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November 21, 1978
Ano Nuevo, California
Venerable Master,
The mother of heaven and earth is
said to be born from the Tao.
The sun and the moon are both
bright, moving in their orbits.
So it is with the basic substance
of all in creation:
It is infinitely wonderful.
Ch'an Master Hua
This poem came alive today, Shih Fu, as the sun rose on the rain-soaked coast. It's been raining for tow days at Ano Nuevo. Everything in our world is damp. Moisture hangs in the air, saturating space without boundaries. It's wet outside the skin, wet inside our bones. The dusty hills have turned to dull gold, the sagebrush and the tall grasses have exploded in green. Everything is happy with the rain.
This morning the clouds blew away and the sun appeared. At nine a.m.
there was a turning point; a transformation happed. The wetness began to
flash, change, and disappear. You could see and fell the Birth and change, yin and yang, happening all by itself, wonderful
to see. All in its proper time. Nature is patient, the Tao contains all
things.
Cultivating the Way has been called the great reversal. "Go towards
the
good," says the Master. "Return the light in every thought. Change your
bad habits from evil to good. Find out your real self." This is what all
Buddhist Sutras tell us. Because one who walks the Way turns back the
energy that used to flow out in bad habits, soon the accumulated light will
reach a flash-point. Like the sun transforms the wetness, the resolve to
go
toward the good and the practice of returning the light will carry one
surely on to a new high road. There will be a birth of wisdom, a change
of
darkness to inner light. The dross metal of the body transform into vajra,
the selfishness of false-thoughts transforms into the universal lamplight
of
Great Compassion. Birth, change, returning, transforming.
"If you want to find what's really true, don't look for it apart from
the false," said the Master in Kuantan, Malaysia. "It's right within the
false that you find what's true. And you have to be very, very patient."
"How do you find the false within the true?" asked a layman.
"Diamonds come out of the earth, don't they?" answered the Master.
The keys seem to be patience and faith. The three necessities for the
Pure Land are Faith, Vows, and Practice. Faith can mean not pushing the
Way, not forcing and seeking results overnight. The magic of the weather
change at Ano Nuevo was in its perfect effortless timing. It happened
slowly and completely all by itself, wet changed to dry, yin changed to
yang, all in perfect harmony. As the poem says, "The sun and the moon
are both bright, moving in their orbits."
Even though we took a lot of wrong roads before we began to practice
the
Dharma, once we recognize our faults and resolve to change, we step inside
the orbit of Enlightenment. Patiently, faithfully, "making tracks for the
good, one step at a time," as the Master says, will certainly bring about
the Great Reversal.
Now it's raining again and the autumn wind is whistling past our tin-
roofed, four-wheeled Bodhimanda. Soon the sun will rise and whole cycle
will move on in its orbit. From empty space there is birth and change.
"Infinitely wonder."
Disciple Kuo Chen
(Heng Sure)
bows in respect