Question
Hello, Master Kosen,
"Zazen is simply the absolute Dharma of peace and happiness for eternity." The idea of karma loses all substance there, as the questions and answers attest.
Karma is the existence of a world outside zazen; it is the slope I see myself biologically following in that world. Karma is everything that reaches me and everything I touch.
Around karma crowd the discourses explaining what my life is and what it should be. Around karma are woven acceptance of what I am and the desire to become someone else. Through karma arise both hope and fear...
The fact that I cannot do nothing with my life is karma's anxious fatality and the promise of existence, since without existence there is no karma.
From the idea of karma emerges discourse about vice and virtue, whose presence society summons to maintain itself, since virtue ceases to be exemplary if it does not cure us of the lived horror of vice.
To the question of March 4, 2006, "Can zazen be stronger than karma (genetic, family)? Even the hardest karma there is?" you answer, "It all depends on the zazen; it all depends on the karma." Between the "absolute Dharma of peace" and karma, here is a connection I am not sure I understand. Do you mean karma is everything influencing the intimate quality of a zazen practice, but also that all these illusory, crude discourses, all this petty accounting about managing past and future lives, about the terms of moving, at a gain or loss, from one kind of existence to another—all this, then, offerings and bonnos—both conceal and reveal what makes zazen practice perfect and why, for example, my own practice is not, not very, perhaps a little all the same?
"It all depends on the zazen; it all depends on the karma." Could you please explain this, Master Kosen?
Machin.
machin
Answer from Master Kosen
There are indeed predestination and free will.
There is indeed the fact that every thought and action generates effects and reactions that modify and transform our future, even bring it into being.
There is indeed heavy karma to take responsibility for and bear.
There is indeed a Dharma of peace and happiness called zazen.
There are indeed beginning practitioners just discovering this practice. We must take our time and persevere.
There are indeed experienced practitioners for whom entering the dimension of peace and happiness is extremely simple.
So? What else?
Kosen