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Heng chau:
Sunday
February 26, 1978.
"The Difficulty with Intelligence"
A young student of comparative religions at a well-known university approached us as we bowed in open country.
"I know I've got to really go and do it! I've read and studied until it's coming out if my ears, but I don't really know anything, you know? I mean, its all a head-trip. I started experimenting with 'mind expanding drugs' and I realized that all my book learning was a sham. There's a path to ultimate wisdom and enlightenment inside and no book can give it to me. Drugs cant either. So I've started to meditate and well, I felt I wanted to stop and say I understand a little bit what you're doing and I know it's the right way. I'm just beginning. I'd like to find a teacher." he said. "I heard you Buddhists have a university in Ukiah that puts the books and real spiritual practice together. That's the way it's gotta be. Just studying about the path with heart is a dead end, I've found. You have to really do the work and not just rap about it."
"It is not through mere scholarship That one can enter the Tathagata's Dharma. As a deaf musician playing his tunes Pleases others but cannot hear him-Self, When one does not cultivate the Dharma, Mere study is just like this." -- Avatamsaka Sutra "Bodhisattvas Ask for clarification chapter"
There are eight circumstances in which it is difficult to meet up with the dharma or cultivate it, even if you want to. The seventh of these eight difficulties is that of having worldly knowledge and argumentative intelligence. This is the "smarts" so esteemed in college, and the key to a successful career after. It's the ability to argue and make a clever case, to discriminate and debate. This kind of worldly wisdom however, is not wisdom that transcends the world, and so no matter how intelligent you are, with our genuine cultivation, there is no actual liberation.
The way of a left-home person is to travel light: unattached and homeless, like deer and the wind in space.
"He vows that all beings forever leave behind the dharmas of he home life, and with few desires they know sufficiency and stash or hoard nothing." -- Avatamsaka sutra "Ten transferences chapter"
Heng Sure:
"In all countries in all directions, He is totally unattached, He relies on nothing. He seeks not even life itself, Nor does he falsely raise any distinctions," --Avatamsaka sutra "Ten transferences chapter"
How is this place any different from Huntington drive in LA, or harbor boulevard in Oxnard or anywhere else? All bows are one bow. Concentration makes the environment unimportant. If you don't seek, what is there to worry over?
With this contemplation in mind, I took a second look at the mountains and ocean landscape before us. "Hey! What a beautiful place to cultivate! What a Bodhimanda!" my heart seemed to take wings and soar out above the water, sailing into the clean air above the mud of my old afflictions. The pilgrimage has turned yin fear into solid faith in cultivation. This is the way to end my own suffering and help others. It's beginning to sink in that those who walk the dharma road are on the path that all Buddhas have walked before. It's the same road that all Buddhas of the future are walking right now. It takes time. From first bringing forth the resolve for enlightened until final realization of the tenth ground, a bodhisattva cultivates for aeons fall to dust and rise again countless times before I realize nirvana without remainder. I believe we all get there right on time.
"Of all dharmas you see in the world,
The mind is the only host.
Following what you understand, you
Seek their marks.
This is upside-down and not
The real thing,"
-- Avatamsaka sutra
"The Bodhisattvas Ask for clarification chapter"