Posts Tagged → yuanwu

chosen limits empower growth

nothing ever happens

 

Voluntarily chosen limits
empower your growth.

 
The practice of economies is a valuable notion everywhere in life. In your financial dealings, a reasonable thrift practiced today assures you of opportunity tomorrow. In your emotional life, the practice of balance and equanimity allows steady spiritual progress. The hexagram Chieh comes as an encouragement to set practical limits throughout your life.

Life lived without guidelines is confusing and troubling. In order to make genuine progress in any direction, we must first give some definition to our path. However, limits that are overstrenuous are not helpful; having too many rules causes rebellion in the one on whom they are imposed, whether one’s self or another. Therefore there must be limits even on one’s limits.

To yourself, the setting of limits means defining your purpose and responsibilities so that you have a clear idea of where your energies are to be aimed. Your limits should be determined by yourself, not another or the culture in which you live. Avoid harshness and impatience with yourself; true progress is made in gradual steps. Allow yourself pleasure, but avoid careless self-indulgence.

With others, place limits both on your own actions and the indulgences you offer them. To encourage another’s inferior qualities is to invite misfortune. Allow your interactions with others to take place within the limits of gentleness, tolerance, and innocence. If you will define and observe reasonable limits in all things, you will be assured of steady progress.
 

from The I Ching, or Book of Changes

Hexagram 60, Chieh / Limitation

 

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washing dirt in mud

diamonds

 

By even speaking a phrase to you,

I have already doused you with dirty water.

It would be even worse for me to put a twinkle in my eye

and raise my eyebrow to you, or rap on the meditation seat

or hold up a whisk, or demand, “What is this?”

As for shouting and hitting, it’s obvious

that this is just a pile of bones

on level ground.

 

There are also the type

who don’t know good from bad and

ask questions about Buddha and Dharma and Zen

and the Tao. They ask to be helped, they beg to be received,

they seek knowledge and sayings and theories relating to

the Buddhist teaching and to transcending the world

and to accommodating the world. This is washing

dirt in mud and washing mud in dirt —

when will they ever manage

to clear it away?

 

Forget the words and 

embody the meaning.

 

Yuanwu

zen letters

 

cut off any duality

ashes and snow

 

Yongjia said,

“Without leaving wherever you are,

there is constant clarity.” No words come closer

to the truth than these. If you start seeking, then we know

that you are unable to see. Just cut off any duality between

“wherever you are” and “constant clarity,” and make

yourself peaceful and serene. Avoid concocting

intellectual understanding and seeking.

As soon as you seek, it is like

grasping at shadows.

 

Yuanwu

 

yuanwu’s deathbed zen

papaji

 
At all times just remain free and uninvolved. Never make any displays of clever tricks — be like a stolid simpleton in a village of three families. Then the gods will have no road on which to offer you flowers, and demons and outsiders will not be able to spy on you.

Be undefinable, and do not reveal any conspicuous signs of your special attainment. It should be as if you are there among myriad precious goods locked up securely and deeply hidden in a treasure house. With your face smeared with mud and ashes, join in the work of the common laborers, neither speaking out nor thinking.

Live your whole life so that no one can figure you out, while your spirit and mind are at peace. Isn’t this what it is to be imbued with the Way without any contrived or forced actions, a genuinely unconcerned person?

Among the enlightened adepts, being able to speak the Truth has nothing to do with the tongue, and being able to talk about the Dharma is not a matter of words.

Clearly we know that the words spoken by the ancients were not meant to be passively depended on. Anything the ancients said was intended only so that people would directly experience the fundamental reality. Thus the teachings of the sutras are like a finger pointing to the moon, and the sayings of the Zen masters are like a piece of tile used to knock on a door.

If you know this, then rest. If your practice is continuous and meticulous and your application broad and all-pervading, and you do not deviate from this over the years, then you will mature in your ability to handle the teachings, to gather up and to release, and you will be able to see through petty things and cut them off without leaving a trace.

Then you when you come to the juncture of death and birth, where all the lines intersect, you won’t get mixed up. You will be clear and immovable, and you will be set free as you leave this life behind. This is deathbed Zen, for the last day of your life.
 

Yuanwu