It’s So Simple / It’s So Beautiful

It’s not za, not oryoki [with “just enough” special food or special bowl or fast speed of eating], not special clothes or okesa [robe] or rakusu, not a committed vow-entrance (jukai), not a name, not a way to enter and to exit zendo, not chants, not prostrations, not sutras—not hidden in process.

In Korea, 1989, at exquisite Bapchusa Temple in Sang-gi National Park, the big outdoor-standing Maitreya Buddha and shrines with seated forms covered in open-faced temples where offerings were made by lay people obscure what Siddhartha saw.

It’s so simple.

You may be looking out the window, and the glass disappears and the bamboo you were looking at is you.  That’s the physical sensation you have.

           

Your realization comes when you see the objective world and realize that it is part of you:  the birds singing, the trees, the mountains, the wind, the sky.  Its all part of you.  This is one realization of truth: You as subject realizes that the object is no other than you.  It’s so beautiful.

The body is the physical self, and when the physical self dies, we cannot see, we cannot hear, our feet can’t run, our hands can’t grasp.  But original mind is still here, and again original mind is the one that ahs been seeing, hearing, laughing, or crying all along.  I know that you still don’t believe me when I say this—no matter what the Dharma says, you find it difficult to believe—but why do you think this?

            ….we have approached with our dualistic, conditioned thinking. But the Dharma is not just a subject to think about.  It is something to directly experience that actualizes the natural radiance of our original mind.

Jakusho Kwong, No Beginning, No End

So simple, yet beyond conceptual: Experiences of “oneness” and conceptual freedom/fluid concepts are still very far away, and still the same old dilemmas and koans that read like puzzles rather than clear answers.  To say that it is simple is really in the sense that E=mc2 or the structure of DNA is simple.

So again and again, way back past the sutras and centuries of discovery, back to the deep source of the human being Siddartha, see what Siddhartha saw—different appearance for you, but the same enduring thing that changes everything.

What appears?