A Talk to the Assembly (Part Three)

Don’t remember what I’ve said, and consider it right. Today I speak this way, but then tomorrow I’ll speak otherwise. As soon as you’re thus, I am not thus; when you’re not thus, then I am thus. Where will you search out my abiding place? Since I myself don’t even know, how can anyone else find where I stay?
This is the living gate: you can enter only when you’ve put to death your fabricated “reality.” Yet students consider paying homage to the Buddha, upholding the scriptures, and disciplining themselves in body, mouth, and mind, as their sustenance, hoping to find realization. What does this have to do with it? They are like fools intent on going west to get something in the east – the farther they go, the farther away they are; the greater the hurry, the greater the delay. This is the gate of the great dharma: unconditioned, undefiled, without accomplishment. If you arouse the slightest notion of gaining experience of it, you are running off in the opposite direction. How can you hope for it, wanting to rely on some petty, contrived accomplishments?
It’s not a forced action: the dharma is fundamentally like this. Don’t take a liking to other people’s marvels – the marvelous misleads people.

This morning it is raining so beautifully.

Tomorrow…one never knows; it may be sunny, the clouds may have disappeared.

This morning the cuckoo is continuously singing, tomorrow it may have gone. Life is such. You cannot ask permanency, consistency, that things should always remain the same.

Watching life you will come to know the very secret, and you will also become aware that mind is not functioning according to life. Mind believes in consistency; it wants that it should rain every morning, just the same. Mind is not able to cope with the unknown, with the spontaneous, with the ever-renewing existence.

The disparity between mind and life is the whole problem. Either you listen to the mind…then you live in misery, because life is not going to fulfill the demands of the mind. Unfulfilled, miserable, your life will become just a long drawn-out tragedy. But nobody else except you is responsible. You listened to the wrong adviser: you should have listened to life, not to mind.

Mind is a small mechanism, good for day-to-day affairs, good for the marketplace, but if you want to enter into the vastness of existence mind is absolutely incapable. But you are accustomed to the mind, and even when you are seeking for truth or for love or for the ultimate meaning you go on carrying your old mind, which is absolutely a hindrance; it is not a help on the way.