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are you doing? Have you forgotten your sermon?"
He said, "Jesus only talked about turning your cheek once. Now forget that, come on, man to man! To hell with Jesus! You have slapped me twice. I will kill you. That was only a sermon; you don't have to practice it; it's just a beautiful statement."
IT WAS SNOWING, AND THE MONK IN CHARGE ASKED HYAKUJO TO GIVE A SERMON.
In the first place Zen does not have any sermons; nor does it have any commandments, or discipline, or rules. It is a unique style of living so that you can come in contact with the divineness of existence itself.
Jews have ten commandments. Perhaps you know why there are ten. At that time, four thousand years ago, man used to count on his fingers. Ten is the ultimate figure, then there is repetition; for eleven and twelve, you are repeating another set of ten. You can go on repeating as many sets of ten as you want, but you cannot go beyond ten. Ten is the basic, because man learned arithmetic by counting on his fingers.
The story is that God created the world and went around asking the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Arabs a single question, "Do you want a commandment?"
They all asked, "What is the commandment? Of course first we want to know what it is. In the dark we are not going to take anything."
And when he said, "Simple! Never, never look at another woman. Avoid all kinds of corruption."
The Babylonians said, "Then what else should we do? The whole joy of life will be gone. Keep your sermon to yourself."
The Egyptians did not ask, "What is the commandment?" They simply said, "Go ahead, find somebody else. Why should we listen to any sermon or any commandment? We are enough unto ourselves."
God was very sad; he has made these people and they are not ready to accept even a single sermon, a single commandment.
Finally he asked Moses, "Would you like to have a commandment?" And God forgot completely that a Jew responds differently from anybody else. Moses did not ask, "What is the commandment?" He asked, "How much does it cost?"
God said, "Absolutely free!"
Moses said, "Then why one? I will have ten!"
The
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