The title of the blog post is deliberately ungrammatical. "Things-as-it-is" is a phrase made up by the late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi to describe the fundamental nature of reality. He mixed up singular and plural deliberately, to keep us from grasping one or the other. "'Many' and 'one' are different ways of describing one whole being," he said.
"When I say to see things-as-it-is, what I mean is to practice hard with our desires -- not to get rid of desires but to take them into account. If you have a computer, you must enter all the data; this much desire, this much nourishment, this kind of color, this much weight. We must include our desires as one of the many factors in order to see things-as-it-is. We don't always reflect on our desires. Without stopping to reflect on our selfish judgment we say "He is good" or "He is bad." But someone who is bad to me is not necessarily always bad. To someone else, he may be a good person. Reflecting in this way we can see things-as-it-is. This is buddha mind. "
(From the book
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai)
No comments:
Post a Comment