Having received two questions this beautiful sunday morning...


1.Why would zen (or Buddhism in general) opppose suicide? There is no ethical problem created by waking up from a dream, so how is dying to the illusory world around us any different than that?

2. If this world is illusion and attachments, then isn't having a child akin to feeding someone a mind-clouding drug? We are facilitating a mind being trapped in the world of Mara's temptations from which it must work to escape.
I made two quick answers. Not the best but the answers that are true to me:

Suicide is killing. In the act of commiting suicide do one wakes up from a dream or one goes deeper into it? The real question is who does it, who commits suicide? In that light you may start to realize that the self is busy trying to get rid of itself. You so don't wake up basically. And, at the same time, one should abstain from judging a person that committed suicide. Just bow, sing and laugh and cry.

And I cannot share your vision of life, a big Mara thing, filled with illusion. The world is not only this :it is this and that. Delusion and awakening, both at the same time. What you see out there is far too pessimistic and has more to do with primitive images of HInduism that Buddhism as Dogen practised and understood it. Maybe you could do with reading, chewing and chewing again a chapter of Shobogenzo like One Bright Pearl or The sutra of Mountains and rivers.

So having a child is not drug dealing. It is to give to as it isness the possiblility to awake (manifest) within this dream-reality spin.


gassho


Taigu