Zazen tomorrow at Hill Street Center. Details are in the links to your left. Don't forget to bring a crisp new $5 bill with you. The rent I'm paying to host these things ain't gettin' paid in good vibes!
When I was at the Great Sky Sesshin last month, my friend Greg Fain, from the San Francisco Zen Center, and I got assigned a job during work period to plane off a 1/4 inch of the bottom of a door so it would shut easier. While the two of us were carrying the door down the hill to the workshop, Greg made a mocking show of it being really heavy, which it wasn't. Then he said, "Dogen said we should treat light things as if they're heavy!"
I'm not sure exactly where that quote comes from. But it means to treat everything like it has great value, no matter what it is. When you're carrying a bag of trash out to the dumpster you should treat it like it's full of precious antique china. Don't read the paper while you eat, it's insulting to your food. That attitude. This is Buddhist morality.
I'm working on my book now and I came across the following passage. I don't like quoting myself because that's insufferably pretentious. But since some of you have e-mailed and asked to see previews of the book, I'll offer it for what it's worth:
The Middle Way was not some kind of spiritual path designed to make us all holy with shiny pink haloes on our noggins. It was a way to live a life that wasn’t a piece of shit. It was a way to find happiness and stability in an unhappy and unstable world. That’s really all any of us are looking for, when it comes down to it. The stability of the Middle Way comes in our practice of zazen, which is the actual physical and mental practice of stability and happiness. A bit of zazen in the morning and a bit in the evening radiates throughout the rest of the day and night and makes everything better. That’s all there is to it.
Morality is an important part of finding real happiness because we are all interconnected. I can’t be happy if I make the people around me miserable under the mistaken impression that their misery is not intimately connected with mine. So if I don’t want to be miserable I need to behave morally toward everyone I encounter. In Buddhism behaving morally doesn't mean following some fixed code of conduct. It means being careful.
But another aspect of Buddhist morality is that you have to do your part. You’re not here just for yourself. You’re here for everyone and everything you encounter. Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective. God is too far removed from the universe to see himself clearly without splitting himself into a bazillion eyes and ears that watch over all aspects of himself. Whatever perspective you have is the most valuable thing in the universe. You need to be fully yourself. At the same time, you need to completely forget any idea you have about yourself. Or, if you can’t forget it, at least ignore it, secure in the knowledge that whatever you think you are isn’t what you really are.
Don't really know why but that seemed to resonate this evening.
See you all tomorrow!
