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HENG SURE: May 16, 1977. It is hard to blend with the rhythm of this land because it has no rhythm. It is like a river of gas-fired metal on paved stone paths. No sound; one roar. No smell; one stink. No light; one haze. No time; pure morning when the zero is pure and then the one comes into being and the 2 and the 3 and the millions.
No human can live here. We have made a hostile environment at great cost. The World Trade Center runs on electric power, is adorned and sanitized costing millions of dollars for the few hundreds of people who will never see it and the millions of ghetto Chicanos who will never see it or dream of it. It is like Versailles. It is a thin reality, disposable, ready to be abandoned. Dead. With Muzak. We come in off the street to relieve ourselves and return to our lively hells of streaming metal.
“Do you believe that praying and bowing can affect disasters and catastrophes?”
Yes, we do, don’t you? Where do disasters come from? They come from the accumulated heaps of bad karma that you and he and I pile up and after a while the scale is unbalanced and nature erupts or a plane crashes and human suffering results. But it starts with us first; we make our fate with every present action we do, with every thought. So by working directly with the mind and by concentrating a prayer for no harm, no hatred, no weapons, no suffering, we are seeking a response right at the source of the problem--our own minds. Do you see the link?
Yesterday and this morning, I experienced a shrinking of desire to this point: I recognized that I was not looking forward to today with any pleasure in mind. I did not have any expectations of pleasant, pleasing, or position events. At the same time I was not hoping to avoid any unpleasant events--those come as part of the work we do. Whether it is a honk, a laugh, the constant sneers, the verbal attack, the physical attack, or actual polite interest, all that sort of attention is just one test after another, to measure our depth of sincerity and to remind us of our goal.
The end of expectations is an added gift, a bonus. From that point of view, everything is a gift, a surprise, a mystery, a point of wonder, a chance to snap the chains of self.
The truth about bowing seven hundred miles is the same truth as making one solitary bow. If you are sincere, if your mind is clear and if your heart has no expectations, then you can be anywhere and it makes no difference where you are. The Gold Mountain Buddhall is the same as the noisiest downtown ghetto; the highest isolated mountain crag is the same as the busiest highway roadside. The Dharma rests unchanging. In other words, the bowing practice cuts through time and space.
Sincerity is the key, however, and patience, and desirelessness. If you are not looking ahead to a better time, to lunch, to being finished bowing, to enlightenment, then your bow will be sincere.