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A Koan of Matthew [1]

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Date: 2025-01-05

There are many koans that don’t make sense on the surface, where one needs to be well along in training to take them on. And then there are those that are entirely obvious and clear in their wording, where the problem is wanting to do whatever they recommend. The karma of greed is the most obvious of them all, and still sticks in the throat like the proverbial red hot iron ball that one cannot swallow or cough up.

19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: 21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Matthew 6

We all know of people stuck in the deepest Hell of greed, of course.

This knowledge leads immediately to another koan, the Precept

Do not be proud of yourself and devalue others.

Some time I must tell you about the Smell of Enlightenment, especially pride in kensho. But you don’t need to have a kensho to get stuck in pride, not at all.

For hard koans, consider the more advanced stages of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, culminating in Returning to the World with Bliss-Bestowing Hands.

Admit it. You have no idea what gifts he has for you in that sack, nor even how to think about them.

Then there is the Heart Sutra telling us that all of the Buddha’s teachings are empty of self, so that we always have to go beyond them. I could cite hundreds more, but I think you get the basic idea.

For koans that have both surface sense and another meaning after one has shuffled off the delusion of self, you can look at any of the Buddha’s teachings as recorded in the Suttas, starting with the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Three Refuges, and the Precepts, and then applying such understanding to the multitude of questions he was asked, including the utterly useless ones. We all know a lot of the ordinary facts about birth, old age, dread diseases, and death, or about attachments to the karma of greed, hatred, and delusion, where denying the existence of such karma is the very worst karma of all.

But it is not enough to know about such facts. We want to act on them. We want to put such problems aside so that we can see into the heart of the matter.

Put aside any notions of kensho/satori/nirvana. You can’t make any more sense of what you have not experienced than a person blind from birth can imagine seeing colors and shapes, or a profoundly deaf person can imagine hearing music.

These things can take care of themselves when the time comes. Meditate on yourself. Allow thoughts, feelings, emotions to arise, and neither try to push them away nor get embroiled in them. This work is necessarily as hard as possible, but no harder.

The thing is, you get better at it with practice. You will start off having trouble with certain thoughts, but their hold on you will fade if you make the effort. Someday, if you are serious, you can let it all go at once. This mind can be Buddha, if you like. Or there can be no mind and no Buddha.

This is what Dogen Zenji did when Nyojo Zenji told him

You must let fall body and mind.

Dogen then returned to Japan as the greatest Zen master of the age, and then discovered that he needed far more training than that in order to cope with the delusions that others brought to him. Lifelong, endless training.

Similarly, Shakyamuni Buddha had a thundering great awakening under the Bodhi Tree,

The picture shows the Bodhisattva calling the Earth to witness his vow the day before his Awakening

and then spent months on his next personal koan, how to teach what cannot be explained.

The Buddha working on his second koan, symbolically protected by a Naga king

The Blessed One is also on record helping a blind monk thread a needle, and when the monk asked him why he bothered, saying

Nobody is more eager for merit than I.

You can’t say fairer than that, can you?

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