The Way Things Are Is Mysterious and Hard to See
- Description
- Allison, Tess and Jesse lead us into the heart of PZI practice—what it means to take refuge, how to work with vows as koans, and how, at its root, our life in itself before we’ve improved it is an expression of the Bodhisattva Way.
- Koans
- a stone drenched with rain (mk19), bodhisattva vows
- Tagged
April 25, 2021 · Sunday Dharma Talk · Allison Atwill, Tess Beasley & Jesse Cardin
Allison: Welcome! Welcome, Tess and Jesse. The three of us will be your hosts and guides for the great matter of refuge and precepts this morning. Let me see how I want to go in … I’ll start with how I’ve been thinking about refuge and the precepts:
It Is for You
One way to say it is that the precepts appear to us as direct encounter. Another way to describe it is that it’s like Lingyun’s encounter with the peach blossoms. Last week, John was speaking about Lingyun rounding the bend and encountering peach blossoms. The precepts are very much in that spirit and that domain where they come to us individually—just for you. They appear in a particular form, like that. That tree full of peach blossoms—it only occurred for Lingyun. They met each other in that moment and it was his own awakening.
The precepts are just like that: they come to us in as many forms as there are galaxies and stars. Every one of you that I see now before me in your little side chapels—in any moment of your life, if a precept appears, it appears in this particular form only for you and only in this way. It’s for you and it has to do with your awakening. If one of the precepts has appeared, it’s not an impediment or obstacle to awakening. It is your awakening appearing in the moment you’re encountering it, just like the peach blossoms.
And in Chan, in Zen, we take up the precepts and refuge not in the spirit of a set of rules of behavior for right and wrong or good and bad, or to set up exemplars for what awakened behavior looks like. We take them up in the spirit of koans, which means they have something to do with your awakening. It’s a living experience and expression of your own awakened mind, of the awakened mind.
A Sense of Separation
Every one of the precepts, fundamentally, are one precept—they’re all speaking to the same thing but in a certain flavor or form of it. And they all come and speak directly to the experience of separation. When we feel separate from our lives, in whatever ways that we do, we might find ourselves feeling more virtuous than other people.
Let’s say you’ve finally given up smoking—and you’re sitting in meditation, and you feel that all the buddhas and bodhisattvas are around you and they are smiling down on you and applauding your virtuous behavior. Right there, you are not following the precept of “not misusing intoxicants.” Right there, you are in the precept of “elevating yourself over others.” You are completely in the realm of the precepts.
Design preview only — this excerpt is the opening of a real 7,366-word transcript; the rest isn’t reproduced in this wireframe.