Quietistic meditation is easier, naturally, but a person who practices
it will turn out to be just as insecure and petty as someone not
enlightened at all. What is equally important, "leisure-time"
meditation that separates our spiritual life from our activities is
merely hiding from reality. You cannot come home from the job and
suddenly turn on a meditation experience. He cites the case of someone
who excuses himself to meditate, but who is then so harried and tense
it does no good.
_Even should there be such a thing as . . . reaching a state where the
great illumination is released by means of dead sitting and silent
illumination . . . people are so involved in the numerous duties of
their household affairs that they have scarcely a moment in which to
practice concentrated meditation. What they do then is to plead illness
and, neglecting their duties and casting aside responsibilities for
their family affairs, they shut themselves up in a room for several
days, lock the door, arrange several cushions in a pile, set up a stick
of incense, and proceed to sit. Yet, because they are exhausted by
ordinary worldly cares, they sit in meditation for one minute and fall
asleep for a hundred, and during the little bit of meditation that they
manage to accomplish, their minds are beset by countless delusions.11
_
But what is worse, these people then blame their careers, assuming they
need more isolation. But this is like the aspiring ocean swimmer in the
tub mistakenly desiring less water.
_[They] furrow their brows, draw together their eyebrows, and before
one knows it they are crying out: "Our official duties interfere with
our practice of the Way; our careers prevent our Zen meditation. It
would be better to resign from office, discard our seals, go to some
place beside the water or under the trees where all is peaceful and
quiet and no one is about, there in our own way to practice _dhyana
_contemplation, and escape from the endless cycle of suffering." How
mistaken these people are_!12
Having determined meditation in the midst of activity is the only
meaningful practice, he next addressed the question of how to go about
it. He explained that we can do it by making our activities into
meditation.
_What is this true meditation? It is to make everything: coughing,
swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil
and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong,
into one single koan.13
_
He gave an example of how to change the implements of daily living into
a Buddhist metaphor, in this case by a warrior's making his clothes,
sword, and saddle into a meditation hall of the mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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