Yes, it is the end of summer, and our garden is filled with weeds and flowers. (Mostly weeds!)
This time, we will read all of Chapter 4. We will stay with this chapter one week (although I may extend up to three weeks due to Ango/Jukai activities).
If i were to summarize this chapter in a couple of sentences, it is this: If you impose on the world how you want it to be, expect it to always bend to your will, resist when it does not go as you wish or meet your expectations, you suffer. When you allow the world to be the world, drop the demands and judgments, dropping the resistance and separation between your and things, flowing along as the flowing along of life, no separation of oneself and outside conditions ... one is free. We stop imposing ourself on life, and expecting it to bend to our will, and instead merge and become one (quite literally) with conditions as they are.
The first section of the chapter continues discussion of the relationship of the "self" and the separate "things" of the world. It also makes the point that "enlightenment" is not a fixed state, but is the constant moment by moment dropping of resistance between self and things all through life. Like the weeds in my garden, they are never ending, and must be encountered one by one.
The second section, "Self and All things," quickly presents the traditional Buddhist model (very close to the modern scientific model of how the brain and senses work) regarding how data from the outside world flows into the senses, is processed in the brain to become our experience of a world of things (and our "self" as solid and separate from those outside things). Even the senses and brain (or, rather, the idea "senses" and "brain") are names and images of things created in the brain. So, all is "empty," and all flows together in the big merging.
Each thing then re-emerges from this wholeness, thus becoming its own "just as it is" shining jewel in its individual thingness. Emptiness and form/thingness are not two, just two ways to experience the world and all it contains. Then, flowers are just flowers, weeds are just weeds (including the weeds of life like sickness and loss) ... and that is okay.
And the things of the world-life are just us, and we are the things of this world-life. "Buddha" is another name for this interflowing Wholeness.
And better to experience the above, or just have faith in the fact, rather than to merely think about it as another idea. It is like the difference between actually tasting the soup rather than merely thinking about the recipe and ingredients for cooking soup.
A moment of Zazen is our cooking and tasting and being this wonderful soup!
I think that most of what Rev. Okumura says in this Chapter consists of variations, said different ways, of the above.
It is basically the same views as we have been discussing in earlier chapters. Any questions or new impressions?
Can you give some examples of how the same objective, potentially frustrating situation in your life would be very different between when you (1) demand circumstance fit your standards and demands, or (2) let the circumstances just be the circumstances and flow along with (and be one with) you? Any real life examples?
Gassho, J
STLah
PS - This is not my back field, but just to give you an idea what the weeds can be like here just after a few weeks of rain ...
