Posted inHenry's Messages, Koans

Message from Henry: Dharma Gate

August 2, 2016

Everything is a Dharma door, every phenomenon, every experience. Every moment opens to infinity.

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The other day my son took me to the gym where he likes to work out. Afterward he wanted to go to the sauna. We sat down on the wooden boards. They were fiercely hot. “Wow,” I said. Even through the swim shorts it was a strong sensation, and my first impulse was to move or even get up.

“Dad!” he said with a smile. “You have to feel into it. I thought you’d know that, what with the Zen and everything.”

Oh boy. Rumbled!

He was right. That was the way: rather than pulling back, feeling in. Feel in to the undesirable sensation.

A big chunk of suffering is the not-wanting it. This is how the screens and obstacles that obstruct us in practice get burned away — through pain of one kind or another. Through being endured, neither avoided nor complained about – just endured and allowed.

*****

 What is Buddha’s great teaching? Suffering has causes. And plenty of them are internal. In the end, perhaps all of them are.

*****

 There are “Dharma gates” everywhere…

Everything is a Dharma door, every phenomenon, every experience. Every moment opens to infinity.

Everything is in that sense a koan. We do koan practice to get more practiced at the bigger view, the open life, where we are weightless, buoyed on the formless sea without name or source.

Each moment, let’s open the door. What is the door?

 

Message from Henry taken from our August 2, 2016 Newsletter
Image:  Gate, by Smoobs, cc-by-2.0, from Flickr.com

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