What is your true nature before your father and mother were born? Is it no coming, no going? What is the original freedom arising from seeing your true nature?
Following are some lengthy excerpts of a book I'm reading titled "No Death, No Fear" from Thich Nhat Hanh.
Does it have something to do with your understanding of Zen or is it religious nutbakery? As most of you know I'm not a zen purist so I don't mind either way, but onward I'm continuing on my quest to figure out what zen actually is and is not, and what it might and might not include.
Our greatest fear is that when we die we 'will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and that when we die we become nothing. And so we are filled with fear of annihilation. The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no same, there is no different; there is no permanent self, there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief, We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.
The same thing happens when we lose any of our beloved ones. When conditions are not right to support life, they withdraw. When I lost my mother I suffered a lot. When we are only seven or eight years old it is difficult to think that one day we will lose our mother. Eventually we grow up and we all lose our mothers, but if you know how to practice, when the time comes for the separation you will not suffer too much. You will very quickly realize that your mother is always alive within you. The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, "A serious misfortune of my life has arrived." I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderfUl talk. She looked young and beautifUl, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning. and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. l opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants. and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants. I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often. very tender. very sweet ... wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as "my" feet were actually "our" feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil. From that moment on. the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand. feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me. available at any time. When you lose a loved one, you suffer. But if you know how to look deeply, you have a chance to realize that his or her nature is truly the nature of no birth, no death. There is manifestation and there is the cessation of manifestation in order to have another manifestation. You have to be very keen and very alert in order to recognize the new manifestations of just one person. But with the practice and with effort you can do it. So, taking the hand of someone who knows the practice, together do walking meditation. Pay attention to all the leaves, the flowers, the birds and the dewdrops. If you can stop and look deeply, you will be able to recognize your beloved one manifesting again and again in many forms. You will again embrace the joy of life.
A French scientist, whose name is Lavoisier, declared, "Rim ne se cree, rim ne se perd." "Nothing is born, nothing dies." Although he did not practice as a Buddhist but as a scientist, he found the same truth the Buddha discovered. Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of non-being, the fear of annihilation. The Buddha said that when conditions are sufficient something manifests and we say it exists. When one or two conditions fail and the thing does not manifest in the same way, we then say it does not exist. According to the Buddha, to qualify something as existing or not existing is wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as totally existing or totally not existing. We can see this very easily with television and radio. We may be in a room that has no television or radio. And while we are in that room, we may think that television programs and radio programs do not exist in that room. But all of us know that the space in the room is full of signals. The signals of these programs are filling the air everywhere. We need only one more condition, a radio or a television set, and many forms, colors and sounds will appear. It would have been wrong to say that the signals do not exist because we did not have a radio or television to receive and manifest them. They only seemed not to exist because the causes and conditions were not enough to make the television program manifest. So at that moment, in that room, we say they do not exist. Just because we do not perceive something, it is not correct to say it does not exist. It is only our notion of being and non-being that makes us confused. It is our notion of being and nonbeing that makes us think something exists or something doesn't exist. Notions of being and non-being cannot be applied to reality.
For many of us, our greatest pain is caused by our notions of coming and going. We think that the person we loved came to us from somewhere and has now gone away somewhere. But our true nature is the nature of no coming, no going. We have not come from anywhere, we shall not go anywhere. When conditions are sufficient, we manifest. When conditions are no longer sufficient, we no longer manifest. It does not mean that we do not exist. Like radio waves without a radio, we do not manifest. Not only do the notions of coming and going not express reality, neither do the notions of being and non-being. We hear these words in the Prajnaparamita Sutra: "Listen Shariputra, all dharmas [phenomena] are marked by empti- . ness, they are neither produced nor destroyed, neither increasing nor decreasing." The meaning of emptiness here is very important; it means first of all to be empty of a separate sel£ Nothing has a separate self, and nothing exists by itsel£ If we examine things carefully we will see that all phenomena, including ourselves, are composites. Weare made up of other parts. Weare made of our mother and father, our grandmothers and grandfathers, our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental formations, the earth, the sun and innumerable non-self elements. 12 WHERE DO WE COME FROM? WHERE DO WE GO? All these parts depend on causes and conditions. We see that all that has existed, exists or will exist is interconnected and interdependent. All that we see has only manifested because it is a part of something else, of other conditions that make it possible to manifest. All phenomena are neither produced nor destroyed, because they are in a constant process of manifesting. We may be intelligent enough to understand this, but to understand it intellectually is not enough. To really understand this is to be free from fear. It is to become enlightened. It is to live in inter-being. We have to practice looking deeply like this to nourish our awakened understanding of no birth and no death in our daily lives. In this way we can realize the wonderful gift of non-fear. If we just talk about inter-being as a theory, it will not help us. We should ask: "Piece of paper, where do you come from? Who are you? What did you come here to do? Where are you going to go?" We can ask the flame: "Flame, where do you come from and where will you go?" Listen to the reply closely. The flame, the piece of paper, is replying by its presence. We only have to look deeply and we can hear it reply. The flame is saying: "I do not come from anywhere." That would be the answer of the japonica flowers also. They were not the same and not different. They did not come from anywhere and they did not go anywhere. If there NO DEATH. NO FEAR is a baby who is lost, we should not be sad. It is because there were not sufficient causes and conditions for it to arrive at that time. It will come again.
The Great Being Avalokiteshvara was a disciple of the Buddha. One day, when he was concentrating in the course of deep understanding, he suddenly saw that everything is without a separate sel£ Seeing this, he overcame all ignorance, which means he overcame all his suffering. Looking deeply, we should also see that there is no birth, there is no death; there is no coming, there is no going; there is no being, there is no non-being; there is no same, there is no different. If we don't learn this practice, it is a terrible waste. We can learn many practices to lessen our sadness and our suffering, but the cream of enlightened wisdom is the insight of no birth, no death. When we have this insight we will have no more fear. We can then enjoy the immense inheritance our ancestors have handed down to us. We should make time to practice these deep and wonderful teachings in our daily lives.
Submitted May 15, 2020 at 02:45PM by Gutei_Isshi https://ift.tt/2WU6Omi
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