Not One Single Thing: A Commentary on the Platform Sutra by Shodo Harada

Author:Shodo Harada [Harada, Shodo]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

Wisdom

The Sixth Patriarch gives us the final resolution: do zazen and realize that state of mind of holding on to nothing at all. Drop all of the information, knowledge, and conditioning you have gathered. Let go of all of it right now and, in the midst of this world of delusion, vow to live in that clear, purified mind. This central point must be clear. As Hakuin puts it in his Song of Zazen, “All sentient beings are essentially buddhas.” Even if someone is a thief or a liar or a murderer, that person is still essentially a buddha. Each person has to take responsibility for their own great cleaning of mind and see the ways in which they’re not yet awake. Then we will see that, as Hakuin goes on to say, “This very place is the land of lotuses, this very body is the body of the Buddha.”

It is often asked how someone who holds on to nothing can understand the pain in the world. Or how one who has nothing in his or her mind can possibly teach. That is only a concept of something not intellectually understandable; that state of holding on to nothing has to be experienced. We see pain, and with goodwill we want to help. We can’t sit by and watch it happen. When we have no personal ideas and no places in which we’re caught, we are open to another’s experience. Through all of our senses we receive the pain of all people. Because our unencumbered perception does not add on ideas about the pain, we receive everything just as it is.

We must not make the mistake of making offerings to the physical body. Our ability to perceive with our senses fades as we age and then vanishes with our death. When the body is gone, there is nothing left there to honor. But that which was taught in Buddhism more than twenty-five hundred years ago is still alive now and will remain alive even when the planet is gone. People ask how they can believe in what happens after they die, but this question arises from deep delusion. The Buddha did not receive that morning star as a material thing but, through those clarified senses, as himself. To return to that original clear mind is what we are here for! But to do this requires that deep faith.

People often say that it is good to be natural—to eat when we feel like it, to sleep when we feel like it, to play when we feel like it. People like to say that this is Zen. But Zen is not such a self-satisfying way of being. We have to move beyond that to become the manifestation of that deeper wisdom. Everyone looks outside, seeking wisdom in the words of others, and in doing this we ignore our own sacred internal places.

No matter what wonderful buddha we perceive, if we are not directly perceiving with our own awareness, it is not the absolute Buddha of no shape or form.

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