Hello all,
As of late I have been visiting a Japanese garden here in my city. It's a wonderful little place inside a park where you can just be at peace and sit zazen. I like to go there because staring at the koi makes me understand the nature of our mind.
Our mind is just like the pond with the fish. It's this space where the koi live and swim. They come and go. They try to stay and ask for your attention, but they keep on flowing.
If you get a koi out of the water it will die and rot in your hand, compromising your health and infecting you. So it's better to allow it to just be and swim away. Eventually it will come back, but it will swim away once again. Some day it will die and will return to the source of the pond.
Maybe a turtle appears from time to time. It's different from the koi, with different features and behavor. It will also stay for a bit, asking for food. Sometimes it will look for a rock to come out to the sun. But it will get back to the pond and swim away again.
There are big koi, but there are also small ones that swim a lot faster.
Our ideas, fears, afflictions, attachments and anxieties are like this. They flow, they swim, the go back to the source.
Sometimes the koi drift a little far and you can see the sky on the surface of the water. But it's just a reflexion. The sky is upthere and what we see in the pond is not reality. It's just an abstraction of the truth that is the sky.
A koi. A turtle. Our thoughts.
A pond and the sky. Our mind and reality.
All the same.
Gassho,
Kyonin
Thank you Kyonin! What a beautiful place!
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