Yuanwu (1063-1135)

When your vision penetrates through and your use of it is clear, you are spontaneously able to turn without freezing up or getting stuck amid all kinds of lightning-fast changes and complex interactions and interlocking intricacies. You do not establish any views or keep to any mental states; you move with a mighty flow, so that “when the wind moves, the grasses bend down.”

When you enter into enlightenment right where you are, you penetrate to the profoundest source. You cultivate this realization till you attain freedom of mind, harboring nothing in your heart. Here there is no “understanding” to be found, much less “not understanding.”

You go on like this twenty-four hours a day, unfettered, free from all bonds. Since from the first you do not keep to subject and object or self and others, how could there be any “buddhadharma?” This is the realm of no mind, no contrived activity, and no concerns. How can this be judged with mere worldly intelligence and knowledge and discrimination and learning, if the fundamental basis is lacking?

Did Bodhidharma actually bring this teaching when he came from the West? All he did was to point out the true nature that each and every person inherently possesses, to enable people to thoroughly emerge clear and pure from the orbit of delusion and not be stained and defiled by all their erroneous knowledge, consciousness, false thoughts, and judgments.

“Study must be true study.” When you find a genuine teacher of the Way, they will not lead you into a den of weeds; they will cut through directly so you can meet with realization. You will be stripped of the sweaty shirt (of the ego) that is clinging to your flesh so your heart is enabled to become empty and open, without the slightest sense of ordinary and holy, and without any external seeking, so that you become profoundly clear and still, genuine, and true.

Then even the thousand sages cannot place you. You attain a state that is unified and pure and naked, and pass through to the other side of the empty room. There even the Primordial Buddha is your descendant, so how could you seek any more from others?

Ever since the ancestral teachers, all the true adepts have been like this. Take the example of the Sixth Patriarch. He was a man from a frontier area in the south who sold firewood for a living, an illiterate. When he met the Fifth Patriarch face to face, he opened his heart and openly passed through to freedom.

The saints and sages live mixed in among the ordinary people, but even so, it is necessary to use appropriate means to reveal this matter that makes no separation between the worthy and the ignorant and is already inherent in all people.

Once you merge your tracks into the stream of Zen, you spend your days silencing your mind and studying with your whole being. You realize that this Great Cause is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you enhance your clarity of mind.

Your potential for enlightened perception is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times. What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate through freely in all directions and arrive at peace and security free from doubt and attain the stage of great potential and great function.

This work is located precisely in your own inner actions. It is just a matter of being in the midst of the interplay of the myriad causal conditions every day, in the confusion of the red dusts, amid favorable and adverse circumstances and gain and loss, appearing and disappearing in their midst, without being affected and “turned around” by them, but on the contrary, being able to transform them and “turn them around.”

When you are leaping with life and water cannot wet you, this is your own measure of power. You reach an empty, solidified silence, but there is no duality between emptiness and form or silence and noise. You equalize all sorts of wondrous sayings and perilous devices and absolute perceptions; ultimately there is no gain or loss, and it is all your own to use.

When you go on “grinding and polishing” like this for a long time, you are liberated right in the midst of birth and death, and you look upon the world’s useless reputation and ruinous profit as mere dust in the wind, as a dream, as a magical apparition, as an optical illusion. Set free, you pass through the world. Isn’t this what it means to be a great saint who has emerged from the dusts of sensory attachments?

Yuanwu (1063-1135)

excerpted from Zen Letters – Teachings of Yuanwu-Translated by J.C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary

These letters were written by the Zen teacher known as Yuanwu to various friends, disciples, and associates – to women as well as to men, to people with families and worldly careers as well as to monks and nuns, to advanced adepts as well as to beginning seekers. Yuanwu is best known as the author of the single most famous Zen book, The Blue Cliff Record, a collection of meditation cases with prose and verse comments. Here in the letters, Yuanwu delivers the Zen message in a more accessible form, in direct person-to-person lessons.

Once again we begin in the Blue Sky or Mighty Flow as expressed by Yuanwu, and while we read the words, we stretch to enter and feel the essence of a message that is carried by a fine thread of intention through time…

Explore and live from this wide, broad, spacious, expansive spirit and break through the eggshell of ego. Our job is not to get lost in the correctness of technique, the rightness or wrongness of a point of view, the details of a task, any of which would destroy the spaciousness. Thus, we create a whole different way to view situations and the world, a new horizon to relate to. This won't limit us in the way our habitual way of seeing and relating has.

Our practice is to keep that sense of space. Much like the open space parks we enjoy, this is the cultivation of open space mentality. An open and vast mind can see the spaciousness inherent in any situation. Technique is only a means of strengthening while you practice remaining spacious. Practice strengthens your mind so you don't get lost. Our aim is not to live in the world of form alone, but to see the world of form clearly and then to be able to act from a sense of balance between form and spaciousness.

Return to a bright, clear, immovable state of mind, one unmoved by circumstances. When the unexpected happens, it's like water changing shapes and adapting to the circumstances it finds itself in. It is a very skillful state where no doer is necessary to perform actions. Your training is to at all times be in a state unmoved by outer circumstances, to see clearly and respond spontaneously and skillfully.

May my mind be clear
May I live fearlessly 
In the Mind of Readiness
May I rely on nothing
Save Emptiness.

May your New Year be filled with joy and gratitude,

Elana, Scribe for Daily Zen