You Must See for Yourself!

(Photo by Laura Williams)

When you set your body on the meditation bench, it is no more than silencing and emptying your mind and investigating with your whole being. Just make your mind and thought clarify and become still.

A fine place to do active meditation work is amid confusion and disturbances. When you do active meditation, you must penetrate through the heights and the depths, without omitting anything. The whole essential being appears ready-made before you, and it no longer arises from anywhere else. It is just this one Great Potential, turning smoothly, and steadily. Why talk any more about "worldly phenomena" and "enlightened truth"?

If you maintain a uniform equilibrium over months and years, naturally your stance will be true and solid. You will experience realization, like water being poured into water, like gold being traded for gold. Everything will be equalized in One Suchness, profoundly real, and pure. This is knowing how to live.

Just do not give birth to a single thought: let go and become crystal clear. As soon as any notion of right and wrong and self and others and gain and loss are present, do not follow them. Then you will be personally studying with your own enlightened teacher.

If you do that, what worry is there that this work will not be accomplished? You must see for yourself!

-Ch'an Master Yuanwu, Zen Letters