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Heng Sure
March 24, 1978
I hoped into the car to meditate before lunch. Look out! Too late! My Ch'an seat had visitors. A cloud of cow-pie bugs from the seaside pasture had paid a call. Ugly, slow moving insects covered the cushion, the curtains, the crackers, and the cups. Unaware I had crushed a few forlorn little bugs in my haste to sit.
We work to protect life, to decrease suffering, and to benefit all living things. Not killing, not harming, cherishing life, are sources of great happiness. Refraining from killing makes good karma. We try our best to watch out for the beings whose karma brings them insect and animal bodies.
But sometimes you simply sigh and endure life as it comes. When it comes as death you offer up a prayer for the transforming soul and vow to cultivate pure causes in the future.
I very slowly eased out of the Plymouth, left it to the squatters, and meditated in the tailgate.
"Moreover there are animals, in odious and repugnant shapes, which all come from their bad karma, and they suffer an eternity of affliction." -- Avatamsaka sutra "Flower store world"
Heng Ch'au
Friday
March 24, 1978
Near arroyo Del Oso, somewhere between the Peidros Blancos pt. Coast guard lighthouse, and pt. Sierra Nevada. Sunny, blue skies, clear wind. Very quiet and alone.
Bowing reflections off a full moon ...
I. The only way I ever got anything genuine and worthwhile was by following the rules and hard work. The teachings of the Buddha and the traditional values of American culture meet and merge, like distant cousins or forks of the same river. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote,
"There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the convic- tion that envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide, and that he must take himself for better or worse. For although the vast universe is full of great good, no kernel of that nourishing corn can come to him except through cultivating the ground given to him to till. The power that resides in him is new in na- ture, and none bit he knows what he can do until he has tried." -- From "self-Reliance"
In Buddhism, Emerson's principles are applied to cultivating the mind ground. The harvest matches the tilling just as the way and the response intertwine. The fruit of enlightenment ripens and falls naturally through diligent cultivation if morality, concentration and wisdom. You grow your own Bodhi-tree; it can't be begged or borrowed. The Buddha was man who cultivated the "ground given top him to till" throughout measureless aeons, in life after life, until he perfected all merit and virtue and opened the wisdom of all-wisdom. No one gave him Buddha hood. He simply set out, like a pioneer, not knowing what he could do until he tried. After sitting unmoving for 49 days beneath a Bodhi tree, he looked up and saw a star, and at that moment, attained the way. Then he said,
"Strange indeed. Strange indeed. Strange indeed. All beings have the Buddha nature and all can become budd- has. It is only because of false Thoughts and attachments that they do Not realize the fruit." -- Shakyamuni Buddha.
The first sutra the Buddha spoke after his enlightenment was the avatamsaka. In the chapter "verses of praise in the Tushita heaven palace" the Buddha expresses the same principles of self-reliance and independent hard work that Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and others were to mild into an American ethic.
"Where was there ever a man of wisdom Who got to see and hear the Buddha Without cultivation of pure vows and Walking the same path the Buddha walked?" -- Avatamsaka sutra
They called themselves "transcendentalists." Had they known about Buddhism, they would certainly have responded to those teachings.
P.S. our very first day of bowing L.A. the abbot gave us some instructions that Emerson would have appreciated,
"You can't be lazy. Go do it like no one ever did it before. Don't imitate anyone else. If you look at others for the way to do it, you still don't understand the true principle. Do what's never been done. Don't fol- Low or imitate. This is America. Go And be unique." -- May, 1977
Heavy holiday traffic. We are bowing through barbed wire fence pieces and on the pull-off to avoid direct highway travel. So far, so good.
II. The faults of the world are just my own faults. If I want to improve the world, I should first improve myself. Only with a straightforward mind can I hope to straighten out the world.
The virtue and goodness in the world I owe top the good people who came before me, my parents, my teachers, and elders. I should safeguard this legacy by subduing myself and returning to principle and not getting lost in the hustle and the chase.