I remember a day at the public pool when I was maybe five or six years old. My parents were in the water, encouraging me to jump in while I lingered at the edge of the pool, taking a step forward, peeking into the frighteningly deep water, and stepping back again. It went on for quite a while, with my parents repeating, “Come on, it’s safe, the water will carry you, and we are here to catch you,” but I was still hesitating. Then I heard a voice behind me, somebody watching the whole thing, saying: “If you jump, I buy you an ice cream,” at that instant, I jumped. The ice cream had, of course, absolutely nothing to do with the experience of jumping and being propelled by the jump itself to the surface of the water, but it was a very successful and skillful means to let go of my worries. Many decisions in life are like that. We reflect and ponder and hesitate, trying to come up with a solution that will enable us to keep standing at the pool edge while at the same time feeling the richness and wholeness of being immersed in water. We are already the constantly waving ocean, but we try to keep ourselves apart because we fear getting wet. We want the fullness of life but are afraid of letting it happen without putting our conditions on it.
There is a saying: “Entering Buddhahood with one jump.” It is that one step where we lose our defined self in the wholeness of what is. We are longing for it, and at the same time, we insist on not giving up our identifications, beliefs, narratives, and concepts. We want to stay in the basement and at the same time would like the view from the top. That’s not going to happen. We have to let go of the fixed positions we created and insist upon. It is one jump, and that one jump is always this moment. It’s not something that happens once, and then it’s done forever. If we think in terms of “forever,” we create a new concept, a new identification, a new position to rely on. It doesn’t matter what we rely on - it could be with being successful, or it could be with a noble cause; as long as our sense of self and our self-worth depends on anything, there will be no inner peace because regardless of what we depend on, it has to be maintained, protected, and defended, and whenever it falls away, as all impermanent things are bound to do, we are left high and dry, blaming life for being unfair.
One jump, and it is revealed. One jump into emptiness, which is already fullness. We don’t need a definition of what it is; we can’t understand it or grasp it. We can’t pin it down and look at it, but the stunning fact remains that something is reading these words, something with the astounding ability to hear, feel, smell, taste, and think without getting defined or tainted by any of it. It can do all these things and yet never loses its freedom, its empty nature. It is no-thing, being already everything. As a famous Zen verse says:
Within no-thing,
there is inexhaustibility,
there is a flower,
there is the moon,
there is the pagoda.
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One jump
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