Safety and Danger — Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership
One of my all-time favorite collection of words about navigating through the human experience .
Fushan Yuan said:
Nothing is more essential to leadership and teachership than carefully discerning what to take and what to leave aside. The consummation of taking or leaving is determined within; the beginnings of safety and danger are determined without.
Safety is not the safety of one day, nor is danger the danger of one day. Both safety and danger come from gradual development.
It is imperative to examine the matter of leadership. To uphold leadership by means of enlightened qualities accumulates enlightened qualities, to uphold leadership with courtesy and justice accumulates courtesy and justice. Exploitative leadership accumulates resentment and enmity.
When resentment and enmity build up, inside and outside are estranged and opposed. When courtesy and justice build up, inside and outside are harmonious and happy. When enlightened qualities accumulate, inside and outside are sensitive and compliant.
So where there is a plenitude of enlightened qualities, courtesy and justice, then inside and outside are happy. When exploitation and resentment are extreme, inside and outside are miserable. It is the feelings of misery and happiness to which calamity and blessing respond.
letter to Master Jingyin Tai
Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership
(translated by Thomas Cleary)
I always liked the sense of cumulative development this letter points out: “Both safety and danger come from gradual development.” But once I became more emotionally literate, use of misery and happiness as indicators of the environment, take it even further. The worst and the best of things we encounter are rarely instances of operating in a vacuum; even a tangential instance often has inertia beyond the moment of contact.
Most of all, when considering what influences how things are now, understanding what has been and how it has been shaping, how it is shaping what is, this is essential in understanding what is becoming and what may arrive.
