Friday, December 31, 2010

Cold and Hot

A monk asked Tozan “ How can we escape the cold and heat?” Tozan replied “Why not go where there is no cold and heat?” “Is there such a place?” the monk asked.  Tozan commented, “When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through.”

The world in which we, these bodies, live is a place of dissatisfaction. We are to hot or to cold, to thin or to fat, to young or to old. We strive for perfection, fight and dig our way to the top of given situations only to find that, once there, we are not fulfilled.  As the Heart Sutra says:

Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.
Sensation, conception, discrimination, awareness, are likewise like this.

When we are involved a given drama of life we need to be in it thoroughly, and then let it go. Clinging is what gives rise to suffering. When you are cold be cold, when you are hot be hot. Do not cling to the cold or hot just be. Do not cling to the drama live it and let it go. Become the master of your life not the servant.  

Thus the bodhisattva lives Prajna Paramita,
with no hindrance in the mind; no hindrance therefore no fear.

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