People
today concentrate
on the quest to have no thoughts but
find that their thoughts ultimately cannot be
annihilated. Just don’t linger on the preceding thought,
don’t greet the following thought; if you can just use
the present adaptation to circumstances to
break through, you will naturally enter
nothingness in a gradual
manner.
Work toward
emptiness and openness.
Cultivate stillness. Breathe harmony.
Become tranquility. As the ten
thousand things rise and fall,
rise and fall, just witness
their return to the
root.
Everything
that flourishes dissolves
again into the source. To dissolve
back into the source is to find peace.
To find peace is to recover your true nature.
To recover your true nature is to know the constancy
of Tao. To know the constancy of Tao is insight. Insight
opens your mind. An open mind leads to an open
heart. Open heartedness leads to justice.
Justice is an expression of divinity.
Divinity is oneness with
Tao.
Oneness
with Tao is freedom
from harm, indescribable
pleasure, eternal
life.
from The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,
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Hua hu Ching, and Art of War for
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Heartbreak
asks us not to look for
an alternative path, because there
is no alternative path. It is an introduction
to what we love and have loved, an inescapable
and often beautiful question, something
and someone that has been with us
all along, asking us to be ready
for the ultimate
letting
go.
After offering a convincing response when Kaso later challenged the validity of his awakening, Ikkyu went on to admit that he had practiced for a decade “seething with anger” only to find that as the raucous cawing of a crow shattered the evening’s silence “an enlightened disciple of the Buddha suddenly surfaced” from within the mud of his emotional torment.
Ikkyu continued practicing under Kaso for another four years, earning the deep respect of his master as well as a reputation for eccentricity. According to a biography completed by Ikkyu’s disciples not long after his death, when Kaso offered Ikkyu a “seal” of his enlightenment (inka) — a document essential for anyone seeking advancement in the Rinzai hierarchy — Ikkyu refused to accept it. Later discovering that Kaso had given the document to a laywoman for safekeeping, Ikkyu took possession of the inka, tore it to shreds, and asked his disciples to burn it.
On another occasion, when Kaso was hosting a memorial ceremony for his own master, Ikkyu spurned the custom of wearing ceremonial raiment and showed up in patched robes and grass sandals, drawing the considerable ire of the rest of the community. Questioned by Kaso about his behavior, Ikkyu said that he was dressed simply, as a monk should be, while everyone else was prancing about in sumptuous “shit covers”. At the end of the service, when Kaso who was asked who would be his Dharma successor, he reportedly surveyed the gathering and said, perhaps with some reluctance, “the crazy one”.
…Ikkyu had devoted himself to Kaso precisely because he carried the torch of Daito’s personification of a “true person of no rank” — a rigorously ascetic approach to Zen exemplified by Daito having tempered his own enlightenment by living under a bridge with beggars and other outcasts for five years.
Having
realized understanding
kindness and the excellent nature
of opportunities and dangers, one ably
breaks through the net of doubts snaring all
sentient beings. Departing from ‘is’ and ‘is not’,
and other such bondages…leaping over quantity and
calculation, one is without obstruction in whatever
one does. With penetrating understanding of the
present situation and its informing patterns,
one’s actions are like the sky giving rise
to clouds: suddenly they exist, and
then they don’t. Not leaving
behind any obstructing
traces, they are like
phrases written
on water.
