After several years of slow walking through the Book of Equanimity, we come to the final Koan ...
... which actually teaches nothing other than the first Koan, and all the Koans here ...
... Case 100 - Roya's Mountains and Rivers ...
In the Main Case, a question is asked ... Why do mountains, rivers, the whole earth (not to mention you and me, everything, all the mess) arise from the pure Wholeness of the Original State?
The response repeats the question, but perhaps not as a question alone, more as a declaration and celebration (notice that the English translator but an ! instead of an ? the second time). It is much as Master Dogen famously often turned question words like "Why?" into exclamations "WHY!" as in maybe "Yes, WHY OH WHY OH WHY!"
It just is, "That's WHY!" ... like why the mountains rest of the earth, and why the rain falls to make the rivers ... such is WHY earth, mountains, rain and rivers are just the unbroken and whole "Original State" in other guise. "WHY ya even need to ask!"
And to know the truly "Clean and Pure" (caps), one sits in Zazen dropping all small human measures of "pure vs. impure, clean vs. dirty." Then, even the trash we need to haul to the dump with the cat litter is PURELY the cat litter, sacred in its way!Nonetheless, we had best clean the cat box.
I see the Preface to the Assembly as basically just saying that knowing the above Wisdom, vs. only knowing the ignorant and divided bifurcated view, is basically up to you, your insight, your vision or lack thereof. If you see the world as divided, filled with clean and dirty, good and bad, prosperity and perishing, profit and loss, life and death ... it is. If one knows the Wholeness, all is Whole. If one knows that the divided is the Wholeness ... this is the True Wisdom. That's the "WHY and WHEREFORE!"
In the Appreciatory Verse: We see all the broken things of the world as existing, we see some things as either existing or not existing, we ask if the "Original State" exists or does not exist ... but what happens on the sitting cushion when one drops all question of "existing or not existing?" This may be the True Original State. I like to say that if Hamlet had been a Zen Buddhist, his "To Be, or Not to Be" might have had more options!
So, what Roya expressed is insight no different from Gautama Buddha, who by the way, appeared in Koan No. 1 of this collection ... and it is no different from you if you can know such too.
Let the mountains speak, let the rivers run ... healing time on the whole earth ...
Thank you for laughing and crying with me through these many years of Koan Songs ...
Gassho, J
stlah
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