Good morning!
We are having a sesshin today. Sesshin means embracing the heart-mind (摂心) and
touching the heart-mind (接心). Our minds (in the wider sense, including intellect,
emotion, heart, and volition, hara, guts) are usually out-going for survival with the
Triple Poisons (desire, divisiveness, and delusion) and for action (karma), and thus
diversion, diffusion, and confusion. Just like water in a bowl surges, spills, and spoils
as the bowl moves, the mind surges, spills, and soils as the body moves. As the bowl
settles still, the water settles calm and clear, without turbulence and turbidity. As the
body settles still, the mind settles calm and clear in peace and prognosis. Through
continued concentrated cultivation, anyone can witness nirvana (unconditioned
peace) and bodhi (unsurpassed awakening). Sesshin – intensive sitting, stilling,
seeing, and serving for holy (wholly wholesome) truth, goodness, and beauty –
is the first, only, and best way to enter into such cultivation and witnessing.
Animals are moving beings, constantly in physical, verbal, and mental karmas with
the Triple Poisons obsessed by pressing needs, obscuring the wholly wholesome way
world in nirvana and bodhi, the deepest, widest, and longest peace and prognosis.
This is why the human species, with its most delicate bodies and brains, create
consciousness in suffering (birth, aging, sickness, death, losing, parting, meeting –
in short, the rampant racing of the five aggregates) through the transmigratory Six
Ways of hell beings, hungry ghosts, fighting devils, beastly beings, human beings,
and celestial beings. Trees, sharing the etymological root with true (lasting, deru or
dhrī, root of dharma, form/norm, phenomena/law of phenomena), can survive ten
thousand years because of their wholly wholesome way with water, wind, and the
world throughout time and space (genes, generations, geographies, galaxies, etc.)
settling still and strong, withstanding storms.
This is the time of the tenth anniversary of the Katrina hurricane disaster, which
destroyed more than thousand human lives and other species and spheres. This is
also the fourth anniversary of the East Japan Earthquake with the associated
tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, which engulfed more than two hundred
people and still leaves more than one hundred refuges from radiation contamination,
some never able to return to their homes. We have droughts and wildfires causing
food crises, while we have flooding, typhoons, tornadoes, and melting glaciers and
iceshelves. These are only a part of the man-made disasters of global warming with
extreme weather. Our karmas as “business as usual” have created the sixth mass
extinction, with over one hundred species extinct per day. We are blindly bound in
more wars with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, more than ten percent of
which stand at hair trigger alert.
Did you see the full moon, high above the earth last night? The full moon represents
the Buddha’s heart-mind with brilliant beauty and clear calmness in perfect
perimeter. The human fallacy and failure lie in self-centeredness, with short sight
and partial perspective. Buddhas, in nirvana, beyond karma, and bodhi, beyond the
Triple Poisons, are in peace, beyond craving, fears, and hatreds, and prognosis,
beyond blindness, doubts, and karmas. Unconditioned peace and unsurpassed
awakening are one and inseparable, innate in anyone, anywhere, any time. They are
in sitting still, stilling karmas, seeing the dharmas (the human heart-mind, karma
kinetics, etc.), serving and saving all. Sitting reveals the unity of cultivation and
verification or witnessing. Only practice makes perfect. Only perfected ones can
practice continuously in concentration. Concentration is contentment.
8/30/15
