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Main Index
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believes in love. It does not believe in rules, regulations. It does not believe in any outer discipline, it believes in the inner. It comes out of love, it comes out of respect, out of trust. When you meditate, you start trusting existence. See the difference: if you ask a Christian or a Hindu, trust is the first demand. He says, 'Trust existence -- then you will know what God is.' In Zen, that is not the first demand. Zen says: Meditate. Out of meditation trust arises, and trust makes existence divine. Tathata arises.
How can you go on condemning if you know everything is God? The so-called vedantins in India say 'All is Brahma' -- but still they go on condemning. Still they go on saying that you are a sinner and that that one is a saint, and the saint will go to heaven and the sinner will go to hell. This seems very absurd, if all is God. Then how can you be a sinner? Then it is God who is a sinner in you. And how can God go to hell?
Zen says: The day you know all is divine, all is God And they don't use the word 'god' at all -- because the other religions have corrupted the word so badly, contaminated it, polluted it, poisoned it. They don't use the word 'god'. When you meditate, and by and by you start seeing things as they are, and you start trusting and respecting things as they are, a trust arises. That trust is tathata -- suchness.
Tathata leads to a vision of the interrelatedness of existence. Then the whole universe is one unit, functioning in an organic unity. They have a particular word for it, they call it 'JIJI MUGE HOKKAI': when you come to know that the whole existence is unitary -- it is really a universe, not a multiverse -- that everything is joined with everything else; that sinners and saints all alike are part of one net, they are not separate; that good and bad are joined together. Just as dark and light are joined together, just as death and life are joined together, so are good and bad.
Everything is interconnected. It is a web, a beautiful pattern.
Listen to these words of Berenson. 'It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with a caress.
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