Here a Star, There a Star...

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

This morning brought cool desert air across our skin as we hiked our nearly three mile morning trek. It was glorious, though. I love desert walks. The air always seems to fresh and, after a rain, verdant.

Today I would like to address a few lines from the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra.


O Shariputra, remember, Dharma is fundamentally emptiness, no birth, no death. Nothing is pure, nothing is defiled. Nothing can increase, nothing can decrease. Hence: in emptiness, no form, no feeling no thought, no impulse, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no seeing, no hearing, no smelling, no tasting, no touching, no thinking, no realm of sight, no realm of thought, no ignorance and no end of ignorance, no old age and death and no end to old age and death. No suffering, no craving, no extinction, no path, no wisdom, no attainment.
This section is a core teaching and reveals the koan of life and death that is at the base of Zen. Dharma is, says Kannon, "emptiness". In Judaism we might call this Ein Sof, in Christianity, the Universal Godhead. It points to the fundamental underlying reality of all things: process, evolvement, unfolding, etc., on an infinite level. In such an understanding, nothing has a permanent, fixed, or of a separate reality. Everything is intimately interconnected and is always, always, changing.

Secondly, the sutra teaches us that all of our senses and the organs we use to sense, all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, in short, everything we think we know, is also "empty." Life and death, old age, youth, suffering, even enlightenment itself has no reality separate from all reality, the reality of constant process.

So?

So, let go, forget about it. Just be who you are, when you are, now. We suffer when we attach to a notion of reality, and expectation of ourselves, or others, or the world. We suffer when we think that our thoughts are actual reflections of reality and that this reality is it.

If we realize the truth of this teaching, we see these manifestations for what they are and can set them aside in order to open ourselves to the buddha within. This buddha is the buddha of infinite life. Life without death, yet life where death is occurring moment to moment, thus allowing ourselves the possibility of being born and re-born in each and every moment of our existence, and as part of the Infinite Everything, being born and re-born eternally as starstuff.
Quite something, this sutra. Don't worry, be happy.

Be well.