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HENG SURE: June 2, 1977. More on the song. When you work with the mind, the mind becomes sensitized to input, to the environment, to ideas and subtle shadings, nuances. The difference between affliction and Bodhi is as thin as a reed.
By singing a non-Dharma song yesterday I trashed the sensitive mirror of my thoughts and planted the stupid, mundane lyrics and tune of the song in my head for a long time. I’ll be hearing the song long after I should have been enlightened.
It’s like bowing hard to polish a crystal tray, getting every bit of dust off it and then turning around and dumping the morning sweepings of garbage and dust on it. How silly! All the day’s work wasted!
Another way to view the mistake of singing after cultivating silence is like a mountain climber who slips off the trail, falls a few feet and bruises his ankle. It will take a while for the bruise to heal, it makes walking all the harder and I must be really careful to avoid taking a big fall and doing real damage. Dumb!
The Bodhisattva goes where others cannot go to complete his work of bringing the Dharma to the world. Bowing beneath the San Diego freeway is such a place. Toxic, foul, evil, uninhabitable, foreign to the planet, the underpass and the roads that feed it were made by human hands and strength, but did they know that in the future, the space they created would be destructive to human life? Heng Chau and I did not have the protective armor of an automobile when we dared to traverse the area. As we bowed through the thunder and poison of the exhausts from thousands of buses and trucks, we lost our breath, lost our minds, our hearing, our sight, our sanity. White faces, short of breath and fading, if we had to stay there for one hour instead of twenty minutes, we would have collapsed and died of the poisonous vapors. So congratulations, modern people. We have made our cave truly uninhabitable. Only this time we can’t leave it and go further West. We’re stuck with it. Unless your thoughts get really daring: say, use fewer cars?
We do not bow across intersection. We pace across, counting the steps, with hands in "palms together" position, to bow the right number of bows on the far corner. Walking slowly, mindfully with palms together startles the motorists we cross in front of.
On lady, however, picked up on the purpose of palms together crossing of streets right away. At the busy Gayley and Wilshire intersection I crossed with palms together, slowly pacing and counting the steps. When I reached the other curb, the hour was over so I made a half-bow, mentally marked the spot and the number of bows to do and turned around to look for a drinking fountain. I met the smiling face of a 40ist woman who happily said, "See, you made it, safe and sounds."