Volume 1, Track 7
It seems to me that the great task in life is to find out who and what you are. Once that is discovered and your true nature uncovered, your troubles tend to disappear.
Many serious seekers have asked the question: Who am I? Two of those troubled by this question were the great Indian poet and translator, Rabindranath Tagore, a deeply spiritual man, and the Japanese Tenko-san, a former Zen monk who founded a community known as Ittoen devoted to service and sometimes known as the conscience of Japan — it is a conscience that nation will [sic] need as it becomes more and more materialistic.
Tagore wrote the following poem:
The first day’s sun has asked at the manifestation of new being:
who are you?
No answer came.
Year after year went by.
The last sun of the day,
the last question utters on the western seashore in the silent evening.
Who are you?
He gets no answer.
Here we note that the brilliant Tagore ends in the same bewilderment with which he started. Perhaps he was a tormented man.
The simple Tenko-san also asked the same question. He said in a poem known as Juno No Commio (The light that is not two):
With one rice bowl, 1000 homes
alone I roam for countless autumns
being neither empty nor phenomenal,
returning to life without pleasure or pain,
warm days and green grass at the river’s bank,
cool breezes sweeping calmly beneath the bridge.
Should you by chance ask who are you?
A bright moon floating over the water.
So, Tenko-san’s surprising answer shows he knows who and what he is: a bright moon floating over the water. When one has glimpsed his self-nature, an act known as kensho in Zen, there grows in him, what I have called, in one of my books, the growth of certainty. No longer is he blown about like a weightless tumbleweed in a high wind. He knows who and what he is.
A good example of this inner certainty may be seen in this story. A Chinese monk was walking through the streets of a town on a rainy day. Puddles of water had formed in the streets. Looking down, the monk noticed a small body struggling in one of the puddles. It was a scorpion, slowly drowning.
Without hesitation, the monk reached down and plucked the creature from the water, at which the scorpion promptly bit him. “Ohhh,” he exclaimed. If you’ve ever been bitten by one (I have), you’ll know how it hurts. As soon as the scorpion was placed on the dry street, it promptly turned and walked back into the water. Seeing it drowning again, the monk reached down and plucked the perverse little creature from the water a second time. “Ohhh.” Once again it had bitten him.
A passerby noticing this little drama, walked up to the monk. “You fool,” he exclaimed, ‘Don’t you know that every time you lift that scorpion out of the water, it will bite you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do know it,” calmly answered the monk. “It is in a scorpion’s nature to bite me. But I also know it is in my nature for me to keep pulling him out of the water.”
Know thyself, said Jesus, as did other saints.
To listen to Justin reading Spiritual Stories of the East, click here.