Anybody following a spiritual path knows that there are times when things become difficult, and we start to question whether this path is for us at all. When resistance shows up and the “me” feels threatened, we tend to wonder if this is the right path or the right teacher. Maybe we should look for something else or find a different teacher who understands us better. When my teacher Morinaga Roshi first met his teacher Goto Zuigan it was after the war, and he felt that everything he had believed in had been taken away. Zuigan Roshi let him talk for a while and then told him, “I let you stay if you can trust me. Without trust, practice is not possible.” The Roshi paid lip service but was thinking, “If I could trust anything, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.” Goto Zuigan didn’t say this because he wanted the Roshi to trust him explicitly, but because he knew he’d lost trust in himself, which cannot be separated from losing trust in life. Without trust, we go in circles.
I am sure that most of us know the situation very well, but we would rather proactively work on avoiding suffering than look from where it arises. We have a hard time seeing that suffering is not tied to circumstances but to me. Conditions and circumstances in life can be challenging and painful, but what transforms them into suffering is the attempt to change things into going “my way.” It isn’t “my way or the highway” but rather “my way leading straight into suffering.” Life rarely goes the way we think it should. We run around complaining that we have been dealt a lousy hand, which might well be the case. But the question is: do we play our cards fully or spend our time grumbling and blaming? If we play our cards, however lousy they might be, we might have a hard life - but that’s not suffering. Suffering is tied to our resistance to what is, not to the circumstances themselves. If we want to change our relationship to circumstances, trust becomes crucial.
Whatever arises, whatever is manifesting is Buddha-nature, the divine, or emptiness. All those words point to something, and to find out what they are pointing to, we have to stop running away and resisting some things while holding on to others. It is easy to trust in what we can see and hear, the outer appearance, but to trust what we cannot directly perceive with our senses, what we cannot pin down and define, what cannot be made into a “thing” and yet arises as everything, is difficult. It’s not difficult because it is hidden; it’s not. It’s always right here. It eludes us because it is not an object we can grasp and understand. We are not even in a relationship with it - we are it. A Chinese phrase says, “The eye cannot see itself; a sword cannot cut itself.” We don’t have to look in the mirror to make sure that our eyes are there; the fact of seeing is enough. We don’t even have to call it trust in our eyes; there is just seeing. Therefore Master Rinzai (Chin.9th CE) says, “Trust in your activity right now - there is not a single problem.” And, “For those whose trust is not deep, the last day will never arrive.”
If we want to be a person of leisure, of “not having anything,” as Master Rinzai calls it, being able to die and be reborn each moment, we must realize and have confidence in what arises as vivid aliveness, constantly moving in space and time, permeating everywhere and everything. The courage to not keep ourselves separate from what is happening but to recognize ourselves in it isn’t that “Great Love,” dissolving an apparently separate self. It is nothing but trust in its deepest sense.
Painting: “Cauldron” by Michael Hofmann
Once again, Thank you. Deep bow.