In this issue:
Do not dwell on the past,
Do not fear the future,
Live now without evil.
—Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett,Kyojukaimon Commentary
The Sandokai teaches, “Each sense gate and its object altogether enter thus in mutual relations, and yet stand apart in a uniqueness of their own, depending and yet non-depending both.” Sense experience arises from the interaction of the senses and their objects. Pleasure and pain are inherent aspects of sense experience. We grasp after what we perceive as pleasant experiences, and turn away from those that are unpleasant. So now we have clinging and aversion being triggered by our experience of the senses, and the whole edifice of the illusory separate self is constructed..
Now we are judging experience—judging ourselves and others—as “good” or “bad,” and suffering. This would be an exhausting, grim, depressing, one-dimensional story indeed if it were the whole story. But through the example of their lives and the wisdom of their teachings the Buddha and the Ancestors show us how to realize a fuller dimension of Reality.
Buddhism has an expansive and evocative lexicon for pointing to this all-inclusive Reality. The Buddha said It is “Unborn, Undying, Uncreated, and Unformed.” Rev. Master Jiyu said of It, “If you say It is the Immaculacy of Emptiness, That Which is Eternal, you are getting very, very close to the truth, because ‘the Immaculacy of Emptiness’ implies the fullest emptiness possible.” It is all-encompassing: all things arise from It and return to It. One expression that resonates for me is “Great Ocean of Dharmakaya,” because just as a fish lives in the ocean and the ocean lives in the fish, we live in the vast great ocean of the Dharmakaya and It lives in us.
We cannot know It if the entire orientation and focus of our life is reacting to external experiences; then we “see as through a glass, darkly.” It is through pure meditation—zazen—that we open our Heart-Mind to That which is beyond the mundane. Just by letting our thoughts and emotions arise and pass away—without attachment or aversion—we come to know that they are fundamentally unreal, just passing states and nothing to cling to, and not who we really are. As they diminish in our consciousness the ultimate Reality behind them emerges in our awareness.
As we continue to train we become increasingly open to the luminous background of the Eternal behind the experiences of daily life. The ups and downs of daily life are seen to be simply the crests and troughs of waves on the surface of Great Ocean Dharmakaya. The Precepts are vital in daily life because they remind us of the reactive and impulsive habits of body, speech, and thought which dim our spiritual vision, like cataracts in our physical eye.
A wonderful—if challenging—aspect of being a human being is that we can choose at any given moment to keep our awareness open to the eternal Reality behind our transient experiences. This requires recognizing the habit energy of our particular karmic propensities, which pure meditation helps us do, and saying “No!” to them. This can be difficult, because we are trying to turn the powerful momentum of lifetimes of self-centered karmic energies in a positive direction. And this effort makes life worth living.