Return to Summer/Fall 2003
Enlightenment
from a talk given by John Holland at Providence Zen Center
Welcome to the Enlightenment Project! This is what I found on the Internet yesterday. I read that “Enlightenment is a completely themeable, highly configurable Window Manager for the X Window System” - or as we might say, for Zen practice.
There were, however, no pictures on my screen. There were no pictures, as there are sometimes, of the Buddha’s life on the outside of the meditation halls of temples in Korea. One of the pictures might show Siddhartha being confronted by an old person, a sick person, a corpse and a mendicant when he ventured away from his father’s palace. Another picture might depict Siddhartha giving up his six years of extreme forms of renunciation and asceticism. Buddhist texts say those years, “were like time spent in endeavoring to tie the air in knots.” Instead he adopted the “middle way” and went to sit under the bodhi tree. And it was there that Siddhartha was confronted by Mara, the lord of the senses, and finally attained enlightenment.
One of my favorite stories of enlightenment happened much later in China. [It is told by Jack Kornfield in A Path With Heart.] An old monk asked his master, “Please, may I go find a hut at the top of the mountain and stay there until I finish this practice?” The master, knowing that the monk was ripe, gave permission. On the way up the mountain the monk met an old man walking down carrying a big bundle. The old man asked, “Where are you going, sunim?” The monk answered, “I am going to the top of the mountain to sit and either get enlightenment or die.” Since the old man looked very wise, the monk was moved to ask, “Do you know anything about this enlightenment business?” The old man, who was really the Bodhisattva Manjusri – said to appear to people when they are ready for enlightenment – let go of his bundle, and dropped it to the ground. As in all good Zen stories, in that moment the monk was enlightened. “You mean it is that simple? Just let go and not grasp anything!” Then the newly enlightened monk looked back at the old man and asked, “So now what?” In answer, the old man reached down and picked up his bundle and walked off toward town.