Zen practice, and the freedom it brings, begins by unconditionally accepting our life, our situation and events without superimposing our desires or some attachment to a particular outcome. The marriage of traditional Buddhism with Taoism in China in the fifth century gave birth to Zen. The Taoist phrase “wu wei” is allowing things to happen naturally. Our insistence that events adhere to some ego based concept of our life is the root cause of our suffering. Zen says, follow the flow of the river and let life live through you. Learn to recognize and utilize the energy born out of nature. To freely flow requires letting go of our habit mind with all it’s attachments, wanting things to be a certain way. An earnest and continuous examination of what my teacher Zen Master Seung Sahn used to call “opposites thinking” is a good starting place. Look closely at your proclivity towards praise and blame, loss and gain, like and dislike as examples. When we function from a not moving fulcrum in our daily activities, everything we set out to do can be accomplished without being rigidly attached to some mentally predetermined outcome. This is true freedom. Carelessly allowing results to dominate our day to day actions is a dysfunctional way of attempting to control the uncontrollable. When we surrender to the natural cycle of things we are acknowledging that change as a universal principle is constantly informing our existence.
An ancient Chinese poem titled The Human Route says in part:
“Coming empty handed, going empty handed that is human.
When you are born, where do you come from?
When you die, where do you go?
Life is like a floating cloud which appears.
Death is like a floating cloud that disappears.”
Calamity and good fortune, birth and death, are simply two aspects of this oneness, this flow of life energy. Quit investing in ephemera and learn to stay in the moment. Don’t be pushed and pulled around by the illusion of your mundane goals. Realize that doing so only dissipates your life energy.
In closing I’d like to offer a quote from Hakuin Zenji. “When one learns to be calm and tranquil, without turbulence, the ancestral energy adapts itself spontaneously, producing an all-pervasive and unbroken qi energy. Know that this is the secret to preserving life.”
Ji Haeng Zen Master – The Desert Dragon