Good evening!
We just heard a beautiful bell sound, but it’s gone now. Time flies! The grip of the snowstorm has passed and now we’re having spring, with plants peeping out. Today, March 3, is momono sekku (????, festival of peach), the girls’ festival. Since old times we’ve been celebrating annual festival; it punctuates periods, like the sections of a bamboo stalk.
We celebrate January 1 with seven herbs, March 3 with peaches, May 5 with irises (boys’ festival), July 7 with bamboo, September 9 with mums. People are enjoying peach blossoms now and soon will celebrate the Buddha’s birthday, the flower festival. When we sit in zazen like the Buddha, we are liberated from our karma, like spring flowers without snow, or the blue sky without clouds.
Dogen said, “Handing off, our hands are full” (hanateba te-ni miteri: ????????). When the grip of snow opens, spring flowers bloom in full blossom. Where clouds clear, there is full space, clear and calm. If our minds are clear and calm, there is limitless space and time, unfabricated and unconditioned,
When we hold something, we cannot hold other things. If we hold on to something, we are held by it. Possession is possessedness. When we possess positions, possessions, the past, or our plans, we are possessed by them. Only when we hand them off or let them go do we have a free hand to hold anything. Only an empty cup can contain a drink. Emptiness is limitless potential.
Humans are the beings most possessed by self, society, state, status, and symbolism. That’s why they have become the most powerful in poisons (the three poisons) and the least powerful in purity. This is due to karma through evolution and development in sciences and technologies. The global problem is global pollution; persecution and precipitation are due to this.
The ultimate solution is to awaken within the global system (Systemic, Sustainable, Saving, Simple, Safe) and to actualize the global ethic (Law, Life, Love, Liberation, Lielessness). The fundamental solution is within everyone’s understanding and activation, amidst one’s concrete living. One must sit down, stop karma, and strive in awakened life and living (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rearrange, Restore; Access, Assess, Agree, Act, Advise).
If we understand and actualize these, we can live in limitless life, light, liberation, and love; in the most clean, content world; in truth, goodness, beauty, and holiness; with genuine awakening, freedom, equality, love, and peace; with every day healthy, harmonious, and happy. The three worlds of the physical, non-physical, and instinctive depend on the mind, essentially karma. If karma is purified, the world is pure. Our worlds depend on our minds.
3/3/11