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Removing labels, seeing the original face
When astronauts look at the Earth from space, they see it is very beautiful because it is fragile, but human beings often forget to cherish what is present; only when separated do they feel love. Many people regret being born 2,600 years after the World-Honored One, but in reality, many who lived at the same time and served as His attendants still felt resentment and left. The World-Honored One sometimes admonished, or even sent away 300 monks because they were as noisy as a fish market, but that admonition was based on love and the desire for a pure Sangha. Spatial and temporal distance cannot prevent a meeting if there are sufficient conditions, whereas without conditions, even sitting opposite each other, one does not see the other.
We often live with mental images and accumulated concepts instead of touching reality. For example, we see a star as a small speck of light, but science sees it as a massive ball of fire thousands of light-years away. The practice is to shatter wrong perceptions in order to discover:
- Original face: one’s true face.
- The true person of no rank: the true person without a position. Zen Master Linji once declared this concept to be a “stick of dried dung” to prevent disciples from seeking it through the intellect.
- True nature: the true nature of the object, unobscured by the creations of the mind (mental constructions).
Suffering and war, as in Vietnam, arise because humans stick labels (such as Communist, American puppet) on one another to destroy the label without seeing the real human being. The play “The Path of Return Continues the Journey” recounts the story of five workers from the School of Youth for Social Service who were unjustly shot and killed simply because they were wrongly labeled. The purpose of looking deeply is to remove these labels; just walking one-third of the way and removing some illusions, we already have a lot of happiness.
