Pretense

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

Our Zen is our life, not our rules or precepts or even our practices about our life. It is very easy to confuse the two. Frankly it is easier altogether to create a temple with a nice alter, beautiful Buddha, and fragrant incense, than to walk the walk of Buddhist life. Such a temple makes us feel like Buddhists, but if we are not buddhas as we leave, drive our cars, interact with our friends and co-workers, and go through our day, then the temple is really just a shallow idol we pay homage to, a pretense, so to speak.

Walking the walk requires us to actually make our practice our life itself. The means we must think-feel our way through our precepts and make them living expressions of our Buddha Nature. Sitting like a buddha is not being a Buddha.

We must ask ourselves how is our life informing our practice, how are we actually being buddhas? Some might say we should "just sit" sooner or later a light will go off. Yeah? So what? Unless we change our life and go out into the world with that light, we might as well be in the dark.

To eat meat, not eat meat; to sit in witness or not sit in witness; to be buddhas or pretend buddhas, has nothing to do with eating meat or bearing witness, but it has everything to do, with being a Buddha. These things, like the old story of polishing a tile to make it a mirror, do not make us Buddhas or Buddhists. We are already Buddha. Life is already Dharma. Humanity is our Sangha. It is our decision to live our lives as Buddhas that makes a difference.

How do you do that?