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HENG CH’AU: May 31, 1977. Checked out twice during the night by University of California police. No problem, in fact they even stretched the rules and let us camp in a corner of a parking lot overnight.
Stopping the mad mind at times seems impossible. By comparison it makes the whole Three Steps, One Bow look like sneezing. On the other hand that’s true only because of impatience and laziness. Once resolved on enlightenment it is just the beginning. Each minute is a small step; how many steps? Only one! Countless! Only one because looking ahead or behind is false thinking, counting is false thinking. With no thinking, who counts the steps? Who steps? Who is enlightened? Discriminating and impatience need a who.
Countless steps because with no who counting and looking back and forth and forward, expecting and rejecting, anticipating and disappointed, with no who doing the steps, the steps are without beginning or end, without a fixed number or amount.
Realizing this is properly inconceivable, I only go on faith right now. And having left home just recently many of the little niceties that buffered my ego and comforted the "me" are gone and raw faith and whatever resolve I can muster gets sorely tested.
The mind resists the medicine partly out of beginningless bad habits and cumulated garbage but partly too because it’s just plain strong and afraid.
Patience and hard work! These are cracks and openings now and then but mostly just steps, countless steps. It helps to remember at times like these what exactly I "left" (Oh yeah, right, I remember now, always I knew and felt inside it was nowhere, impermanent. I kept putting it down, searching for more ultimate goals. So now you are really trying to break through. You can’t go back--to what? So be patient and smile). It also helps a whole lot to notice that my teacher is right behind me smiling, "Patience, Kuo T’ing. Hard work and patience. Everything is OK."
The other side of the complexity is the harm I caused other people. I was like a predatory animal. I chose to afflict whoever I felt prompted to harm.
Surely there are past affinities that must be untied, and much attention shall be given to whom one relates to, and the quality of the relationship. Compassion, services, kindness, beneficial deeds, giving shall be the guidelines. In this way, the future meeting with these beings will not be for mutual exploitation, mutual harm, mutual wasting of energy, but rather for shared benefits, for teaching and learning, for the inspiration to cultivate and become enlightened.
When the Master was head of the Vinaya Academy at Nan Hua Monastery he made it his practice to personally send off each departing Dharma Master. He would go borrow money and give the department monk the sum he had borrowed. Then the Master would carry the monk’s luggage a mile or so down the road. His purpose? To tie up affinities, to "establish conditions" with as many people as possible. That is to say the Master wanted to make a positive connection with a great many people so that in the future, when there is a great deal of work to be done, all those with wholesome affinities will join together and aid in the progress of the work.