zen316

Sorry functioning in the so-called ‘real world’ is recognizing those different perceptions and opinions, the conventions that we use. Driving on the left or the right, what something’s worth: those are just society’s fictions that we use to get through a day and to function as a human group. And if we hold them lightly in that way, if we loosen our grip on the world, rather than it becoming ‘less real’, we mysteriously find ourselves more totally at home with it. If you love the world completely, you let go of it. The more tightly you hold on to it and want to keep and own it, the more alienation you create between yourself and it. That’s the principle of letting go or non-attachment; you’re not trying to nullify your life and your feelings out of a dismissal of the world. Rather, ironically and mysteriously, when you let go of the world you find yourself at home in it. That’s the human drama. You still have all your desires and ambitions, but you don’t grasp them. Aj

Solzhenitsyn once mused that it would be so easy if evil was an absolute and we could just isolate it and wipe it out, unfortunately: ‘The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.’ The Buddha’s teachings also indicate that there is no such thing as an absolute evil. According to Buddhist myth, Mahā-Moggallāna was Māra (the devil) in at least one of his previous lives (M 50.8); that great saint, both fully enlightened and a chief disciple of the Buddha, had at one point been Satan, the Lord of Lies. Or there is the example of Aṅgulimāla, a mass murderer who became a disciple of the Buddha and an Arahant (liberated being); and not only an Arahant, but also protector of expectant mothers and their babies. It is a beautiful irony that 2,500 years later, his verses are still chanted to impart blessings to pregnant women. All this shows that we can never be irremediably lost. Even if we think these examples are just fairy stories, their symbol- is

trouble. As Ajahn Mun’s ‘Ballad of Liberation from the Five Khandhas’ says: Wanting what’s good, without stop: That’s the cause of suffering. It’s a great fault: the strong fear of bad. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are poisons to the mind, like foods that inflame a high fever. The Dhamma isn’t clear because of our basic desire for good. Desire for good, when it’s great, drags the mind into turbulent thought until the mind gets inflated with evil, and all its defilements proliferate. The greater the error, the more they flourish, taking one further and further away from the genuine Dhamma. (Ven. Thanissaro, trans.) Also, in the Verses of the Third Zen Patriarch: When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity. (Richard B. Clarke, trans.)