Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The ancients circulate verbal teachings of buddhas and Zen masters for the edification of later learners, with the subtlety to pull out nails, remove stakes, dissolve stickiness, and remove bonds. When it came taking care of details over and over, making unconventional changes for effectiveness, they were like rolling round boulders down mountains ten miles high. Perpetuating such examples among those of later ages was for no other reason than to remove mental clinging, contentiousness, intellectual opinion, and theoretical understanding, to place people in the empty and clear, clean and naked, bare and untrammeled state of great liberation.

Now it is otherwise. There tend to be those who are blocked by worldly knowledge and intellectual sharpness, divided into those who argue forcefully and those who overcome themselves; and there are ascetics who fall into quietism or ambitious activism. When you observe their behavior, they all claim to have the claws and fangs of time immemorial, but when it comes to situational adaptation in contact with conditions at large, they are invariably living in ghost caves in mountains of darkness.

This matter is certainly not to be rushed. It is essential that the individual be clear and precise in getting the gist, and after that not leak at all twenty-four hours a day. Only then is it appropriate to go to another for certain discernment, lest one still be blown by the wind of intellectual understanding. If one is unwilling to give up what one has treasured, it will become a serious problem in the future.

Even more problematic is when one wants to clarify this matter without a genuine basis and without the necessary attainments. How is that different from worms dancing in hopes of soaring into the misty clouds and undergoing a miraculous transformation? Can they do it?’ (quoted in Classics of Buddhism and Zen)

Can they do it? Can you do it? How is it that fifteen hundred years on, these words have lost none of their tang?