The Japanese Zen Master Muso Kokushi (1275-1351), while still being a monk in training once asked his master: “I still have not clarified the matter of self. Please point the way.” The master answered, “Our school has no words or phrases and nothing to transmit to anyone.” Muso insisted, “That may be so, but be compassionate and at least teach me an expedient means.” The master said, “There are no expedient means, nor is there any compassion.” Finding himself even more confused, Muso went to see a different master and told him about the dialog. The master said, “If a follower of the way separates between the mundane and the spiritual by even so much as a hairbreadth, there is no way liberation can happen.”
To dialogs like this, monks running from one master to another, Morinaga Roshi sometimes said jokingly, “This is why shoemakers stay in business,” pointing out how we are all busily running around, trying to find answers while unable to hear what is said. We insist on our attempt to clarify the self by the self, like trying to see our own eyes. We want a method that tells us what to do so we can control and monitor our progress. The more effort we put into this endeavor, the more strength is added to the illusion of a separate and enduring self. Anything we are told will immediately be translated into another method. To do something or to not do something, “me” trying to solve “me” will definitely keep us stuck between a rock and a hard place.
When we can actually hear what is said, there is a sudden falling away of our notions and the phantoms we were holding on to, and what is left is '“what is happening,” including all the thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and urges we used to identify with and wanted to change, but now the one having had a problem with it, the separate phantom doer, thinker, or feeler, is no more and what is arising and ceasing is happening without a reference point. Nothing more or nothing else is needed, no skillful means and no compassion to clarify a self, which revealed itself as a phantom, a mirage. Pointing that out is genuine and immediate compassion; the question is whether we can hear it. As long as we split ourselves into a mundane, faulty self and a spiritual self, as long as we keep dividing ourselves into subject and object, watcher and watched, we are chasing the phantom. As long as we break things up into worldly and spiritual, form and emptiness, grasping one and rejecting the other, we cannot see what is happening. There is no dividing line between emptiness and form. We are already absolutely nothing and absolutely something.
“There are no expedient means and no compassion” - can we recognize the deep compassion in this sentence, directly addressing each one of us. While we continue to chase after a mirage, seeking the traces a bird leaves in the sky, we keep missing the obvious - that which already and lively is, undefinable, naturally luminous - sitting here now, reading these words.
Calligraphy: Shaku Daijo
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