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Being Upright: Zen Meditation and Bodhisattva Precepts (Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts)
by
Reb Anderson
Read between
June 23 - June 25, 2019
Helping others entails learning how you are helped. In order to heal others, you must learn to heal yourself. Learning how to give to yourself is part of learning how to give to others. If you are stingy with yourself, you will be stingy with others. When you understand how everything is given to you, you will be able to give everything to others.
When you see a block of marble or a piece of steel, you see it as a dharma gate.
To become intimate with someone means to meet that person or that being without taking all the knowing to yourself. It means entering into a relationship where you don’t know exactly what’s happening, where you don’t decide unilaterally what’s going on. If your view is the only one that matters to you, then there will be no intimacy.
Once you externalize the world and feel separate from it, you feel isolated and threatened, and so instinctively you try to grasp it. This grasping creates anxiety or pain.
Being willing to be me means letting go of me. As long as I’m holding on to me, I really can’t be myself fully.
Letting go doesn’t mean that you deliberately set about to change or manipulate your state of mind: it means that you don’t hold on to it. When you’re feeling anxious, you can practice wishing to be free of anxiety, fear, and anger. Sometimes when you do this, you feel more relaxed and less anxious. But it also might intensify your anxiety and bring you closer to seeing its roots. If you wish yourself well while you’re feeling anxious, then that naturally leads you to the source of the anxiety. If you try to get rid of your anxiety, then you’re distracting yourself from facing it. You’re not
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The greatest darkness for the human mind is to believe that you never do anything wrong or hurtful or stupid.
Our present response must be in complete harmony with the way of all buddha ancestors, while at the same time being the most creative and appropriate response to our present circumstances. If we don’t attach to the traditional teachings and do not deviate from them at all, then how will we practice?
To “practice all that is good” means “to wholeheartedly live life based on freedom from the illusion of an independent self.” It is to awaken fully to the interdependent self, and to express such a self.
If there are laws that prohibit abortion, which force a woman to have a baby even against her will or better judgment, then there should be laws that ensure a decent home for the mother and child.
If you accept credit for work that someone else has done, if you don’t acknowledge the help that someone has given you, this is taking what is not given.
Throughout the meal this monk tasted the one flavor of buddha’s teaching: the flavor of liberation, the flavor of self-forgetting, and the flavor of release from suffering. This poor monk, who was unable to think of any way to change his state, came to be thus. Being unable to control his experience, being unable to escape from his experience, he just sat upright in the midst of his experience of torment.
Doing something to try to improve yourself is not this bodhisattva precept. Trying to improve others is not this bodhisattva precept. This precept is about liberating self and others from self-concern. It is precisely about not using anything to improve anybody, and using everything to help everybody. This precept is about dropping all self-concern and appreciating all beings just as they are. When this selfish monk accepts himself and allows himself just to be himself, all his energies turn to the welfare of others. Being himself with no desire to improve himself or his circumstances shows
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If we hold to the view that the precepts exist or do not exist, or that the precept vein flows through one being but not through another, then the precept vein is dead in us.
