Appreciate Your Life

by Taizan Maezumi

  This koan has a further checking point. Daito Kokushi, the second Japanese patriarch in the Rinzai lineage, is considered to be the reincarnation of Master Unmon. Master Unmon lived in China about three hundred to four hundred years prior to him. If Master Daito is the incarnation of Master Unmon, where has he been these three hundred years? That is the koan. What does it have to do with you? That is the point: What does this have to do with you? What kind of relationship does it have with your own life?

  How can you embody this koan? It could be written on your forehead. Where is the name Shakyamuni Buddha? When you call it Shakyamuni Buddha, it is you! And when it is called you, it is Shakyamuni Buddha. How do you call it? Right now, this moment! Do not wait a hundred years to be born somewhere else. How do you call it?

  We say that every moment we are being born and we are dying. How are we being born and dying moment to moment? This is a wonderful koan. When you know this, you will have no problem enjoying yourself as the incarnation of Shakyamuni Buddha himself. Or of Bodhidharma, or Monk Isan, or a buffalo, or whoever you wish.

  Koan is the manifestation of ultimate reality. What is ultimate reality? It is your very life! How is your very life manifesting right now? Is it manifesting as the realization of koan? When you truly manifest koan, then your treasure house will open by itself and you will use it as you wish. Use koan as the key to open the treasure house. Once you open it, what is inside is also koan. And the one who is turning the key is also koan. That treasure is also nothing but yourself, your life. When you realize this, then the koan is in manifestation.

  PAIN, FEAR, AND FRUSTRATION

  SOMETIMES OUR LIFE SEEMS to go to all kinds of so-called negative extremes. When this happens, how do we take care of our frustrations, anxiety, pain, sorrows, even despair? The point is how do we put balance in our life? What kind of standards do we use?

  In the Four Noble Truths, Shakyamuni Buddha speaks the truth of suffering. We know that happiness never continues forever. Ironically, the more happiness we have, the more pain we have when we lose this happiness. Generally speaking, birth and death are understood as the main causes of suffering. Birth, sickness, old age, and death are all suffering. To be born is to live and become sick, to become old. Dogen Zenji tells us that there is a buddha within sickness; there is a buddha in the midst of getting old; there is a buddha within suffering. More precisely, being born is the life of buddha, being sick is the life of buddha, getting old is the life of buddha, death is nothing but the life of buddha. It is the same life as our life. Do not discriminate between the life of buddha and your life.

  One of our members recently learned that her mother has terminal cancer. Her mother has not been told of this, so the daughter wrote and asked me, “Shall I tell her or not?” I wrote back a passage from Dogen Zenji, “Birth and death is the life of the Buddha.” I don’t know what she told her mother, since her mother is not Buddhist. Is it difficult for you to take death as the life of buddha?

  Dogen Zenji also said, “When the Buddha is within birth and death, there is neither birth nor death.” This is a wonderful koan. If there is no birth, no death, then what exists? Answer me. What exists? Just buddha. We are being born and dying simultaneously. Each moment we are being born and each moment, dying. Instant birth and death. This means that in every moment our life is brand new. We are living this fresh, new life all the time, and yet we experience so many fears and frustrations.

  Of the Four Noble Truths, the fourth, the Eightfold Path, is the most important, for it talks about how we can take care of suffering. In the Eightfold Path, the Buddha begins with right understanding, or right view. This sense of right is not limited to a conventional sense of right and wrong, but means a total or complete understanding. We should understand life and the aspects of life in a proper way. Right understanding is followed by right thought, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration, or samadhi. Samadhi leads us back to right understanding. What is right samadhi? This kind of samadhi is one of the very crucial bases for making decisions. When we have it, we transcend this restricted I. If we do not transcend this I, we create delusions and we suffer pain, fear, and frustrations.

  The Eightfold Path begins with right understanding, which takes care of ninety percent of the pain in life. What makes it right? What is right and what is wrong? In one way or another, all of us have some kind of standard by which we make value judgments, by which we judge whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, adequate or inadequate.

  In this regard, there are four aspects to consider when we have decisions to make or actions to take. The aspects are time, place, the people involved, and amount. These could be applied to any situation with our commonsense understanding. For instance, we must take into account the people involved in the situation before we can take action or make certain decisions. We also consider the circumstances, the place, and how much we can do. If we pay attention to these four aspects, we can judge fairly well what to do.

  In the Nirvana Sutra, we find the Buddha’s last sermon on the Eight Awarenesses of the Enlightened Person. It is somewhat similar to the Eightfold Path of his first sermon. I want to emphasize the first two awarenesses: wanting little and knowing how to be satisfied. The first awareness is having few or fewer desires. It does not say not to want anything, but rather to have fewer desires. There is wonderful wisdom here. Want little of the things that we do not have. With just this awareness, our life can be fairly well sustained.

  How much should we want? How do we know if it is too little or too much? And what kind of things should we want? In a way, wanting little is a very clear guideline, but it is not easy to achieve. What would be good guidelines for practicing wanting little? You already have everything you need! So it is not a matter of setting up artificial guidelines. Look deeply into yourself. I think you know the answer.

  The second awareness is even more fascinating. Know how to be satisfied with the things that we already have. When we think about this, we see that we truly have enough. We have this life. To some degree, we can say that the less we have, the more abundance we have. When we don’t own anything at all, we have the abundance of the entire universe. This is die miracle of life, but instead we chase in vain after things. So wanting little and knowing how to be satisfied, we can be peaceful, can’t we?

  This principle of no gain applies to enlightenment, too. Since we are already it, we need not expect anything. This may be the most important attitude that we can take toward our practice or even our life. We can look at this from two aspects. One aspect is, “Don’t expect anything.” The other is, “Everything is already here!” What is there to expect? What else do you need? You have everything to begin with. You don’t need to become something or someone else! You are already complete.

  Buddha guarantees this to each of us with no exceptions. This is right understanding.

  The last of the Eight Awarenesses is avoiding idle talk. These are, in effect, the last words of the Buddha’s teaching. We can understand idle talk as the pursuit of conceptual thoughts or dualistic understanding. If we talk in dualistic ways, our talk becomes idle talk and we cannot have peace. We can even make our healthy body sick by our thoughts and vice versa. In our tradition, zazen is the best means to taste this nonduality, or peace. At the same time, practicing zazen to get something is not an ideal way to practice. Please do not expect any effects from zazen as such, just do zazen. Can you do this? In just doing zazen, zazen contributes to each of us, to the immediate sangha, to the extended sangha, and even further to the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, which contain everything.

  Please consider that your practice is not just for yourself. When you forget yourself, a transformation takes place. Then your life is no longer your life. It is the life of Buddha. Your practice is contributing much, much more to others than you might think. If we must use any basic standard of evaluation, the fact that the life of each of us contains everything is the standard we sho
uld use. We make this realization clear through our practice. You are taking care of the dharma at the same time that the dharma is taking care of you.

  So when you feel fear, pain, and frustration, appreciate your life as Buddha’s life. Being sick, take good care of yourself instead of being upset and frustrated. Getting old? Enjoy it, Buddha is getting old. Have a feast with him! Why not? We have all had painful experiences. Turn your mind around and see how you can take it with the joy of Buddha. Just the way we look at these things can be the difference between heaven and hell. This is not to say there is not terrible suffering in life, but too often a tiny thing becomes a huge thing for us; it almost kills us. And yet, when we look at it from a different perspective, we laugh.

  Clarify what life is, what death is. There is a very clear answer. How you appreciate it and how you live it is up to you. Please take care of it.

  INTIMACY OF RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

  INTIMACY IS ONE OF THE BASIC THEMES expressed in the poem Identity of Relative and Absolute written by Master Sekito Kisen, a Zen master in eighth-century China. The poem begins:

  The mind of the Great Sage of India

  Is intimately conveyed West and East.

  Among human beings are wise ones and fools;

  In the Way there is no teacher of North and South.

  The implication of identity is not just that two things are one thing, but that there is the activity of being one. The two interact, and yet they are one. Being one is the activity of intimacy.

  The first line is, “The mind of the Great Sage of India is intimately conveyed West and East.” We use the word conveyed, but the word in Japanese is mitsu, or “intimacy.” The mind of the Great Sage is intimate, not conveyed; it is here! Being intimate is this vivid, vital life itself. Be intimate with yourself! Buddha realized this intimacy and handed it down generation after generation, ancestor to ancestor, to us.

  What is the relative and absolute? Master Sekito Kisen writes:

  The relative fits the absolute as a box and its lid.

  The absolute meets the relative

  Like two arrows meeting in midair.

  What is ordinary and what is absolute? Our ordinary life is the phenomenal or relative part; the fundamental, so-called essential nature, which is somewhat invisible to our physical eyes, is the absolute. Sometimes absolute, or ri, is translated as “principle, the primary point, or essential nature.”

  In the original Japanese version, this line literally means that when the relative exists, the box and its lid fit together. When the absolute responds to it, it is like two arrows meeting in midair. When the relative exists, the absolute responds to it like a box and its lid. It is like two arrows meeting in midair. Everyday life and essential nature—Buddha nature—are not separate.

  Intimacy is also expressed in two arrows meeting in midair. How can two arrows meet in midair? It is almost impossible. And yet this is a very practical analogy.

  The story of two arrows meeting in midair was originally expressed in Reshi, a book written more than two thousand years ago. There were two archery adepts, a teacher, Hiei, and a student, Kisho. Kisho was becoming more and more skillful and eventually he believed himself the best. Without his teacher Hiei, Kisho believed he would be the best in the world. One day, he tried to kill his teacher.

  Kisho and Hiei happened to meet in a field when no one else was around. Kisho shot an arrow and his teacher, responding, shot back. The two arrows met in the air and fell to the ground. Kisho shot a second arrow and a third one. The same thing happened each time. But Hiei had only three arrows, and Kisho had four. He shot the fourth arrow, and the teacher automatically picked a branch with thorns from a bush and stopped that arrow with the thorn. You may think such a thing is impossible, yet at the same time, can you take it as an analogy for your life?

  Our essential nature, our Buddha nature, and all the different manifestations of our world are not two. Subject and object are altogether as one. As an individual, your so-called true self and your so-called apparent self are not separate. Our true life and our daily life are not separate. All our surroundings and this self are not separate. The point is how do we see it? Do we see it as one?

  Just seeing this is not enough. We must ask how our daily life functions as the life of everything. How are these two arrows meeting? If we say it is impossible for two arrows to meet in midair, we can say that it is also impossible for each one of us to meet all external phenomena as one, right here, right now. So how do they meet? Or rather, how to live so that this life and all externals are together intimate as your own life? You cannot do this by any intellectual efforts or schemes, for when you do you encounter this I, my, me.

  Intimacy is nothing but realizing the fact that already you are as you are. Your essential nature is nothing but you as you are. See that these two arrows already meeting is your own life. You are no longer whatever you think you are, you yourself are the life of the dharma, the life of Buddha. Realizing this fact is the moment of transmission. Transmission from whom to whom? There is nothing to be transmitted from anybody else to you, not even your true Self. This is intimacy. How do you appreciate it?

  There is a koan in the Transmission of the Light1 about being intimate. The forty-second patriarch Ryozan Enkan was attending his teacher Doan Zenji. The patriarch Doan asked him, “What is that beneath your robe?” In other words, “Who are you?” Ryozan had no answer. Doan Zenji said, “It is the most painful thing when one who studies the Buddha Way hasn’t yet reached that stage. Now you ask me.” So Ryozan asked, “What is that beneath your robe?” The patriarch Doan replied, “Intimacy.” Ryozan was greatly awakened.

  Taking refuge in the Three Treasures is also intimacy. I am not talking about anything special. Be one with the Buddha. Be one with the Dharma. Be one with the Sangha. The Sangha meets when the Buddha arrow and the Dharma arrow meet. Where do they meet? Right here, now, as our life, as my life! This very moment is midair! The Buddha, the unsurpassable Way, is absolute. So if we call it darkness, it is dark; if we say it is a subtle source, it is a subtle source. All appearances as light and dark, clear, muddy, messy, transparent, appearing and disappearing, and so on, are all the dharma.

  Really be intimate with no division between yourself and others. Then everything becomes nothing but you. Nothing could be more intimate than this. This is the buddhas’ teaching, your original self. You cannot separate your life from Buddha.

  Of course, the two arrows meeting in midair is an analogy, and analogies never cover every aspect. This analogy simply indicates the fact of truly being one. So in daily life, please accept yourself as you are—as absolute, as the source—and accept your life as it is, as male or female, young or old, smart or dull. Given this fact of absolute and relative, we are all the same and we are all different, each having our own unique function and position. Whether you see these two arrows meeting in midair as difficult or easy, see it as the ease and difficulty of your own life.

  Trust yourself as you truly are; you are already the Buddha Way itself. Be intimate with it. Do not make yourself separate with your opinions, your judgments, your ideas, with whatever you think your life is. When you do that, the two arrows miss each other. If there is any difficulty, it is simply the difficulty of how to be intimate with yourself.

  The two arrows meeting is the mind of the sage and the ordinary mind. Our ordinary life is intimate to begin with, but unfortunately we experience our everyday life as a split life, as if the enlightened life is separate from it. So this identity is of oneself and Oneself and of Oneself and others. Others are not necessarily just human beings. How to be intimate with Oneself and the phenomenal world? This fact has been transmitted down to us. How you take care of it is your responsibility.

  In your daily life, please accept yourself as you are and appreciate your life as it is. Be intimate with yourself. Taking good care of yourself is always the best way to take care of everything. Then your life, I am sure, will go all right. I want yo
u to be a truly intimate being. Beneath your robe is the same as outside your robe. Inside and outside the robe are one. There is no division. Please take good care of this life. Enjoy yourself!

  1. The following koan is adapted from Francis H. Cook, trans., The Record of Transmitting the Light: Zen Master Keizan’s Denkoroku (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1991), 190.

  CLARIFY THE GREAT MATTER

  Once while in China, I was reading a collection of sayings by an ancient master. At the time, a monk from Sichuan, a sincere practitioner of the Way, asked me, “What is the use of reading recorded sayings?” I replied, “I want to learn about the deeds of the ancient masters.” The monk asked, “What is the use of that?” I said, “I wish to teach people after I return home.” The monk queried further, “Yes, but ultimately, what is the use?”

  Later, I pondered his remarks. Learning the deeds of the ancient masters by reading the recorded sayings or koans in order to explain them to deluded people is ultimately of no use to my own practice or for teaching others. Even if I don’t know a single letter, I will be able to show it to others in inexhaustible ways if I devote myself to just sitting and clarifying the great matter. It was for this reason that the monk pressed me as to the ultimate use [of reading and studying]. I thought what he said was true. Thereupon, I gave up reading the recorded sayings and other texts, concentrated wholeheartedly on sitting, and was able to clarify the great matter.