|
Main Index
|
| |
| |
|
| |
`this', gives you the very essence of religiousness -- the mystery of it, the beauty of it, the truth of it. You cannot answer and you cannot ask, you have simply to live; to live thisness -- in Gautam Buddha's words suchness, tathata -- is the whole of religious consciousness.
Just live this moment in its totality, without wavering; neither thinking of the past which is no more, nor projecting about the future which is not yet.
All that you have is the purity of thisness, this moment.
And the glory and the ecstasy cannot be higher, cannot be deeper if you can understand the simple experience of thisness.
Setcho's commentary on it: THE LAST WORD, LET ME TELL YOU -- LIGHT AND DARKNESS INTERMINGLED,
LIVING IN THE SAME WAY, YOU ALL KNOW; DYING IN DIFFERENT WAYS -- BEYOND TELLING! ABSOLUTELY BEYOND TELLING!
BUDDHA AND DHARMA ONLY NOD... Buddha and Bodhidharma -- Dharma is a short form of Bodhidharma. BUDDHA AND BODHIDHARMA ONLY NOD TO THEMSELVES.
They utter not even the simplest word, this.
They simply nod. In their nodding is said everything sayable, unsayable. In their nodding is the whole mystery of existence.
EAST, WEST, NORTH AND SOUTH -- HOMEWARD LET US GO. LATE AT NIGHT, SEEING THE SNOW ON THE THOUSAND PEAKS.
As I have told you before, Setcho is a great intellectual but he is not an enlightened man. Once in a while, he makes a comment that is beautiful, but it is coming out of his head rather than out of his being. He is not accounted in the long line of buddhas. He remains only a commentator. And a commentator, however great, is simply repeating, paraphrasing the experience that is not his own.
I don't want you to be commentators.
I want you to be in the very center of existence, of your being.
That is the only way to understand this tremendous mystery that surrounds you.
Another story...
SEPPO IS ALSO KNOWN AS HSUEH-FENG. SEPPO ONCE SPOKE OF AN INCIDENT THAT CONTRIBUTED TO HIS AWAKENING:
"WHEN I ASKED MASTER TOKUSAN WHETHER I COULD SHARE THE EXPERIENCE THAT THE ANCIENT MASTERS KNEW, HE STRUCK ME, AND I WAS LIKE A BUCKET WHOSE BOTTOM HAD JUST DROPPED
|
|
|
|
| |