Zen Talk: Buddha Speaks of Small Good Being Good Enough

“Do not underestimate good, thinking it will not affect you. Dripping water can even fill a pitcher drop by drop; one who is wise is filled with good, even if one accumulates it little by little.”

This saying of the Buddha, found in the Dhammapada, causes me pause. I hope that its simplicity holds meaning for you as well.

Every good action matters. No good deed is too small. Many people want to save the world or change it for the better or be all they can be – but they want these things in one felll swoop. Little by little is a successful method. As the turtle taught us, slow and steady wins the race.

Don’t underestimate the importance of every good action, even the smallest, because every little bit helps. Perhaps we can all try to make it a goal for the day. Maybe even a once a day goal? I’m not suggesting that you drop your change into a homeless man’s tin. If you want, give him your leftovers or something. Try picking up a piece of trash. Do something nice for someone around you. Pass a smile onto a sad person. There are so many different kinds of good things to be done. Try to do one thing today – whatever comes to your mind. I will too. Tomorrow, perhaps we can try the same.

As the Buddha has told us, every good thing – no matter how seemingly small – can help to fill a much larger vessel.

What will you choose to do? What do you think of the Buddha’s words?

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Zen Talk: Dogen’s “The Issue at Hand” Waxes about Being As Is

“Kindling becomes ash, and cannot become kindling again. However, we should not see the ash as after and the kindling as before. Know that kindling abides in the normative state of kindling, and though it has a before and after, the realms of before and after are disconnected. Ash, in the normative state of ash, has before and after. Just as that kindling, after having become ash, does not again become kindling, so after dying a person does not become alive again. This being the case, not saying that life becomes death is an established custom in Buddhism – therefore it is called unborn. That death does not become life is an established teaching of the Buddha; therefore we say imperishable. Life is an individual temporal state, death is an individual temporal state. It is like winter and spring – we don’t think winter becomes spring, we don’t say spring becomes summer.”

These words from Dogen’s Shobogenzo essay, “The Issue at Hand,” reassure me not only about the nature of time but also about the nature of life and death. The notion of individual temporal states removes the usual power that the idea of death has.

I have never been particularly scared of death. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to die and when confronted with the prospect of immediate death I am scared. However, the actual idea of death, which is to say, no longer being a part of this life on earth, doesn’t upset me. I am not scared of death as an unknown. Perhaps it’s this lack of apprehension regarding death that has never made me feel the need to pursue religions that insist on making me feel better about what happens after we die, with notions of Heaven and Hell, salvation, etc.

Those ideas are all meant to fill a need: to comfort people and their fears about the great unknown, death. For instance, Christianity is a very ‘other-worldly’ religion. That is, this life is about guaranteeing salvation and a ticket into Heaven and eventually about being resurrected back into life. These concepts are all central to the purpose of Christianity and are meant to address a very basic and understandable human fear about death. The purpose of Christian ritual and belief, then, is aimed primarily at seeing these things through – in a manner of speaking, at preventing, or beating, death.

On the other hand is the Buddhist approach above. Life and death are both individual temporal states: they are times, or periods, and they each have an equal value as such. We are not meant to prize life and cling to it obsessively, insisting that it is all that matters. Yes, life should be valued, no doubt, but we should also embrace its fleeting nature, seeing existence not as our conscious self in time but as ourselves among everything else as existence.

Did you read this week’s essay? Did you enjoy it? What do you think about when you read the quoted section above? What is your philosophy about life and death?

I have spoken in brief about a fraction of a concept in part of a paragraph in this essay. I recommend you read “The Issue at Hand” in Dogen’s Shobogenzo to begin getting the full effect. Then read it again. I read it three times before anything started to register.

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