Gate Fifteen
Read the following, place it in your heart and sleep on it. Then, tomorrow, live it until evening when you can leave a brief comment on what you may have received during the process.
Compassion is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not kill or harm living beings.
By “Dharma Gate”, we mean a teaching or practice we can study to gain insights into the deepening our practice. It's a way to integrate our understanding of approaching reality.
The Koan:
"In a severe drought farmers cannot avoid picking and choosing. Their fields are not others. If they cannot get water their rice will die, and they will have no harvest. During droughts in acient times, there were often fights among villages by the same river, and farmers in the same village, to get even a little more water for their fields. In the midst of a fight, the sky might suddenly darken, and it might start to rain. Then the farmers lost their reason for conflict.
When we soften self-centered discrimination and live without being driven by hatred and love, the supreme way beyond duality manifests itself. And when we see the true interdependent reality of all beings, we can relax and open our clinging minds. Our Zazen is to sit in our own caskets and view things from nonduality, or complete interconnectedness."
-The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo 26 pg75
Most note worthy replies :
By cultivating a mind of compassion, we can better welcome all beings/things into our arms and see them as not separate. When we harm other beings, we do so out of a feeling of separateness.
gassho, Shokai
stlah
Read the following, place it in your heart and sleep on it. Then, tomorrow, live it until evening when you can leave a brief comment on what you may have received during the process.
Compassion is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not kill or harm living beings.
By “Dharma Gate”, we mean a teaching or practice we can study to gain insights into the deepening our practice. It's a way to integrate our understanding of approaching reality.
The Koan:
"In a severe drought farmers cannot avoid picking and choosing. Their fields are not others. If they cannot get water their rice will die, and they will have no harvest. During droughts in acient times, there were often fights among villages by the same river, and farmers in the same village, to get even a little more water for their fields. In the midst of a fight, the sky might suddenly darken, and it might start to rain. Then the farmers lost their reason for conflict.
When we soften self-centered discrimination and live without being driven by hatred and love, the supreme way beyond duality manifests itself. And when we see the true interdependent reality of all beings, we can relax and open our clinging minds. Our Zazen is to sit in our own caskets and view things from nonduality, or complete interconnectedness."
-The Zen Teachings of Homeless Kodo 26 pg75
Most note worthy replies :
By cultivating a mind of compassion, we can better welcome all beings/things into our arms and see them as not separate. When we harm other beings, we do so out of a feeling of separateness.
Embrace compassion
Our first step
To embracing the world
gassho, Shokai
stlah
Comment