Kuei-Shan

This passage was so to-the-point! I think the short length of this passage made it profound. When Keui-Shan said “what he hears and sees are ordinary sights and sounds, but nothing is distorted” it really jumped out at me. I think it is always the profoundly simple things that stick out to me, but with good reason. It continuously brings me back to the simple things in life that we take for granted all too often. In this instance, it jumped out at me because it reminded me of when I was younger. My mom would take my sister and I to Golden Gate Park (in San Francisco) and we’d lay in the grass and close our eyes. Every time we’d just listen to nature and inevitable one of us would say “I’ve never heard that before.” It wasn’t that it was a new animal making the sound we’d heard, it was the fact that we’d never slowed down enough to hear it in the first place. When you truly just sit and listen (which also helps in meditation), I think you can hear the world for what it is – nothing more and nothing less.

I also liked the part where he said “Because he has eliminated … bad thinking habits …” because it makes a great point: We can have negative or bad thought patterns that we are able to change in order to better ourselves. It is a relatively obscure concept, but it is a revelation in and of itself. We have to recognize that we can rid ourselves of negative views or preconceptions and that it will make us better in the long-run. In this case, it makes you a Zen Master!