The Art of Zen Living

The days are long, but the years are short.

Over at The Happiness Project, Gretchin is talking about the third splendid truth.  Which I’ve quoted above.  I should also clarify that when I say All Things Mulch, I’m not talking about garden supplies.  Mulch is my male cat, pictured to the left.

Yoda, of course, is the little green jedi guy that chided Luke:

“All his life has he looked away—to the horizon, to the sky, to the future. Never his mind on where he was, on what he was doing….”

Wow.

What is the Present Moment, anyway?  To my mind, it’s the unchanging now.  Time is something that we have invented to help up make sense of the ever changing flux and flow that happens inside the unchanging Present Moment.

I know, right?  Makes my head hurt a little just thinking through that sentence.  Let me put it a different way.  Right now, in the present moment, I am writing this blog post.  Also in the Present Moment the Buddha attained enlightenment.  Also in the Present Moment, Jesus Christ hangs on the cross.  Truman gives the order to drop the first atomic bomb.  The first atomic bomb detonates.  The Spartans defend the pass at Thermopylae.  Babylon falls.  Rome rises.  All happening in the unchanging Present Moment.

So why do we spend so little time there?  Why do we always look away - to the future and to the past?

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There’s an old proverb, it goes something like this.  A Zen Master was asked how his life changed when he became enlightened.  He replied “Well, before enlightenment, I would carry water and chop wood.  After I became enlightened, I carry water, and chop wood.”

It’s an interesting statement to meditate upon.  What I’m going to write next is just my take on this, I don’t claim that I’m right or wrong, just that my conclusions means something to me.

The subtle subtext is that before he became enlightened, he did those things because he was told to, without understanding why.  Once he became enlightened, he understood that those were the things that needed to be done.  Buddhism is both straight forward and convoluted.  It’s this duality, perhaps, that I find appealing.  Buddhism asks us to accept and embrace our own duality in order to transcend our duality.  The irony is that once we do transcend our duality, what we do is what we’ve always done.  We just do it differently.  I think I’m more confused now than when I started writing this, so I hope I’m not being too convoluted.

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