[AUDIO AND TEXT]
In the New Testament, we have Jesus stating his relationship with God in several places. For instance:
Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. (Jn 14:10, NIV)
And this, announcing the coming of the Holy Spirit:
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. (Jn 14:20)
These clear statements could be said to have filtered down into the modern analogy often put forward by and for Zen practitioners, to articulate our relationship with the Infinite: “We are waves, and the ocean is us.” Or, in the words of the ancient poem, the “Jewel Mirror Samadhi” (a staple of Soto Zen practice):
You are not it; in truth it is you.
Let’s take that again: “You [the waves] are not it; in truth it [the ocean] is you.” That is, our phenomenal selves – our bodies, ideas, thoughts, feelings, actions, everything we bring into the world – are in fact the Infinite in action. They are how the Infinite expresses itself in the world we see, the life we experience.
The contemporary Zen teacher James Ishmael Ford, who says he experiences these few words viscerally, suggests that the “You” in this line of poetry might be changed to “We,” to include all of us (see WE ARE NOT IT. BUT IN TRUTH. IT IS US. IT IS YOU. IT IS ME. A Zen Meditation | James Ford (patheos.com)). Ford Roshi goes on:
On the spiritual way, at least as it is taught within the Zen schools … we come to the loss of all our ideas about ourselves and the world. We tumble into the great empty. Then we find reconstruction, a rebirth. It manifests first as nature itself, just the world, or rather the worlds, and stars, and all the great mess of the universe. Then we return as a part of this great play of things. We are ancient and we are new. We are the same as we’ve always been. Caught up in our wounds and longings. But the healing is also found. Found as nothing other than the being we are. That is you. That is me. …
You are not God. But in truth, God is you. The secret of the nondual. The secret of our lives. In some true-as-can-be way, I knew this line from before I could memorize. It is a truth that is identical to the molecules in my body.
What I hear these words saying, as we call upon our East-West tradition, is humbling: We are not It, and yet there is no boundary between It and us. Form is exactly emptiness. Emptiness is exactly form. Yes: We are not God, but in truth, God is us. And our practice serves to enlarge our heart-mind to embrace this Infinite, the allness of it all.
James Ford ends his meditation (and I will end this talk) with a clear statement of how this experience of relationship can show up in our behavior. He writes:
Now we wander freely. … We bring a good word to this hurting world. We reach out a hand as we can. We are the infinite itself. But we are just this moment, with all the limitations being a moment brings…
We are not it. But in truth. It is us. It is you. It is me.
Let us take this to heart … as we practice.
Thank you.
EMPTY CLOUD ZEN 