a deluded mind.
I realize I have not been posting much and what I have posted has had more to do with my pain than Zen itself. This realization brings me to the question of Zen in Everyday Life, a theme I am exploring in my new booklet under the same title.
At our Zen study group this evening the question came up about practice realization in our daily life. It sprung out of the text of Master Dogen’s Genjokoan. In that text Dogen Zenji says in the comings and goings of practice realization we are deluded, but in practice realization, comings and goings are practice realization. Rather like form is emptiness and emptiness is form, if you get my meaning.
If we live in practice realization our comings and goings (read everyday life) are not deluded. This means we address our lives as not separate from things. In fact, in practice realization, there are no things. We, and the “things” before us, are not separate, but one and we are one with them. So, the cup I am just now sipping from is myself as are the keys on this PC. In this state, the tricky part is, there are, in fact, no cups or keys, no me to sip or type. An infinite circle is no circle at all, as Glassman-roshi points out in his book, “Infinite Circle.”
As we practice and approach infinity we discover our truth, this truth is actually quite simple, in the infinite, there are no limits and as a result, everything falls away as “things” and only the vast emptiness of our true nature resides. Touch a cup and you touch everything that is, touch everything that is, and cup, you, and touch are one. How do we then disrespect the cup without disrespecting the universe?
Yours in the dharma,
Good Morning Everyone,
It is the middle of the night and I have greeted it’s darkness over and over again with an open heart. The sounds of a sleeping world are my companions. A cooling breeze is my blanket. What’s this? I feel as though I am but a shadow in the corner . The fox and the monk are one as karma is the product of a deluded mind.
I realize I have not been posting much and what I have posted has had more to do with my pain than Zen itself. This realization brings me to the question of Zen in Everyday Life, a theme I am exploring in my new booklet under the same title.
At our Zen study group this evening the question came up about practice realization in our daily life. It sprung out of the text of Master Dogen’s Genjokoan. In that text Dogen Zenji says in the comings and goings of practice realization we are deluded, but in practice realization, comings and goings are practice realization. Rather like form is emptiness and emptiness is form, if you get my meaning.
If we live in practice realization our comings and goings (read everyday life) are not deluded. This means we address our lives as not separate from things. In fact, in practice realization, there are no things. We, and the “things” before us, are not separate, but one and we are one with them. So, the cup I am just now sipping from is myself as are the keys on this PC. In this state, the tricky part is, there are, in fact, no cups or keys, no me to sip or type. An infinite circle is no circle at all, as Glassman-roshi points out in his book, “Infinite Circle.”
As we practice and approach infinity we discover our truth, this truth is actually quite simple, in the infinite, there are no limits and as a result, everything falls away as “things” and only the vast emptiness of our true nature resides. Touch a cup and you touch everything that is, touch everything that is, and cup, you, and touch are one. How do we then disrespect the cup without disrespecting the universe?
Yours in the dharma,
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