Three short ones from Bankei

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Where do you go?

A layman asked: "If you become a buddha, where do you go?"
The Master replied: "If you become a buddha, there's no place at all to go. You fill the vast universe to its very limits. It's when you become any other sort of being that there are different places to go."

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Women

A woman asked: "I've heard that because women bear a heavy karmic burden it's impossible for them to realize buddhahood. Is this true?"
The Master said: "From what time did you become a 'woman?' "

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The great doubt

A monk asked: "The men of old declared that with a great doubt one will experience a great enlightenment. How is it your Reverence doesn't make use of the great doubt of the masters?"

The Master replied: "As to what's meant by 'great doubt': long ago when Nangaku went to see the Sixth Patriarch, he was asked by him, 'What is it that comes thus?' Nangaku was utterly flustered, but puzzling over this for eight years, [finally] answered: 'As soon as you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.' This is the real great doubt and great enlightenment.

For example, when a monk loses his only kesa and, searching and searching, can't put it out of his mind for even a moment—that's real doubt! People nowadays go stirring up doubt just because they say the old masters did, so what they produce is an imitation doubt. Because this doubt isn't genuine, they won't have any day of awakening. It's just as if they were to search all over, thinking they'd lost something that had never been lost at all."

Submitted May 09, 2019 at 08:00PM by UhExistence http://bit.ly/2E053vf