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February 22, 1978
Dear Shih Fu,
Back to the Nature. Best wishes from Three Steps, One Bow to the Venerable Abbot and the Great Assembly. We are in harmony. Harmony, California, population 18. Halfway between Cayucos and Cambria. Every day the hills get greener, the sky looks bluer, the people get fewer, the morning fog grows thicker. The landscape includes long snakes and long-haired cattle on winter forage. A passing biology major from Cal Poly confirms that what Heng Ch'au saw on Sunday was a mountain lion.
On the advice of a Dharma-protector we have begun to eat the green weeds that grow beside the road. Gathering wild food is a good dharma. It's free, like the Buddha-nature. Before we discover that the Buddhas of all time and space come from the mind, we run all over the Dharma Realm looking for the Path. Then we hear it's been inside our true mind all along - all we have to do is uncover it. Ah! Wild food is the same. The fields look full of weeds until someone says, "Hey, that weed you're standing on tastes like the finest supermarket greens, better, even 'cause its free and fresh and abundant." Ah! The field of weeds becomes a nutritious garden. The challenge now to the cultivator is to not think of his stomach every time he looks at the ground. Three Steps, One Bow has given us a new appreciation of much that we have overlooked or taken for granted. It deserves mentioning as an inexhaustible storehouse of food for pilgrims and mountain hermits of the future. We don't trip out into extended food-gathering - we can identify five or six varieties of plants that grow nearly everywhere. In five minutes, we can pick a potful (watch carefully for insects - this is their world, too!), then wash and boil them for two minutes. Done. What's more, we have been looking for more bitter foods to dispel "fire-energy" that comes with meditation. Dandelions and mustard greens have just enough natural bitterness to drop the fire without being too bitter to swallow.
Our lives grow more natural and more simple as we bow away the artificial views and habits we learned over the years. The natural and simple truth: all conditioned things will die. Our bodies are temporary unions of earth, air, fire, and water. No amount of natural food will keep the body healthy when it comes time to die. The back-to-nature movement in the modern world - the "back-to-the-'true' nature" movement. The true self-nature does not perish; it is our birthright as living beings. By cultivating the Path that all Buddhas have walked, we return to the biggest Nature there is.
The 'wind and light of our original ground' have a special and wonderfully delightful flavor that is quite inexhaustible. If we wish to try its taste we must simply purify our minds. Water and Mirror Reflections By Venerable Master HuaYou might say the Master is talking about the Bodhi plant - the one we most want to identify, eat, and share with all out Dharma friends. This plant is not in the edible-plant field-guides, because it's special - it grows on the mind-ground. Our teacher shows us where to look, how to recognize it, and how to harvest it. Here is the way it could be listed in A Buddhist Flora:
Species: Enlightenment. Variety: wonderful. Habitat: within the true heart of all living beings. Distribution: eternal. Description: see Flower Garden Sutra for references. Wonderful beyond words.
More car stories. Our Plymouth cave-on-wheels is not an ordinary car. We suspect it is a dragon, maybe a transformed disciple of the Master's who volunteered to work on Three Steps, One Bow. The car is always protecting our Dharma and speaking it for us, too. Some nights under the bright moon it just plain looks like a dragon with a beard and tail. It should have collapsed a dozen times by now, but it keeps right on rolling. Once during the heavy storms in early February, the car refused to start. We were parked right on the highway shoulder. The gas station man couldn't start the dragon - nothing worked. The car sat tight while we bowed in ankle-deep puddles. We had planned to drive into Morrow Bay that morning to dry the gear out at a Laundromat, but no dice - the car was wet. Suddenly a familiar blue bus appeared beside us with three golden figures strapped to the seats. It was Upasaka Kuo Tsai, who had come down to take us and the three Buddha images to L.A. Had we gone to the Laundromat he never would have found us. "Well, let's give the car one more try." Vroom! It started like a champ and away we went. "Do you mean to say the car knew someone was coming and deliberately held you there for the rendezvous?" Well, how else do you explain it? There are all sorts of strange marvels in the world - countless, inexhaustible, measureless, and unfathomable - and they all proceed from the zero in the mind. How inconceivable! Amitabha!
Disciple Kup Chen
(Heng Sure)
bows in respect