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HENG SURE: June 18, 1977. Hassled, frisked, trashed, and threatened by two deputy sheriffs on a hot pavement-sweating afternoon in Malibu. "Where are your knives? Open the robe! I told you to get out of here days ago. Now get out of town! No monk in the world is going to save you, buddy, if I see you again!"
Heng Ch’au and I decided to report to sheriff headquarters to clear this matter and there we learned that it was 12-20 miles to the county border and that the highway/countryside was all private property or fenced in and that people were surely up-tight and would call the sheriffs whenever we were seen camping out. The sheriffs would be bound to send a car out and round we would go again.
We had planned to turn the van back to the laypeople in trade for our little handcart on Sunday (in two days) but after negotiating our treaty with the cops we thought that maybe we ought to keep it until we reached the L.A. County line in two weeks or so. It was a tough decision. We wanted to do the right thing.
The choices: follow the master’s somewhat open-ended comment: "You sure you want to give up the car that soon?" and keep it all the way North (we’ll need something like it again in Santa Barbara, etc.); assume the cop was giving us the straight party line and that we were actually free to camp as long as we stayed out of sight; trade the van for the old station wagon and keep it until we really can camp out, etc.
If we were watched and not allowed to camp, we would have two weeks of sleepless nights for certain. By six thirty P.M. we had pretty much decided that the smart thing to do was to keep a low profit until out of L.A. sheriff-land and that meant keep the van a little longer. We called the laypeople involved to tell them not to bring the cart out on Sunday. When the call went through the layperson’s first words were: "You know what? We got a call from Shih Fu this morning and he says you should keep the van a little longer." Beep, Beep! We’re on the sage’s T.V. screen and the world sure looks a bit brighter--a grin on my face so big it almost shut my eyes. A teacher!
I’m starting to have the sensations while bowing of the better hours of Ch’an sessions. Those times when you’re really at work in your heard clearing out and cutting off each false thought as it rises up. Using the prajna sword to send each mental movement back to emptiness. Finally cutting at the thinking place itself-cutting away the head and the senses until the empty space smoothens right over your neck without obstruction, no head, no senses, no mind. During Ch’ans I have had the sensation of consciousness dropping down into my ch’i center, the navel, and having sounds and the breeze just pass right through where my head used to be.
While bowing it is especially hard to manage because there is so much to process: traffic, changes in the pavement, passersby, pains in your body that come and go but slowly these are all working into a rhythm and a familiar place that allows for them to be held in isolation with a still mind and then whack! And poof they shatter into emptiness--only to reappear as soon as my senses move a matter of milliseconds, usually. But the world is beginning to break up a little more each day, a little less real.
We hear that the world is a dream, that all dharmas are like a bubble on a stream, like a mirage, like the heat waves rising from the highway, like a bit of ocean foam trailing on the sand. No one believes it; no one wakes up.
We hear that the life we walk through is a play and when our bit is through and we leave the stage, The play goes on, and we return in a different role in a later act. No one recognizes the stages, the props, the masks.
We want to be free and happy, but we with countless others, walk on a thin rope bridge, swaying over a bottomless canyon, carrying heavy loads. Run a few steps, fall faster. Stop walking, get pushed off by those behind who can’t see you from the loads they carry.
The only way to walk safely across the bridge is to walk correctly and stay in the middle. Don’t push others off, but help them with their loads. Don’t fear falling, you will fall many times before you reach the other side of the canyon, just keep on walking and keep on lightening others’ loads. No one makes it until everyone makes it across. When you’re really loaded down, you’ll be walking steady and true, unmoved by the winds. Don’t look down, just keep your eyes on the one who made the bridge. He has the heaviest load of all. He has to wait for all those who fall to climb back up and start across again. Despite his heavy burden he looks happy; he looks relaxed and free. In order to accomplish his work he has learned special methods, tools, techniques and skills which he does not reveal to others unless they too are ready to do the work and have almost learned the use of the skills on their own.
When you reach the point on the thin rope ridge when you can’t go any further without faltering, the one who made the bridge will appear to remind you that the bridge doesn’t exists, nor do the lines of people going across exit, nor do the burdens or the canyon or you nor does he. It is all a dream, a play. We made it all up out of false thought, past karma, and bad habits continued through time and space. Do you believe him? Whey aren’t you free and happy?