Principles Of Calligraphy

Forgetfulness

Zen is your very nature; there is no way of throwing it away. All that you can do with Zen is two things: you can remember, or you can forget. This is the only possibility. If you forget your nature, your buddhahood…this is the only sin in the world of Zen: forgetfulness.

Gautam Buddha’s last words on the earth have to be remembered: sammasati. Sammasati means right remembrance. His whole life is condensed into a single word, remembrance, as if on dying, he is condensing all his teachings, all his scriptures into a single word. Nobody has uttered a more significant word when dying. His last message, his whole message: sammasati, remember. And when you remember, there is no way to throw your consciousness away.

Zen is not a meditation. Zen is exactly sammasati – remembrance of your ultimateness, remembrance of your immortality, remembrance of your divineness, of your sacredness. Remembering it, and rejoicing it, and dancing out of joy that you are rooted, so deeply rooted in existence that there is no way for you to be worried, to be concerned.

Existence is within you and without you – it is one whole.

Let me explain to you what zazen is. Zazen is a deep unoccupied ness – not doing anything outwardly, not doing anything inwardly. It is not even meditation because when you meditate you are making some sort of effort, you are trying to do something: chanting a mantra, remembering God, or even remembering yourself. But these efforts create ripples, these efforts create vibrations and your sitting becomes corrupted. Then your sitting is not innocent. Zazen means: sit, and just sit, nothing else. There is no doing on the part of the body, no doing on the part of the mind. It’s a state of non-doing. That does not mean that you are fast asleep, because sleep is – a doing. That does not mean that you are dead, because if you are dead you cannot just sit. That simply means that you are tremendously alive, intensely alive, a fire of being, but not moving anywhere – a reservoir of energy in a deep awaiting. You are just waiting for something to happen, not even expecting, because expectation will again create a ripple of thought and the mind will start functioning. Everything is suspended. You breathe, and that’s all that you do. But that is not a doing, because breathing goes on its own accord. You have not to do anything but just sit silently.

The day you see your flowers opening up and releasing their fragrance, you have come to know for the first time something that can be called spiritual. And it is not a goal. The trees are not growing towards some goal, they are growing towards their potential, which is intrinsic, which is hidden in them. They want to come to a point where what is hidden becomes available to the whole of existence. What is in the seed comes into the flower. Enlightenment is your flowering. Meditation will bring you to the point from where your existence takes a new dimension – the dimension of enlightenment. You can call it satchidanand.

That is the meaning of the word ’zazen’. ’Za’ means sitting doing nothing. And ’zen’ means: in that sitting when you are not doing anything you fall upon yourself, you encounter yourself, you see yourself. That is zen, DHYANA, meditation. The word ’zazen’ is beautiful. ’Sitting and looking into yourself’ – that is the meaning of it.

Man is more than the sum total of his acts, his thoughts, his feelings. Behind the acts, thoughts and feelings there is another man – that which is, that which essentially IS. But many seldom if ever show themselves in their essential being. Very few ever reach to that point of their essential being-hood, to their very ground of being. Those who reach, only they know that life is a benediction. A sheer joy, eternal celebration.