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[...] say? "Everything's okay. No problem. Use effort. Fear is useless."
So, I took another look at the landscape before us. "Hey! What a beautiful, pure place to cultivate in. What a fine Bodhimanda !" My heart seemed to take wings and soar out into the clear air above the mud of my afflictions. When these boulders have turned to dust, I vow to still be on the Bodhisattva path, working to end the sufferings of all loving beings.
Now we're concentrating on the basics: giving, holding precepts, patience, and vigor. Along with all the Master's disciples, we are working to give the world a City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, a place where precepts will be the ground rules for being a person. As for patience, well, there's lots of chances to practice patience on this mountainside. Kuo Dzai Schmitz is sharing the work with us this week, patiently enduring some of the most contrary weather of the whole trip.
We are traveling seven miles of the most dangerous road we've faced: poison oak that grows everywhere, venomous ticks that inhabit the underbrush, sunburn, the mad Big Sur wind, freezing rain that stops as soon as we put on out slickers and boots and then starts aging when we change back out of our raingear. This trip has taught us an appreciation of the monastic environment. How fine are walls, a roof, and a clean floor! I did not make the most of my chance to cultivate in the ideal meditative space of Gold Mountain Monastery. Now that I really want to do the work, all sorts underfoot obstruction arise: each one becomes a test of patience, resolve, and kung fu: wind, insects underfoot, cramped quarters, rein and sun in excess, traffic--all these dharmas can help cultivators forge a vajra resolve. We transfer our work and wish that the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas will come into being quickly and easily, so that whoever brings forth the heart to cultivate the Way will have a pure place to realize their wish. They won't have to endure any hassles before they sit in meditation. I'm not complaining! I have never felt happier or stronger.
These clumsy corpses we walk around in are such a drag! We waste so much time looking after out bodies. The only sensible thing to do with them is to cultivate the Way. I like the Bodhisattva in the First Practice of the "Ten Practices Chapter": he makes a vow to reincarnate into a huge, vast body so that no matter now many living beings are hungry the flesh of his body will satisfy their needs. Then the Bodhisattva contemplates all living beings of the past, the future, and the present. He contemplates the bodies they receive, their lifespans, their decay, and their extinction. The sutra says,
Again he thinks, "How strange living beings are! How ignorant and lacking in wisdom. Within (the cycle of) birth and death, they get countless bodies which are perilous and fragile. Without pause, these bodies hastily and fragile. Without pause, these bodies hastily go bad again. Whether their bodies have already gone bad, are about to decay, or will come to ruin in the future, they are unable to use these unstable bodies to seek a solid body!
"I should thoroughly learn what all Buddhas have learned! I should realize all-wisdom and know all dharmas. For the sake of all beings I will teach them equally in the three periods of time. According to and harmonizing with still tranquillity and the indestructible Dharma-nature, I will cause them to obtain peace, security, and happiness."
I memorized this passage from the Avatamsaka Sutra, and it has given me heart to keep bowing through many situations where my skinbag and my common-person's mind feared it could not go. One immediately useful application: when the hear and pressure builds in the legs from Ch'an sitting, all I have to do is review the Sutra's wisdom and I find strength to continue to sit without wiggling or dropping my legs out of full lotus.
"On the path to the worry-free liberation-city, " as the Sutra calls it.
The biggest discovery of the month of March: "Where there's a will, there's a way." We are rich in methods to cultivate. What counts is resolving the heart on wanting to succeed. Then the Way opens.
Disciple Kou Chen
(Heng Sure)
bows in respect