Posted inHenry's Messages

Message from Henry: What is This?

July 21, 2015

This never tires. This never hurts. This could never lack, or own, or want, or desire, or feel. Yet this, though it has nothing, is always fulfilled, as Dogen said.

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WHAT IS THIS?

This has no time.

This has no place.

This has no words.

This has no characteristics at all.

Anything that comes into this, dissolves and evaporates – like a snowflake in a furnace, as Kakuan said of the eighth ox-herding picture.

This is reality. This is home. This is the truth.

People don’t generally seem to know this, though it can only always be here.

It’s not here, but it’s never gone.

This connects to nothing else.

It is a ship that has docked at piers, quays, harbors constructed by religions, philosophies, practices at times – but it is not of anything, including religion, or practice.

Buddhism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Western Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, Jainism – all have sometimes found it and found ways to lead to it, to offer it some kind of anchorage. But it is not of them. None of them can possess or claim it. There is nothing to claim.

Yet it is the answer.

It doesn’t answer anything but it is the truth.

Welcome home.

You never left.

Buddha didn’t teach this. Jesus didn’t teach this. They each taught in their own way what becomes clear about the human condition because of this.

This never tires. This never hurts. This could never lack, or own, or want, or desire, or feel. Yet this, though it has nothing, is always fulfilled, as Dogen said.

The sun never touches this; the moon never shines on this.

This may seem to be the core of all. But this is everywhere, and nowhere.

What does this have to do with this world? What does it have to do with life? And what does it have to do with existence? And what does it have to do with Zen? Nothing at all. Yet the Zen path exists because of two things – human beings and this.

This depends on nothing. Everything else depends on everything.

Image Credit: Photo by Rosa Bellino, used with her permission.
Featured Image Credit: Between Red and White, by Hartwig HKD, CC BY-ND 2.0. from Flickr.com

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