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Monday, November 12, 2012

Stories from Zen Master Dae Bong

Here's the closing story from Zen Master that I would like to pen down for my inspiration.
Once, a Zen master has 2 disciples, one who would sit through his meditation with his back up straight, never moving and never falling asleep.  Another disciple would always be falling asleep and therefore his body rolls about during meditation.  Both of them do not like each other.  One day the Zen Master called each of them to his room, separately.
Venerable Zen Master Dae Bong (left) with a venerable nun as his translator.


To the sleepy disciple, he said, "you are always falling asleep, you should be more like your Dhamma brother, always sitting up straight and watching clearly."
To which, the disciple humbly bowed and agreed, and went back to the meditation hall to practice.
Then came the "straight" disciple.
The Zen Master said: "You, always sitting upright and checking your thoughts, you think you are doing very well?  You should be more like your Dhamma brother out there, he is always in samadhi (deep concentration) because he lets go."  To which, the disciple also humbly bowed and agreed.
The moral of the story is, it doesn't matter what kind of kamma you have, good kamma or bad kamma.  What is more important is that you use the kamma to the best of the practice.  So you may be good or you may be bad, but a wise teacher can always use the conditions to help you.  So we continue to practice in whatever conditions we have and if we have wisdom, we can turn the conditions to help us.

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