When I was riding on the bus on Monday, out past the jail/work release center, a young man Adam* was babbling on about homelessness and unfairness of the criminal justice system. My first response to him was that the mental health option that this culture used was jail or prison. After a bit I interjected into his ramblings that Fairness, Justice and Equality were all mental constructs, or in Buddhist lingo “objects of mind.” Bob, another rider at the back of the bus, interjected at some point about the “notion of a separate self” was another construct of mind. Bob and I got off and walked toward the jail/work release, I mentioned our great ancestor, Dogen Zenji. Bob said that he’d spent his time in jail wisely, reading the Bhagavad Gita and other texts.
That morning I opened the Genjokoan¹ to “When one first seeks the truth…. riding on a boat, if one watches the shore one may assume that the shore is moving. But watching the boat directly, one knows that it is the boat that moves…”
In her morning reading, Lynda’s selected text highlighted the problem of self and other, and all the problems that accrue as an individuated self, with all of our attendant causes and conditions…from both our ancestry and environment. As she had once heard Norman Vincent Peal say in conversation, “Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.”
¹ Dogen. (1233). Shobogenzo. (in trans. and commentary (1978). Maezumi, H.T & Loori, J.D. Way of Everyday Life: Zen Master Dogen’s Genjokoan) ISBN-13: 978-0916820176
² Gilbert, P. (2019). The Compassionate Mind. ISBN-13: 978-1572248403
* I use a convention of naming the first appearing person a name that starts with “A’ , the second “B” the third “C”…
