The 15th of108 Gates Of Dharma Illumination

[Shokai]

Gate Fifteen
Read the following, place it in your heart and sleep on it. Then, tomorrow, live it until evening when you can leave a brief comment on what you may have received during the process.

Compassion is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not kill or harm living beings.

By “Dharma Gate”, we mean a teaching or practice we can study to gain insights into the deepening our practice. It's a way to integrate our understanding of approaching reality.

The Koan:
"In a severe drought farmers cannot avoid picking and choosing. Their fields are not others. If they cannot get water their rice will die, and they will have no harvest. During droughts in acient times, there were often fights among villages by the same river, and farmers in the same village, to get even a little more water for their fields. In the midst of a fight, the sky might suddenly darken, and it might start to rain. Then the farmers lost their reason for conflict.
When we soften self-centered discrimination and live without being driven by hatred and love, the supreme way beyond duality manifests itself. And when we see the true interdependent reality of all beings, we can relax and open our clinging minds. Our Zazen is to sit in our own caskets and view things from nonduality, or complete interconnectedness."
-The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo 26 pg75

Most note worthy replies :
By cultivating a mind of compassion, we can better welcome all beings/things into our arms and see them as not separate. When we harm other beings, we do so out of a feeling of separateness.

Embrace compassion

Our first step

To embracing the world

gassho, Shokai
stlah

[Nengyoku]

[Anchi]

[aprapti]

[Nengyoku]

Sitting today during my lunch break there were several people in the room with me.
When I sit in public I have lots of anxious thoughts about what other people are thinking, like I'm somehow out of place because I'm the only one not on my phone or something.

Today all of those thoughts were bouncing around my head and I remembered that last line "Our Zazen is to sit in our own caskets and view things from nonduality, or complete interconnectedness."

Suddenly, all those thoughts stopped. I felt instead the emotions of each person running through their own lives and problems, their own insecurities maybe.
I heard one woman trying to reschedule a dentist appointment and she sounded nervous, like her voice was intruding on the quiet of the lunchroom.
I saw one man who dresses very tough and macho, but he was keeping his head down, taking great efforts to stay facing away from anyone else.

A lot of people worry needlessly over their insecurities, not realizing that everyone else is too wrapped up in their own to notice theirs. I wish just that all of those would disappear, so that no one need worry at all.

I try to come up with a poetic response. The best I can do is

Sitting from the casket, I see suffering non-suffering.
We must rise from the casket, from the Zafu
If we wish to fix non-fixing.

Gassho,
William
SatLah

[Juki]

Juki
sat today and lah

[Tairin]

Thank you Shokai


Tairin
Sat today and lah

[Shokai]

Sitting in the casket, I see suffering non-suffering.
We must rise from the casket, from the Zafu
If we wish to fix non-fixing.

Beautiful !!

gassho, Shokai
stlah