I have extracted an episode from the Three Pillars of Zen, by Philip Kapleau.
The author is a 'Canadian housewife', who is said to be Kapleau's wife. I would
call the article a Buddhist way of enlightenment. It implies the existence of
karma and rebirth Are there other ways of enlightenment? I don't know. Please
show me.
A Canadian housewife had the following ‘revealed’ to her:
1) The world as apprehended by the senses is the least true (in the sense
of complete), the least dynamic (in the sense of the eternal movement), and the
least important in a vast ‘geometry of existence’ of unspeakable profundity,
whose rate of vibration, whose intensity and subtlety are beyond verbal
descripton.
2) Words are cumbersome and primitive-almost useless in trying to suggest
the true multidimensional workings of an indescribable vast complex of dynamic
force, to contact which one must abandon one’s normal level of consciousness.
3) The least act, such as eating or scratching an arm, is not at all
simple. It is merely a visible moment in a network of causes and effects
reaching forward into Unknowingness and back into an infinity of Silence, where
individual consciousness cannot even enter. There is truly nothing to know,
nothing that can be known.
4) The physical world is an infinity of movement, of Time-Existence. But
simultaneously it is an infinity of Silence and Voidness. Each object is thus
transparent. Everything has its own special character, its own karma of ‘life
in time’, but at the same time there is no place where there is emptiness,
where one object does not flow into another.
5) The least expression of wheather variation, a soft rain or a gentle
breeze, touches me as a-what can I say?-miracle of unmatched wonder, beauty and
goodness. There is nothing to do; just to be is a supremely total act.
6) Looking into faces, I see something of the long chain of their past
existence, and sometimes something of the future. The past ones recede behind
the outer face like ever-finer tissues, yet are at the same time impregnated in
it.
7) When I am in solitude I can hear a ‘song’ coming forth from everything.
Each and everything has its own song; even moods, thoughts, and feelings have
their finer songs. Yet beneath this variety they intermingle in one
inexpressibly vast unity.
8) I feel a love which, without object, is best called lovingness. But my
old emotional reactions still coarsely interfere with the expressions of this
supremely gentle and effortless lovingness.
9) I feel a consciousness which is neither myself nor not myself, which is
protecting or leading me into directions helpful to my proper growth and
maturity, and propelling me away from that which is against that growth. It is
like a stream into which I have flowed and, joyously, which is carrying me
beyond myself.
