Good morning!
Even though we have clouds and cannot see the moon, our mind moons settle down calm and clear. We sit in zazen, illuminate our world, and reflect our minds.
The morning star is always bright, but small like other stars. Compared to the morning star, the moon is far brighter and bigger. This illusion is due to the distances between us and them.
The reality is just the opposite. The fundamental, universal problem lies in the parallax built into our sense organs and developed through evolution and living.
Chinese people called their country the Central Flower (??), and Indian people called theirs the Middle Country (maddhya-desha). People usually think they are at the center of the world.
We say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, as if the sun goes around the earth. The Copernican revolution was the epoch-making event that changed our common sense views.
The self sense is one of these delusions of self-centeredness. Our sense organs were developed to sense everything; due to self-preservation instruments and instincts, both natural and artificial, we are self-centered and self-aggrandized.
This is the reason we become selfish and create all kinds of problems and sufferings – now on a global scale with global warming, the sixth mass extinction, and many other problems.
Religions want to correct this by seeing things from a point beyond this world, from the universal truth rather than self-centered views, from the other side, as truth called Dharma (Form-Norm), Dao (Way), Dei, Deva, Dyau(pitâ), Zeus, Ju(-piter) (Glittering, God), etc.
Only when we stop our karmic senses and scenes of self-centeredness, can we see the objective or “out-of-self” views of the world. If we remain self-centered, there is no solution for strife and suffering, because our views and actions are simply short-sights and short-circuits.
A donkey’s looking into an old well is not enough. But the old well’s looking into the donkey is a selfless view and the supra-mundane state. All arguments and actions are those of blind men, not those of the king Mirror (Adassa), who is like the full moon (tsuki: ??: full function).
This is the essential hallmark of the practice of the Awakened Way as Dogen manifestly expressed:
“The practice of the awakened one is to practice with the entire earth and to practice with all living beings. If not with the entire whole, it is not yet the practice of the awakened one.”
2/26/11