Floating Isolated Concepts

Actually, I don't think I explained the problem of dead language very well last time. But it is always a challenge to explain such things, you can never get it perfectly right, it is always a kind of attempt to get close to what you mean...

I think we could say if there are some isolated floating concepts in your head, like buddha, truth, masters, right, wrong... if these words are isolated concepts without any connection to real life, we may be locked, these floating, isolated concepts are trying to lock our mind so it cannot think freely. Let's forget about Buddhist words for a while and take the word "love". If you get stuck thinking about "love", if you think what love is or what love is not, you cannot express actual love. Love becomes a dead concept in your head, but you firmly believe it is something absolutely real. It must exist somewhere, but you don't think it is happening now. So you are sitting next to a lovely person in a café, but if you are stuck with the idea about love, you either think that it is love going on in front of you or you think it is not love. But either the idea of love or not love is not actually love. When you forget about love, love can happen. Actual love. Love, actually. Not dreams. And it is the same with buddha or awakening. There are words "buddha" or "awakening: and there is actual buddha and actual awakening. The latter doesn't depend on our ideas about such things. When you open your mind, there is buddha, there is awakening. When you ask yourself : "Is this awakening?" You may be trapped. But when a sincere student asks a teacher sincerely and their mind is open, it is also awakening. There is no difference between asking where the salt is and asking what awakening is.  But when you don't believe the salt is in the kitchen, you cannot taste it. When you don't believe you are awakened, you cannot experience yourself completely. Of course, when we act, we naturally forget our sticky concepts and the awakening is there. But when we start to think about it, when we get stuck again, intellectually, we could say, awakening is gone. But even saying awakening is gone is only an idea. Has anyone ever seen a gone awakening? Gone awakening may be a big delusion. Awakening that has just appeared may be a great delusion. So if these are only words, if we only deal with concepts without any connection to our real experience, this article is a big piece of junk. But when we open our minds, if these words help to open our minds and move from concepts to experience, then such words, such teaching may be helpful. But teaching is never helpful if it is only formulas, concepts or ideas.                      

We should not forget that Buddhism doesn't teach ideas, it uses ideas to teach our own experience, to teach our everyday life. So what I think or what you think is not as important as what we experience. So if we have an idea what Buddha is, we should forget it. Then we can act and express what it is freely. When we have an idea what love is, we should forget it, too, and then we can express it everywhere we go. It may seem that because I am angry with some of my students at school, I don't like them. But I don't think "I don't like them". Because I just act, I actually love them. I am angry because I love them.

At the end I would like to quote master Shunryu Suzuki, who said: "We don't practice in order to become buddhas. We practice because we already are buddhas." So when Buddha Gautama attained the truth he realized he had always been a buddha. But that concept of buddha didn't bother him any more. Before he was asking what the truth is, but later the concept of truth was not something to worry about. So because we already are buddhas, we don't have to worry about the truth. And because we are already buddhas, we may have some questions about the truth. When we ask openly, when we learn openly, we attain openly. When we attain openly, there is nothing to stick to, nothing to point to. Nowhere to stop and get stuck. So then it matters whether we have washed our bowl yet or not. Such things matter the most.