The Ground of Resilience

Ho-shang Mi of Ching-chao sent a monastic to ask Yangshan: “Right in this very moment, are you dependent on enlightenment?”

Yangshan said, “There is no absence of enlightenment. Why fall into the secondary?”

—The Book of Serenity, Case 62; translated by Thomas Cleary

HO-SHANG MI was a peer of Master Yangshan, a very important Chinese master in the Zen lineage. Here he asks, In this moment, are you dependent upon enlightenment?

Enlightenment is to see into the real nature of things—the nature of the conditioned self, our unconditioned nature, time and circumstances, the whole universe—and to realize that all things have one essence, which we speak of as “emptiness.” In this original state, all of creation is present, which we speak of as “form.” Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form; these are one undivided reality.

We typically think of the path of enlightenment as a movement from dwelling within a realm of delusion, pain, and suffering to a realm that is free. We may think of enlightenment as something we don’t yet have but will obtain with realization. When the monastic sent by Ho-shang Mi asks, “Right in this very moment, are you dependent upon enlightenment?” he is asking, Is enlightenment something apart from you? Is it outside? What is it?

As practitioners, we might see ourselves as depending upon the buddhadharma, upon zazen, upon the sangha, upon the conditions necessary for practice. Let’s consider dependency from the point of view of the two truths. There is the relative realm, the world that we see and can talk about and meet every day. And there is the realm of the absolute, in which there is no time and place, no circumstance and characteristic. Within the relative world, we depend upon oxygen and food, water and warmth, sunshine and rain. We depend upon each other, upon a sufficient amount of trust and mutual respect to share this life together and make it work.