Vol. 23. January 5, 2022
Open your heart/mind and listen to the teaching of emptiness.
Swinging from the rafters, hanging like a piñata, we finally found her after a week of searching and called the coroner. What was it that made her lose hope? Why did she kick away the chair? All gone now, white sheet covering her face, heading for the graveyard, the bone hole. Was she really an individual embedded in matter? Was she being or non-being? She was an illusion, a fleeting dream, an idea composed of mind-stuff. We’ll never hear from her again. She was nothing but a phantom after all. Goodbye, 2021.
The Insurrection, the Inauguration, the 800,000 Pandemic Dead, the Myanmar Coup, the Tokyo Olympics, the Fall of Kabul, the Touchdown on Mars, the NBA Championship — all a dream.
This year is no different from last year because all years are different forms of the same year.
All years are Buddha-nature.
Buddha-nature is the true, immutable, eternal nature of all things.
It’s unchangeable reality. For Zen, it’s what’s really real.
Zen master Dogen (1200-53), founder of the Japanese Soto school, held that all beings are Buddha-nature.
Buddha-nature did not create the world.
Rather, Buddha-nature is the world.
All things don’t come to be through it.
Rather, all things are it.
As Dogen put it in his own folksy way, “When you look at the cheeks of a donkey or the mouth of a horse, you are looking at Buddha-nature.”
Buddha-nature is everything, including time itself.
One day, a Zen student wanted to get to the bottom of this issue. He asked the master, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?”
The master answered, “Mu.” Nothingness.
The Absence of anything fixed or permanent.
The task of a Zen student, while meditating, is to come to an immediate experience of this profound answer.
Past, future, samsara, nirvana, anything you can think of or apprehend by your senses is a different form of the same thing: Buddha-nature.
We stand at the precipice of a new calendar year. What 2022 has in store is unknown, yet already known.
During meditation, we experience the “world of mu” at ever deeper levels, until we can look at the world and see emptiness.
Does 2022 have Buddha-nature?
The answer is obvious.
You’ll find it swinging from the rafters a year from now.
The Buddha Times 
Dōgen Zenji also said, “Let your heart go out and abide in things. Let things return and abide in your heart.” Did you ever see the movie, “The Big Lebowski”. My benediction onto all of us is that we abide like Dōgen and the Dude in 2022.
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