During the meditation practice tonight, a practitioner had shared a particular poem which was endearing to him. It was a Zen poem which described a nun who struggled so hard to carry a pail of water later to find the bucket shatter, along with the water and the moon she had been carrying with her the whole time. I thought this to be a beautiful metaphor for spiritual practice: how we struggle so hard and so long under the impression of having to 'get' somewhere, to sustain a certain modicum of being or practice, only to find the whole thing to be delusion. It seems that the harder one tries to get somewhere, the more one is just using the mind to discriminate between a starting point and a future destination far away. And all too often this emphasis on trying to make something a vehicle only gets a person into the realm of ego.
It is significantly only when the 'vehicle' is shattered that the illusions cherished by the nun start to fall out along with the moon and the water. At that point, even the moon itself is seen only as a reflection which comes and goes with the water's reflection. At that point, there is no longer even a need to cherish what is only an appearance or a reflection, and one can be freed of burdens altogether.
I suppose it's not easy to achieve this in real life, because what we see is often only a reflection of how others might or might not be seeing us at the time. The images are not reliable because they are bound to change with perspective. So what, in the midst of all these experiences, is steadfast and reliable? When one returns to the source of the reflections (the mind that sees, that is already awakened), do these images have such a power over the person? The same goes with words and sounds. What are these but impermanent, passing reflections which are bound to arise and fall from one moment to the next?
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