Those who wear the
patched robe of a zen wayfarer
should be completely serious about
taking death and birth as
their business.
Don’t
covet name and fame.
Step back and turn to reality, until
your practical understanding
and virtue are fully
actualized.
Tao is beyond words
and beyond understanding.
Words may be used to speak of
it, but they cannot
contain it.
Tao existed before
words and names, before heaven and earth,
before the ten thousand things. It is the unlimited
father and mother of all limited things. Therefore, to see
beyond all boundaries to the subtle heart of things,
dispense with names, with concepts,
with expectations and ambitions
and differences.
Tao and its many manifestations
arise from the same source: subtle wonder
within mysterious darkness. This
is the beginning of all
understanding.
🦋
This reality
cannot be covered by the skies
or held up by the earth. Space cannot contain it.
It abides within all sentient beings and is the support
on which all of them rest. It has always been
clean and naked. There is nowhere
it does not pervade.
🐞
Buddhism
advises you not to implant
feelings that you don’t really have or avoid
feelings that you do have. If you are miserable you
are miserable; that is the reality, that is what is happening,
so confront that. Look it square in the eye without flinching.
When you are having a bad time, examine that experience,
observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn
its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the
trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by
taking the thing apart piece by piece.
The trap can’t trap you if it has
been taken to pieces.
The result is
freedom.
the shock of unsettling events
In order to
be a proper teacher to
oneself, one must be part midwife,
part executioner: sometimes rebirthing oneself,
sometimes annihilating and leaving useless bits by the
wayside, until the self soars free and clear of
attachment, obstruction, and delusion
and joins all buddhas past,
present, and
future.
Then one
can stop fracturing
reality with names and ideas
of self, other, buddha,
enlightenment,
and so on.
There,
beyond definitions
and beyond mind, reality
flows like pure
water.
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Brave-spirited wearers of the patched robe possess an outstanding, extraordinary aspect. With great determination they give up conventional society. They look upon worldly status and evanescent fame as dust in the wind, as clouds floating by, as echoes in a valley.
Since they already have great faculties and great capacity from the past, they know that this level exists, and they transcend birth and death and move beyond holy and ordinary. This is the indestructible true essence that all the enlightened ones of all times witness, the wondrous mind that alone the generations of enlightened teachers have communicated.
To tread this unique path, to be a fragrant elephant or a giant, golden-winged bird, it is necessary to charge past the millions of categories and types and fly above them, to cut off the flow and brush against the heavens. How could the enlightened willingly be petty creatures, confined within distinctions of high and low and victory and defeat, trying futilely to make comparative judgments of instantaneous experience, and being utterly turned around by gain and loss?
For this reason, in olden times the people of great enlightenment did not pay attention to trivial matters and did not aspire to the shallow and easily accessible. They aroused their determination to transcend the buddhas and patriarchs. They wanted to bear the heavy responsibility that no one can fully take up, to rescue all living beings, to remove suffering and bring peace, to smash the ignorance and blindness that obstructs the Way. They wanted to break the poisonous arrows of ignorant folly and extract the thorns of arbitrary views from the eye of reality. They wanted to make the scenery of the fundamental ground clear and reveal the original face before the empty aeon.
You should train your mind and value actual practice wholeheartedly, exerting all your power, not shrinking from the cold or the heat. Go to the spot where you meditate and kill your mental monkey and slay your intellectual horse. Make yourself like a dead tree, like a withered stump.
Suddenly you penetrate through — how could it be attained from anyone else? You discover the hidden treasure, you light the lamp in the dark room, you launch the boat across the center of the ford. You experience great liberation, and without producing a single thought, you immediately attain true awakening. Having passed through the gate into the inner truth, you ascend to the site of universal light. Then you sit in the impeccably pure supreme seat of the emptiness of all things.
