The Buddha once said, “It’s hard to find the door because there are so many doors. And it’s hard to find the door because there is no door.” Everything in this world is an entryway, an open door to the Buddha-dharma, so what need is there to worry about locks or keyholes?
You need to take a close look at yourself. You will not understand the Buddha-dharma, which is the non-dual functioning of the entire world, by frantically trying to find some separate, unique method or key.
Be careful that you’re not trying to understand the Buddha’s teachings through only theory and intellect. Question yourself carefully! Check whether you truly understand the deep meaning, or instead have only a vague and superficial understanding.
Things don’t follow fixed paths, so don’t get caught up in fixed ideas that things will happen in certain ways. Just keep entrusting everything to your foundation, and the truth of the world will naturally become clear.
Once the water calms down, the moon shines forth.
An ancient pine tree
sends forth
a bolt of lightning,
and rain falls across the world.
As the deep oceans fill,
fish
both big and small
begin to sing and dance.
Seon Master Daehaeng
November 19, 1989
12
Worm Soup
The teacher at a small, remote temple was quite ill, and gradually became weaker and weaker. The sunims who practiced there began to worry because they had nothing in the way of medicine to give him.
One day, the most junior sunim suddenly remembered something he had heard years before: for an illness that involved severe weakness, a broth made from fresh earthworms would help someone recover their strength. He rushed to tell his Dharma brothers, but upon hearing this, they sharply criticized him for even thinking about violating the precept of not killing.
Although the junior sunim didn’t want to hurt any living creatures, his teacher’s condition was rapidly getting worse.
“If earthworm soup can help our teacher recover, then I’ll make it, even if I have to spend some time in hell,” he decided.
He must have collected nearly a hundred earthworms, which he cleaned and then boiled in a huge pot. As he made the broth, he was thinking about the worms.
“I’m sorry for treating you like this, but you may be able to help our teacher recover.”
To repay the worms, he entrusted the following thoughts to his inherent nature:
“Your mind and my mind are one mind. Experiencing this oneness, may you be reborn at the highest level you’re comfortable with. Thank you all so much!”
Having made the earthworm soup in this way, every morning and every evening the sunim fed a bowl of the broth to his teacher.
The other sunims, however, couldn’t believe what he’d done, and hounded him. “Have you forgotten the precept of not killing? Do you have any idea of the karma that will result from your actions?”
But the sunim was undisturbed. “Brothers, if there is any kind of punishment, I’ll be the one to bear it. Anyway, it seems this broth is actually helping to save both our teacher and the worms.
“As they enter our teacher’s body, they become one with him and his bright mind, and so evolve. How many thousands of years would it take for these worms to meet an enlightened person and experience that level of consciousness?
“So this is helping all of these worms, while at the same time reviving our teacher. They are saving each other!”
By the time their teacher had finished drinking all of the broth, his health had improved and his recovery seemed certain. He called for the young sunim. “That broth was full of energy and helped me a lot. But something was unusual about it—what was it made of?”
“Oh, I found an ancient tree in the forest and took some of the young leaves and boiled them for a long time,” answered the young sunim.
His teacher’s eyes narrowed, and before his penetrating gaze the young sunim felt as if all his inner secrets were revealed.
And then his teacher smiled.
∴
What do you think about how the precepts should be upheld? Are you struggling to uphold them while focusing on only the material aspect of existence?
We can truly understand what needs to be done only when we can understand the unseen realm—then we can correctly understand the material realm and will be able to uphold the precepts as they were intended.
To put it another way, don’t treat the spiritual and the material as separate. Do your best to combine them together and use them as one. This is upholding the precepts correctly.
Because every life is as precious as our own life and body, we are taught to not kill. The pain and suffering others experience is what we also experience. If you understand this, you can’t treat other forms of life harshly.
However, it can sometimes happen that your actions deprive others of life, even though that wasn’t your intention to cause them harm. If that happens, wholeheartedly entrust the entire situation to your foundation, Juingong, such that you and their mind are not separate.
Know that “their mind and my mind are not two,” and entrust this thought to your foundation. Then, because you’ve entrusted their mind without separating it from your mind, you destroy only the other being’s body, not its mind. To a certain extent, it can even be said that you’ve helped remove their ignorance.
Even so, don’t needlessly kill or eat anything you like. Not everything can be justified. Killing that comes from desire, cruelty, and greed creates a terrible burden.
13
Buckwheat Dumplings
A century or so ago, in a remote meditation hall, the sunims were preparing to sit long into the night.
It had been a normal meditation retreat in all regards, until one sunim suddenly gave a great laugh and looked around, smiling. “Why is everyone sitting here so stiffly? Does our Buddha-nature only exist within the butt prints of our meditation cushions?”
As the sunims sat there, they felt each word strike home. Later, after some discussion, they asked that sunim to become their teacher.
One day he gave the other sunims a large sack of buckwheat seed and told them to plant it all. In those days there wasn’t much to eat in a temple like that, and what they had was rough and basic, so the sunims’ mouths began to water as they thought of all the foods they could make from buckwheat.
“We could make fine noodles with a savory sauce, or we could roast the buckwheat and have it as porridge, or we could make steamed cakes, or we could …” and so their conversation went as they planted the buckwheat.
After the planting was finished, a couple of sunims were still brimming with thoughts of their future meal, and during tea they asked their teacher, “Sunim, will it be noodles or steamed cake, or something else?”
“Oh, that,” he answered disinterestedly, “I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.”
The buckwheat grew and flowered, and as the nights grew longer, the grains grew fatter.
One hungry sunim hinted, not so subtly, “Steamed buckwheat cakes would taste wonderful, wouldn’t they?” But all he got from his teacher was an indifferent shrug.
Finally, it was time to harvest the buckwheat, and at last their teacher revealed what the food was to be: buckwheat dumplings in soup! As the sunims ground the buckwheat into flour, one sunim asked their teacher, “We’re really going to have soup and dumplings?”
But his teacher replied, “When you put your spoon in your mouth, then you’ll know!”
As the time for the noon meal approached, all of the sunims gathered together in the main hall. They chanted their thanks for the meal, and all together started eating the soup and dumplings. As soon as they put their spoons in their mouths, their teacher gave a great roar.
“Stop! Don’t swallow it and don’t spit it out!”
The sunims froze at the sound of his voice and just sat there, mouths full of hot so
up.
After a bit, their teacher asked, “Do you have any soup or dumplings left?”
“I’ve got a bit left,” one sunim answered.
“Don’t swallow it and don’t spit it out!”
Another sunim spoke up, “It’s gone! It just dissolved and disappeared.”
“What do you think happened then?” asked the teacher.
“Well, I didn’t notice it, but it seems like it just dissolved and went down bit by bit.”
“That’s it exactly! You weren’t trying to eat, and yet that food is gone. Do you understand the principle that underlies this?”
∴
Dumplings are not dumplings, swallowing is not swallowing, and spitting out is not spitting out.
Although things exist individually, nonetheless, they’re all connected together and function as one, changing and manifesting with every instant.
This also describes emptiness, wisdom, and Buddha; what is there that can be added or taken away? How could there truly be something called a hindrance? Don’t let yourself be entangled by ideas such as “achieving enlightenment” or “finding wisdom.”
Understand this principle and practice diligently. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to eat this soup without getting caught up in ideas of eating or not eating, doing or not doing? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to naturally dissolve and swallow the lumps in the soup?
Work hard to understand what it means when I say that the entire universe can be put into a single bowl, and that one bowl can hold it all perfectly.
14
Wonhyo’s Awakening
When Wonhyo and Uisang were young monks, they decided to go to China to find a great master under whom they could study.
Leaving Gyeongju, the capital of the Silla Kingdom, they headed to the southwest coast of Korea to find a boat that could take them across the sea to China.
After weeks of walking, they were nearing the coast. The sky had turned dark and the showers were fast becoming torrents. Before long, thunder filled the air around them, and the rain was blowing sideways.
Barely able to see their own feet, they stumbled across an abandoned hut. It was too wet to start a fire, and they were both exhausted, so they fell fast asleep as soon as they lay down.
In the middle of the night, Wonhyo woke up with a burning thirst. Half asleep, he found a broken bowl full of rainwater. Drinking it down, he gave a sigh and fell back asleep.
In the morning light, Wonhyo was shocked by what he saw: human bones were scattered all around them!
He realized that this was no ordinary hut— it was a plague hut!
Everyone who lived there had died during an epidemic, with no one left alive to bury the dead. Worse, the “bowl” he’d drunk from in the night was actually half a skull, with flesh still stuck to it.
Running outside, Wonhyo began to vomit as though his insides were coming outside.
Kneeling there with his stomach tied in knots, he suddenly realized, “The water was the same—it’s my thoughts that were different. Last night it was pure and refreshing, and now it’s so disgusting that I’ve become ill, yet the only thing that’s changed are my thoughts.”
As he sat there quietly, Uisang said to him, “Why don’t we get going; you’ll feel better once we get away from this place.”
Wonhyo didn’t respond. After a moment he asked Uisang, “Why do you want to go to China?”
“To learn the path, of course.”
“The path isn’t someplace far away. It’s within us, wherever we are. Why go to China to look for what we already have?”
With this, Wonhyo headed back to the lands of Silla.
∴
If you want to discover how things truly work, you’ll have to start by looking within yourself.
All of the principles and truths of the universe are already contained within you. Our fundamental mind gives rise to ten thousand different manifestations, and our fundamental mind can combine ten thousand different manifestations into one. This mind that ceaselessly gives rise to things and causes them to subside also causes me to become a thousand different people, and causes all of those people to become one.
So take the functioning of your own mind as your hwadu, your koan. If you do this, you’ll come to see your own mind clearly; you’ll know what binds your mind, and what frees your mind.
You’ll discover where you are rich and where you are impoverished, and that it’s mind that makes things big, and mind that makes the same things small. You’ll know for yourself the unimaginable wonders that this fundamental mind can call forth.
By ceaselessly taking everything that arises through mind as your hwadu, you’ll realize that, among all the things in the world, the path to true freedom begins with your own mind—for this is the very place of Buddha.
15
Wisdom Guides the Way
It happened that there was a company where things started to disappear from the warehouse.
The owner of the company was quite adept at both business and managing people, so things had been going nicely. The employees were generally satisfied and there had been no problems with theft before.
Although the value of the missing goods wasn’t enormous, the owner wanted to stop the theft before it grew out of hand. So, without telling anyone, he started watching the warehouse after hours.
One night, he saw two people passing boxes out of a side window. The worst part of it was that he recognized the men as two employees that he had always thought highly of. They came from poor backgrounds, but both had always been diligent and seemed completely reliable.
It took a while before he was able to get past his feelings of betrayal and anger, but as he forced himself to carefully think about the situation, he had to admit that the value of what had been stolen wasn’t that much.
When he thought about the two men and how hard they had worked for his company, he had to admit the possibility of extenuating circumstances, so he decided to give them a second chance. If it worked out, he would avoid ruining two men’s careers, while keeping two good employees.
The next day, he called both men into his office. “Over the last few weeks, there’s been a growing problem with theft from the warehouse. There’s no one I trust more than you two, so I’m putting you in charge of the warehouse and solving this problem. Here are the keys.”
The two men found themselves in an awkward position. They were so ashamed they could barely look the owner in the face. They felt bad about stealing, but mounting debts had made them desperate.
Now, they heard that they were trusted above all others, and were to be given the keys to the warehouse! They silently resolved to take their responsibility for the warehouse very seriously and become the people the owner thought they were.
They threw themselves into running the warehouse, and came up with several innovations that improved how things were done. Further, the other employees felt that they, too, were trusted, and the company prospered more than ever.
∴
What would have been the outcome, for the company and the men, if the owner had been fixated on punishing them?
If he had yelled at them and then fired them, it’s likely that instead of reflecting upon what they did wrong, they would have started to hate him. And do you know what often happens next? Each side blames the other, raising harmful thoughts and taking advantage of any chance for revenge. Thus it goes, a vicious cycle of despising and trying to hurt each other. When will it end?
In truth, most cases like this can be avoided if those involved are a bit more generous and broad-minded in the beginning. Even a single thought is that important.
The business owner in this story seems to have had a feeling for this. He understood that if you can change the way people think, this is always better than just punishing them. It’s better for them and it’s better for you. After all, it is mind that moves the body, so instead of punishing the body, he tried to change the mind. He appears to have been someone who unconsciously entrus
ted everything to the non-dual foundation that connects us all.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live with this kind of wisdom?
People with this kind of faith in their foundation can’t be hurt or overcome by others. Your faith in your foundation causes a spiritual light to grow within the other person, naturally bringing them to repent of their wrongdoings and inspiring them to live a new life. We have to entrust things to our foundation like the company owner entrusted the keys to the two men.
He entrusted everything to them completely. Thus, they felt a sense of empowerment and increased responsibility about their job, and so they focused their energy and ability on doing it well.
However, what if the company owner had spoken about trusting the two men, but in reality was still suspicious of them—always checking up on them, taking back the keys, trying to do the work himself? Most people would say, “Okay, you don’t trust me? Do it yourself!” Who could work wholeheartedly in those circumstances?
Your foundation, Juingong, your Buddha-nature, is the one that can truly solve everything, so believe in it to the very end. Entrust everything that confronts you in your daily life to your foundation and have steadfast faith. With true faith, you will never waver.
Never forget that your fundamental mind, your foundation, is a priceless treasure that embraces everything throughout this world and universe.
16
Letting Go
Long ago, in the high mountains of Korea, a traveler was making his way home along a mountain path.
Clouds were drifting between the peaks, and the mountains seemed to vanish into nothingness, only to reappear moments later. At times the clouds would close in and turn his world into just a few misty paces in front of him, with the only sound that of the river far below.
My Heart is a Golden Buddha: Buddhist Stories from Korea Page 4
