Good morning!
Passing the equinox, we now have chilly weather. Sitting still in Shikan-taza, we
have no chill or heat of the karma world. Nirvana is stilling and cessation of karmas
and karma world. Humans, the most advanced and worst applied karma-machines,
are suffering from their triple poisons of greed, anger, and delusion, causing the
global intertwined problems of global warming, extreme weather, war, population
explosion, poverty, mass extinction, etc.
Even though we have enough food, we have more than ten million people starving to
death every year due to the man-made poisoned pyramidal civilization of me-ism,
materialism, militarism, and money-ism. This afternoon we have our Feeding the
Hungry Walk. I was asked to speak on the Middle Way there. Maddhyastha is not
the middle or average of two, but a neutral state, attached to nothing, nirvana,
emptyof substance, śūnyatā.Maddhyastha is śamatha (stillness, cessation) and
śūnyatā (emptiness). Enjoying nirvana for weeks in his awakening, the Buddha was
rather reluctant to go out into the world deeply sunken in its layers of karmas. The
supreme being of the world, Brahma, besought him to go out to save it from
destruction, to share the Dharma (Norm/forms) with those who were untainted by
bad karmas, like unsoiled lotuses coming out of muddy water.
This is how the Buddha as a bodhisattva spent forty-five years after his awakening,
wasting no time to share the Dharma and save all. The triple vehicles are those of
hearers, personal buddhas, and buddhas/bodhisattvas. We must follow suit as bodhi-
sattvas, not as personal, partial buddhas who do not reflect well, but rather like the
clear crystal balls on the Indra-net that reflect each other limitlessly. We must make
the paradigm shift from pyramid-cage to Indra-net culture.
10/4/15
