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change&flow No. 2 October 20th, 2001 |
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| The real thing |
The other day, somebody said to me during Takuhatsu (a Buddhist monk's begging practice): "Please grasp the real thing!" Did he warn me not to assimalate to degenerated Japanese Buddhism, but rather learn the true teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha? Or was it that most of the begging monks in the street looked fake to him? Anyway, I appreciated his words as an encouragement for my practice. But: What is the real thing in the first place? It is true that we have to learn from the Buddha, not from corrupt present day Buddhism. What is needed is the Dharma, but how can we grasp it? Dogen Zenji expresses the answer with the famous words: "When you let it go, it fills your hands." Even though we try to grasp the Dharma, we can not catch it. When we try to hold it firm, it will escape us. Only when we let it go, will we realize it for the first time. The true Dharma does not exist apart from us. we can not grasp it by running after it. Some kind of "Satori" that we have grasped onto after long struggles can only be fake. The Dharma manifests itself in our lives right now. But we are looking the other way, so we can not realize it. The only thing we see is a world of lies and fake. Real Dharma is nothing but reality itself. In this reality there is originally no truth and fake. If we get real ourselves, truely looking at this reality, living true to it, we can become true persons ourselves. The real thing is not something that we have to look for in the world. It is rather something that the world looks for in us. |
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