RAM RAM IN DREAM

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When a young girl from the neighborhood came and asked him to perform a funeral for her dead rabbit, Tangen Roshi put on his best robes and conducted a beautiful full-length funeral service. When a senior monk wanted to check his understanding, Tangen Roshi would be ready to see him in dokusan* at any time. When there was temple-related office work to do, Tangen Roshi would work late into the night alone, enabling his students to focus only on their practice. When one of his students would snooze during zazen, Tangen Roshi would get up himself and strike the person with the kyosaku.* He did so forcefully but at the same time with deep compassion and kindness. When a kitten would lay on Tangen Roshi’s cushion in the hondo* before the start of morning chanting, he would spread his zagu* on bare tatami and let the kitten continue to sleep on his place through the chanting. Tangen Roshi saw a buddha in everyone and everything. He treated those he encountered in this way without differentiating between big and small, important and not important, enlightened and deluded. Yet at the same time, Tangen Roshi would tirelessly guide his students to what he himself had realized, demanding that they give their all to their practice, just as he did. No matter if someone stayed at Bukkoku-ji for thirty years or just for one day, everybody was struck by his living example of bodhisattva life.

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I CAME INTO THIS WORLD with a great debt—my mother gave her own life in order to give birth to me. She already had three children, and when she was pregnant with me, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. The doctor urged her to apologize to the baby and to have the cancer removed from her stomach. Those around her, my father as well, tried to persuade her to do it, but she stood firm, vowing, “This baby in my belly is going to be born.”

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Then I crossed to the other side of the mountain, which formed a precipice. A valley had been gouged out below, and beyond the valley stretched the Pacific Ocean. To one side I could see the rolling hills of the Izu Peninsula. Transfixed by the mountain landscape, I was standing just on the edge of the cliff. There I was asking for nothing—I wasn’t thinking or analyzing—I was adding nothing. The wind began to gust up toward me from the valley below. I became enveloped by the wind. I felt as if I were growing bigger and bigger. At that moment, I realized that I was supported by heaven and earth, by all things. I was being told, “All things are becoming you, nurturing you.” Looking at the mountain, the mountain was me. The wide, wide valley became me. I realized then that whatever I heard, whatever I saw—everything—is always and forever supporting me, caring for me. Happiness gushed from the depths of my belly

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 In his Yoga Sutra, Patanjali explains the two distinctive aspects of samadhi:

 samprajnata, where you question, discriminate, and have feelings of amazement; and 

asamprajnata, where there is no pulsation of thought, no awareness.

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