Mantra

 "All equally empty; all equally to be loved; all come a Buddha"

This is the "prayer" Jack Kerouac (as Ray Smith) gives Gary Snyder (as Japhy Ryder) in "Dharma Bums".

It has become my go-to mantra during this practice period somewhat randomly as well as intentionally when I get all judgmental about others as I sometimes do. As I did yesterday. Oh my.

There was a Dharma talk by a big Sanskrit scholar from out of town, and it got me so, shall we say wound up that I clicked off the Zoom, went to the other room and fumed for a while. And then when I clicked on the Zoom again, he was still there with his "I know everything about everything, and you don't" attitude and presentation, and I just wanted to push him off the engawa into the mud in the hopes that he'd come to recognize a scrap of reality for once in his life. (There's a story about a Zen master in Japan whose disciple asked a question and in answer, the master pushed him off the veranda of the zendo and into the mud after a rainstorm. The disciple gained enlightenment at that moment: "Mud is better than words." It may be a subtle thing, but it is very Zen.)

This scholar much beloved at the Zen center hosting this practice period went on and on using several trillions of words an hour and seemed to say... well, approximately nothing. The text of A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life is not so much opaque as it is indirect as I alluded to in a previous post. This makes it useful to some, not so much to others, but not something that needs or benefits from having every jot and tittle dissected, examined, and then re-animated "correctly". But dude is a PhD scholar. In the academy, it's what they do, it's what they have to do to make a living. And then there will be endless arguments over what constitutes "correct." So on and so on and so forth and so forth, endlessly. But... but... dude reads and speaks Sanskrit; reads and speaks Pali. He knows whereof he speaks. And you, benighted ones, don't. 

Face it!

Well, by the end of his... talk... yes he did end it because he had to go on to another very important meeting... I was laughing so hard. I know it's bad. My whole reaction to this talk ran counter to our teachings of equanimity, charity and wisdom. Among other things. And not judging or bad mouthing another. But there I was, laughing my fool head off as he prattled endlessly and so many of the other participants (a number of whom are PhDs themselves) cooed and bowed before him. Not me. Nope.

So bad I was. And the more I held on to this reaction of mine, the more it seemed to eat at me. Why? I was outside doing some work-practice putting the side yard back together after a succession of wind-storms, and I was still thinking about this talk-waste-of-time, rolling it over and over in my mind, while I was supposed to be in Zen space doing the work that needed doing, and I sat down in a chair in the yard to catch my breath and practice zazen for a moment, pondering how stupid I was to hold onto, to be attached to my reaction to this Dharma talk, and almost immediately came the mantra:

All equally empty; all equally to be loved; all equally come a Buddha

It's obvious how spare and lean that is. It's very Zen. Also, words are left out and the mantra is a question, too... "all" what? for example. And for me, it is a nearly perfect distillation of the teachings over the ages, starting -- but not starting -- with the teachings of Sakyamuni Buddha himself. It's like the whole of the rule and the law of the Bodhisattva way of life. Shantideva's instructions boil down to just about that. But sometimes it might take a whack over the head, a sudden toss into the mud, or a trillion words to get to that realization.

And with the mantra, my reaction was gone -- not gone, because I can still conjure it up as I had to do to write this. The point is, my reaction isn't in control of my mind any more. And that, dear friends, is what all of us are getting at one way or another in our Zen or other Buddhist practice.

May we live long enough to bring all beings to Awakening on the path to Buddhahood.