Question
Master:
What does it mean to “take on past karma”? What does it mean to take on the past karma of the people we love?
Anonymous
Answer from Master Kosen
The karma of the past is the karma of the present and also of the future.
Time is a point in the here and now. There is no line running from the past to the future, only a point, and we go from point to point, from here and now to here and now, as we follow a line of stitching on a kesa. So at every moment we take on the karma of the past. We are the karma of the past because we are a product of conditioned arising, of karma. And here zazen appears, zazen, which is something completely out of the ordinary: the stillness of zazen, which has a tremendous, immense, unimaginable effect on karma. In this way, the zazen practitioner, the Zen monk, can take on the karma of those they love.
A friend once told me a story. There is a monk whose mother is a prostitute. It is no problem; he loves her very much and visits her every week. But sometimes when he arrives, she is with a client or is scantily dressed. So one day he says to her: “Mom, let’s have a secret method so you can recognize that it is me, your son, knocking on the door. When I arrive, I will knock three times on the bronze door, and you will answer by saying ‘Maka Hannya Haramita Shingyo.’” “OK, OK,” replies his mother, who finds her son a little complicated, but because she loves him very much, she does what he has told her, right up to the end of her life. Of course, when his mother dies, she goes straight to hell and finds herself in a large bronze pot full of hot water, with a little devil stirring the sauce with an enormous spoon. The spoon strikes the pot once: “dong,” again: “dong,” and again: “dong”… And the mother begins to chant Maka Hannya Haramita Shingyo and is immediately born in paradise.
Have a good zazen.
Kosen