Rain

With palms together,


Good Morning Everyone,



This morning the air feels heavy. The rainy season is fast approaching. In the desert southwest we typically get rain, often heavy, in the afternoons each day through August and sometimes into September. It is a pleasant season overall, cooler due to the afternoon overcast sky, but the humidity rises and in can get quite uncomfortable, especially in large black robes.



Yesterday, we held our Zen discussion group and the section of the Platform Sutra we addressed was the Fifth Patriarch’s request for his students to show their understanding and the senior disciple’s poetic reply. He writes on the wall,



“The body is a bodhi tree

The mind is like a standing mirror

Always try to keep it clean

Don’t let it gather dust.”



As a corollary, I introduced a koan Student that John S and I were working on, Master Langye’s “Original Purity.” This is Case 6, from Master Dogen’s True Dharma Eye and puts forth the notion that all things appear and each of them are dharma gates: so what is purity?



These two points of ancient text stand as kyosaku. The senior disciple has part of it. He teaches us serenity and practice, but he does so with an aim: the aim of purity. Red Pine points out that the poem “is not the teaching that sets us free, but the teaching that itself becomes a burden…”(p.99).



Master Dogen’s koan offers us a way through the problem: everything is pure, everything. As Daido Loori points out, “There is nothing outside of it.”



The result? Pure and Impure lose their meaning. What is left is absolute Oneness.



Rain is not rain, it is just what we call rain; rain is just rain and it appears as though we might get some today.



Be well.