16 October 2012

A New Task Begins

Tonight during rounds I will go down, offer incense, do prostrations, take my seat in the doksuan room where the teacher usually sits, and ready myself to give daisan for the first time.  Maybe someone will come down, maybe not.  Even if they don't, the monitor will at least stop in to get the ball rolling, and I think that'll be strange enough.

I hope I never forget the feeling I have now, a feeling of utter inadequacy, inexperience and cluelessness.  I'm not nervous at all.  I'm just soberly cognizant of the weakness of my own practice, the lapses of body, speech and mind I all too easily fall into, the myriad ways in which I've lost sight of the Dharma.

And then I remind myself that it's not about me.  It's about my Dharma brothers and sisters seeing themselves.  If I'm doing this right, they should see nothing but their own best selves reflected back at them.  If I'm doing this right, what I have to say should strike them as something they have always known but perhaps had just forgotten about.

At least that's how I've felt in the daisans and dokusans I've gone through.  As I left the room, I always knew that what I'd just heard I'd always known, and that our little interchange was just so much remembering together the truth of the world and ourselves, the truth of dukkha, its origin, its cessation, and the path that leads to its cessation.  Never have I left dokusan with anything other than a "right as rain" feeling.  Never.  Not once. 

I sincerely hope that by some small unforeseen grace anyone who leaves daisan from here on out will find themselves feeling pretty much the same.

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