Grassroots Zen by Perle Besserman & Perle Besserman

Author:Perle Besserman & Perle Besserman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-8048-3243-9
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

IT IS NOT EASY TO BE SURE WHICH END IS WHICH

OF A RESTING SNAIL

KYORAI

LIVING WITH LIMITATIONS

SPIRITUAL GROWTH AND NARROW SPACES

Strictly speaking, we don’t live “with” limitations so much as we live “as” them. It’s just that we’ve gotten into the habit of looking at life from the inside out. When the boss creates a new policy that limits us, we say, “Oh, well, I guess I’ll have to live with it, like it or not.” It’s one way of confronting challenges to our space. Another way is to quit our job. But when we’ve matured a little in our Zen practice, we come to see that we are no different from the limitations we’re experiencing. We see ourselves as limitation, constraint, change, and so forth. Once we’ve bridged the space between ourselves and the moment, there is no one experiencing some event or condition out there that occupies a different space from the one in here. Experience isn’t being thrown at us like a ball. We aren’t catching it or throwing it back, nor are we contemplating it. Rather, we are one with the experience itself. As in the case of the “resting snail,” there’s no telling “which end is which.”

To look at it concretely, living as limitation when you have a cold, for example, is living as sniffling, as stuffed up. In this very moment, your life is manifesting as a cold.

Trouble is, we don’t usually see it this way. We feel we’re being constrained by circumstances, imposed upon by a virus. If we’re really physically impaired, the boundaries between us and the freedom to live as we want appear even greater.

SURVIVAL

When we talk of survival, we have to realize that we are living in the relative peace and prosperity of a technologically advanced country. Most Grassroots Zen practitioners are comfortable, middle-class people who don’t live under the constraints that fall into the category of survival. We don’t have to fear being devoured by tigers. We don’t have to worry that the mushrooms we’re about to eat may be poisonous; we go to the supermarket and assume that, because they’re wrapped in cellophane, they’re not. Never mind that their long-range effects may be poisonous because they’ve been sprayed with pesticides; in the short-run, at least, we can be pretty sure we won’t keel over and die at the first bite.

On a day-to-day basis, what we conceive of as limitation is more mental than physical; it’s something we build up ourselves. Going from the first level of raw survival to the more immediate level of our everyday lives, it’s more realistic to look at the limitations we ourselves read into conditions—what we think of as somehow hampering our will. We might be limited financially or professionally. Our work may not be highly regarded or socially useful. We ourselves may have freely chosen our professions, we may love making art or music, say, but the world around us isn’t particularly interested in what we’ve got to offer. So what do we do? We start measuring ourselves against the world around us.

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