The Zen Master gave a candlelight talk the following night to the students gathered in the zendo.

“Understanding that it is the quiet mind that helps and supports the development of wisdom, and the extent to which it helps wisdom depends on the strength of the quiet mind. Calm can be crude, appropriate, or refined, and therefore , will promote wisdom that is equally crude, proper, or refined. Therefore, it is in your best interest to develop a calm mind to the greatest degree possible without being attached to calm. If we become attached, which is easy to do because of the peace that the calm mind induces, we will hesitate to go ahead with the Research work. Research is the work that is crucial if we want to acquire the refined wisdom necessary to free ourselves from our cycles of birth and death. “

I was impressed by the silence that the assembled students maintained. Only the sounds of the jungle could be heard, and even these sounds seemed to magically disappear as the master continued to speak.

“How do we investigate? To begin with, we must look closely at our bodies and our minds. We will start with our body and look carefully as if we are looking at someone else’s body, not our own, because our own body is too precious to us in this point for an honest assessment. You must look closely at this body, “said the Zen Master, while pointing to his chest, arms, legs and head. Then he smiled and looked each student in the eye. This took some time but it was powerful and was a teaching in itself for me. He indicated that patience would be required with what he was going to tell us.

“Here we have animal things,” he continued, “teeth, skin, fingernails and toenails, head and body hair. But we do not consider ourselves animals and therefore we consider these things to be beautiful when they are. attached to them. our bodies, our beautiful hair and nails. When they fall off the body, however, what is more disgusting than a nail cut on our plate of rice, or a hair in our soup, or for that matter, a dead one-week-old child? a decomposing body in the heat of the jungle with animals and insects feeding on it?

“Therefore, we must investigate to see the real truth of this body that we cherish so much. Can we admit that this body is simply soft tissue and bones? What is substantial here? What is there to fall in love or worry about? past this bone in my arm and that’s the end, and if the bones are removed from the body, what is left then? All that’s left is a bucket of slush, and then if all the water in this bucket of mud were removed as well, what would be left? Just a vial of powder. And when the powder is carried away? “

He took out some ashes from a censer next to his seat and placed them in the palm of his hand. Then, her eyes twinkling, she blew on them, holding an empty palm. He looked back into each student’s eyes and smiled widely, and when his eyes reached mine, I was surprised to find tears welling up for no particular reason. The powerful presence of this withered old man somehow freed me from this prison of a body for a brief and incredible moment. How can these things be explained?

“Look at this bag of skin on my belly,” the Zen master continued, “and see that just below there are many strange things. A tube from my mouth reaches into a bag full of undigested food, and below there are intestines and feces.” . . A diaphragm pushes air back and forth in the lungs and the kidneys filter poisons, while the heart pumps blood relentlessly. “Don’t be alarmed by looking directly at these things, and try not to feel disgusted by them. This is who we are. This is what our past karma earned us this time.

“But there is a big problem with this body; we cannot count on it. It does not obey us and goes about its business without considering what we want and in the end, it will go down the path of the elements, and it will disappear without our approval.” like it or not. He doesn’t follow our schedule, he follows his own schedule. This body is like a comfortable house built near a raging river. Since we must live in this house knowing full well that a flood could carry it away at any moment, it would be foolish to become careless and unnoticed in a place that is threatened with disaster at any moment. It would be unwise not to consider escape routes, because when the time comes to leave, how can we get out? safely in time. Therefore, since we cannot trust this impermanent body of ours, we must invest in something we can trust, a life raft that will transport us when our body fails, which is not much for now. Life goes by fast and a flood could come at any moment. “

A cat jumped onto the Zen Master’s lap, and the master grinned widely, stroking him and interrupting his lecture to give the animal full attention, as if his talk was not the least bit important compared to the little creature that was now his center of attention. attention. interest. He purred contently, knowing, as I did, that he was in the hands of someone he could trust.

The Zen Master looked at the community gathered in the meditation hall for a few minutes, never in a hurry, and then quietly continued, “In the meantime, we must live with these strange things that we are made of because this is the best suitable body. to help us deplete our karma. However, we must realize that this raw form is not our true selves; it is simply a temporary body with enough consciousness to express our particular consciousness at this time. None of us are very different from the others. anywhere in the world – eating, sleeping, working, raising families, having fun – and each in his own way fighting for happiness.

“Now, going back to this body, where can I find myself within it? Who or what is the Zen Master? Am I within my finger? Probably not, because if I lose my finger, I will remain the Zen Master. If I lose my arm, will I still be me? Yes, I am not just my arm. What if my whole body was gone except my mind? I would still be the Zen Master, right? Then the Zen Master must be on my mind. Yes, this is where I am! “

It was smart how he tried to find the Zen Master by denial, although it was something he would have to think about. Everyone was completely attentive when the Zen Master spoke, his eyes glued to the master. Apparently, he instilled complete confidence in those who lived with him, and now he was apparently tackling things that cropped up in everyone’s practice, things that bogged them down with no apparent outlet. Furthermore, since teachers instruct at the level of their students, these students must have been quite advanced. He stopped for a few minutes to drink some water, looking at everyone and smiling in his fatherly way. This was not the smile of an insecure man; It was a smile from a man who knew. . . and he wanted us to know it too.

He finished the water and continued, “So since we cannot find the Zen Master in this body, he must reside in the mind. Is this true? This is what we must find out by observing this mind as we search for the Zen Master. Now Well, what will we discover? What we will discover in our investigations is that this mind is made up of four aspects; the aspect of contact when something first enters the field of consciousness of one of our sense organs – that Moment in which we initially taste, smell, touch, see, hear or think something – just that first moment. This moment is then instantly replaced by the second moment; feeling – you will feel a certain way due to contact with a sensory organ; You will feel good, what creates desire, bad, what creates aversion, or neutral, what creates indifference. This feeling is then almost simultaneously assumed by memory: the mind will try to recognize the contact of memory or, if it’s a new contact, save it for future reference. Finally, the imaginations and the wandering thoughts will play with the contact, creating diverse emotions and proposing ideas and plans “.

The Zen Master apparently felt he was making a crucial point while repeating himself to make sure we understood: “Contact is the instant when a sound touches my ear or a sight touches my eye. This contact lasts only for an instant because right after the At the moment of contact, a feeling arises; desire, aversion or indifference towards the contact. Then there is the memory, recognizing what the contact was and storing the information. Then there is contact with a sensory object, how we feel about that contact. , and storing the experience in memory; three steps. The fourth step is when we use our imagination and wandering thoughts to create emotions about it, organize it and formulate a plan of action, devising many ways to capture and adhere to desirable objects, and ward off or avoid undesirables.

“Since these four things arise and pass as an independent phenomenon, where will I permanently find myself in any of them? Where is the Zen Master? Is he in the initial contact? Perhaps, but what if there was no contact? Master disappears? Then he must be in the initial feeling, but if there was no new contact, there would be no initial feeling. So where could he be? He must be in the memory. Yes, that is where the Zen Master finally meets. memory, but memory is simply a record of what has happened in the past, archived in the mind, so that every bit of memory is dead. Memory, therefore, could not be the Zen Master, anymore that the Zen Master is certainly not dead. That settles it! You must be rambling thoughts and imagination because that is all that remains. But wait a minute, rambling thoughts and imagination are based on memory, and since memory is dead, the story passed ada, then the wandering thoughts and imagination must be dead too, being just a rearrangement or a new combination of the dead, past events. “

The master continued, “Now we’ve run out of places for the Zen Master to hide, haven’t we? So what is The Zen Master, maybe just an imagination? This is what we should investigate, the truth of this affair”. Who or what is the Zen Master? Please contemplate these things at every moment of every day so that you can become familiar with each aspect. Once you understand, in your heart, that the body is insubstantial and cannot be your ‘me’, then it will be easier to accept that the mind is also insubstantial and cannot be your ‘me’. May everyone find Reality; may they find happiness. “

The Zen master stroked the cat again and said nothing more that night. . .

Copyright © E. Raymond Rock 2007. All rights reserved