As I see it, there is nothing complicated. Just be your ordinary selves in an ordinary life, wear your robes and eat your food, and having nothing further to seek, peacefully pass your time. From everywhere you have come here; all of you eagerly seek the Buddha, the Dharma, and deliverance; you seek escape from the Three Worlds. You foolish people, if you want to get out of the Three Worlds, where then can you go?
Commentary:
As mentioned so far, there is nothing else but the Buddha, the Dharma. Whatever you may see and hear, whether you may like it or not, whether it looks right or wrong, and whatever you may do, they are all the functions of the Buddha. When you are deluded by their names and forms, they seem to be countless different things. Enlightenment is not to find something special that is somewhere unknown, so far away that it is difficult to reach and find, but to realise the fact that we are the Buddha itself. That is why Rinzai said, “There is nothing complicated. Just be your ordinary selves in an ordinary life, wear your robes and eat your food, and having nothing further to seek, peacefully pass your time”. No matter how many waves there may be in the sea, all of them are just part of the sea. “If you want to get out of the Three Worlds, where then can you go?” means that although people struggle to leave the Three Worlds that is the ocean of suffering for some other world, the Pure Land, the Three Worlds that we are anxious to escape is no other than the Pure Land we want to reach. In fact, there is no place other than it.
©Boo Ahm
All writing ©Boo Ahm. All images ©Simon Hathaway
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