Good morning!
We have beautiful bright spring-like sunlight and sky – crisp clear space without clouds, piercing through all endlessly.
After our sittings we are also penetrated by purity and peace. Usually we are separated by our skin bags outside and inside, but we drop them off, when we sit still.
It is like shellfish shedding their shells and even inside them becoming transparent or like bowl of water settling still without turbulence and turbidity, when the bowl settles still.
In the same way when we sit still, our bodies and minds settle still without turbulence and turbidity, just pure and peace without conceptions, emotions, and volitions.
Unless we sit still and solid, we remain as karma-machines never experiencing such. Awakened way is to become awakened to this truth and to return to this original state.
Due to karma-machines running like tread-wheels we are always in shells (selves) and become shellfish (selfish). Thus all the problems and sufferings start and spread.
If we want to see our original states, we must sit and still our karmas. Selves are just like bubbles in the ocean or clouds in the sky suddenly appearing by the karma-wind.
As dark clouds with storms, thunderbolts, thunderclaps, hurricanes, and tornadoes cause a lot of devastation and damage, selves create all kind of disasters and deaths.
Some of us watched the movie “Zen” which tells Dogen’s life. He wrote the Universal Recommendation for Right Zazen because of this situation and the solution for it.
If we are truly awakened to this truth, we find such as this vast space without clouds before karma-creation. Karma creates the clouds of conceptions, emotions, and volitions.
If we want to stop our problems and sufferings, we must sit and still our karmas into no-wind (nir-vâna/vâta) state going beyond birth, death, sickness, sorrow, sadness, etc.
Anyone can become buddha in sitting still and stilling karmas. Everyone must sit and see it, as we are affected by and affecting others endlessly in the limitlessly interrelated world.
In that movie Dogen’s life looked like a straight stick penetrating throughout his life and even beyond and also like the vast space embracing all in contact and beyond.
The world is infested and intrigued with all kinds of miseries and misfortunes among men and women like hell beings, hungry ghosts, fighting devils, etc.
We have all kinds of problems – crimes, wars, poverty, pollution, global warming, and mass extinction – all coming from small selves, driven by karma-machines.
Because of small karma-machines we create clouds, causing calamities. Still small selves think themselves smart, successful, and even supreme – too cynical and very sad.
When we sit motionless, we are moved by nothing – fear, craving, anger, delusion, sickness, death, bondage, discrimination, exploitation, and extinction.
All of our strife and success are vain and vanity, actually activities in the dark dungeon of devils in transmigration through the Six Ways or Worlds (六道輪廻), as Dogen said.
We find birth and death, up and down are essentially our mental creations and physical fabrications – with no substance. Beyond it we can taste amrita, ambrosia of immortality
We hope everyone start practice, squarely see and stop not only one’s suffering, but also of all species and generations. This is the most important and the best thing we can do.
Then we can become buddhas, awakened ones, and bodhisattvas, awakening beings, and mahâsattvas, great beings, enjoying the wholly wholesome world.
Did you figure out the precious thing the girl protected at the end of that movie? I think it Tathâ-gata garbha (Thus-being fetus), Buddha-nature in everyone to foster and fare with.
It is not something to be created, but witnessed by anyone by siting and stilling karmas, that is, the universally available awakening and ability in the original dharma realm.
2/26/12
