Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Some people say, “If we have a perfect social construction, we will not have these difficulties.” But as long as there is human nature, nothing will help us. On the contrary, the more human culture advances, the more difficulties we will have in our life. The advancement of civilization will accelerate this contradiction in our nature. When we realize the absolute presence of our contradictory nature, the way-seeking mind arises, and we begin to work on ourselves instead of the material world. Most people who are interested in Buddhism are more or less critical of our social condition, expecting a better social framework. Some people become disgusted with our human life. We cannot approve of these criticisms fully, however, because they do not rest on the full understanding of our human nature.

Human nature is always the same. Some people say our spiritual culture will progres when our material civilization progresses. Strictly speaking, however, as long as we have human nature, it is impossible to obtain a perfect idealistic spiritual culture in our human world. We should fully realize this point. Because of our uneasiness, we are too anxious to achieve something perfect in our spiritual life. Here we have some danger. Our spiritual life cannot be regarded as we have come to regard our material life. You cannot work on your spiritual life as you do your materialistic life. Even though you build a beautiful church, yo religion will not necessarily improve. Even though you talk about our spiritual life thousand of times, it will not help you. It is necessary to know actually what is our human world, or is our human nature. This is a very important point. If you fail to observe our human nature fully, even though you study Buddhism, what you acquire is not what Buddha meant.’ (from the Suzuki Roshi Archive)

This is a talk we looked at last week in my Monday group; I had hoped to find a lightly edited version of it, and thankfully there was one, from the Wind Bell, though the scans are not as legible as other versions available. I have been thinking about technological progress and human nature a lot recently, and these words support how I feel about it.