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HENG SURE: May 13, 1977.
Dirt
The sidewalks of America are clean. Concrete, cement, macadam, gravel and tar. They are uniform, common, straight, and flat. After you put your head down on ten days of sidewalks, they begin to feel soft, responsive cold or hot, but essentially the same.
On top of American sidewalks, Americans deposit the litter and refuse of our disposable, throw-away culture. This is dirt. It proceeds from the human mind. Degrees of greed can be seen on the walks. In Lincoln Heights the merchants sweep their sidewalks. In Chinatown the grime of greed and false thought is caked on until the rough concrete turns slick and shiny. The sidewalks of L.A. City Center are rough, pebbled, and unused. The dirtiest sidewalk yet was outside a Chinatown meat market. There they wash off the meat trays and a layer of grease and gristle and veins covers the walk. This is truly filth. But again, even this could be swept away by conscientious cultivation and effort.
The streets are clean below this thing smudge of refuse. When the thoughts disappear, the mind is clear; when desires reach out, the streets grow dirty. We must bow across every street to purify the garbage-topped walks and to return the nature to its original purity of clean mud and stone. The earth is clean. There is no dirt in nature. Dirt is all man-mind-made. It’s the people who are dirt. When your head touches the pavement there is a bit of honesty, a total submission, a release of pretense, and exhaling. An honesty right down in the dirt.
There’s no one from the top-brass office executives and the fanciest fashion models to the dirtiest panhandler and the slimiest gas station pump jockey who doesn’t feel himself to be superior an better off than the pair of bald-headed robe-wearing monks who bow past them below their feet on the sidewalk. As the monks put their heads on the ground and turn their palms up in total submission and repentance, the hookers, the bums, the bus drivers, the car dealers, all stare and stare, put themselves in the monks’ place, laugh at the impossibility of it and then either ignore them or try to break them down.