Zen — The Rhythm of Imperturbability
Handling Numerous Tasks Simultaneously While Remaining at Ease
Your soul is driven by an unquenchable inner desire to deepen its experiences through many aspects. The life you live is unavoidably the kind of experience your soul longs for. So, should we simply observe everything in this life without doing anything?
The Art of Observing Without Interference
If you can truly do nothing, then you are correct. However, it’s guaranteed that you cannot simply do nothing and just watch. Only someone enlightened, a Zen master, can sit and do nothing but watch. In Zen, there’s a famous saying: “Let karma resolve naturally, avoid creating new misfortunes.” A Zen master’s life is entirely governed by fate.
They do not have specific plans or desires; life is like a floating cloud, blown by the wind to wherever it goes. This is the attitude of a Zen practitioner. They are highly adaptable, without any preconceived thoughts, merely observing and letting things happen naturally, like “the grass grows by itself when spring comes.”
If you can truly live this way, you are enlightened, but you can’t. When you sit there, you will inevitably think and speculate about what might happen. You are constantly waiting, guessing, and engaging in various thoughts, making it impossible to just watch.
Embracing Life’s Cycles
Achieving this means there is no resistance in your life. You will accept everything that happens with joy. When you accept things joyfully, they will complete quickly, whether good or bad. Remember, when you greet something joyfully, it completes quickly.
If it is bad, it ends swiftly; if it is good, it also ends swiftly. You might think you wouldn’t want a good thing to end quickly, but that’s not the case. When a good thing ends quickly, it means another good thing will come even faster, accelerating the positive events in your life.
This is why, once someone enters a positive cycle, it snowballs. When you have wealth and start to give, this giving creates more good karma, making your life better and more abundant. This abundance allows you to give more, and the cycle continues, growing larger and faster.
Conversely, if someone becomes closed off, even energetically, they will enter a negative cycle. A closed system deteriorates with time, drawing in more unfavourable people and circumstances and so increasing anxiety and misery. This anxiety feeds more closeness, which starts a vicious circle of more bad luck and darkness.
The Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges
You must so be happy, open, and sunny while you sit and do nothing. This openness accelerates the events in your life. When you remain imperturbable and open, things actually speed up positively. Some tests may arise, but if you recognize these as ways to dissipate karma and do not resist, they will pass quickly, leading to more positive outcomes.
Everyone faces at least two significant challenges, akin to the breaks in a musical scale. These challenges are unavoidable, and if you remain cheerful and open when facing them, you will progress instead of being dragged down. If you fail, a negative cycle begins. Life is therefore a game that can be happy overall and painful at times. Divinely speaking, the cosmos is constantly happy and positive. Even while there are painful lives, overall the tone is happy when one considers several incarnations.
A wise person’s perspective is broad, recognizing that even suffering is a form of enjoyment. If you live like a Zen master, facing life with imperturbability, you become truly adept at living. Contrary to popular belief, a Zen master’s life is not slow and idle. Instead, they operate at an incredibly fast frequency, handling numerous tasks simultaneously while remaining at ease. This is the art of living.
Throughout history, Zen masters, though seemingly idle, have achieved extraordinary feats. They built numerous temples, each housing hundreds or even thousands of monks, while remaining tranquil. They wrote copious volumes and gave innumerable seminars. For instance, Yongming Yanshou recited thousands of Buddha names every day while writing the “Zongjing Lu,” which has more than a million words. When composed and honest, such people are incredibly productive, doing jobs with ease and leading sizable groups of people without any hindrance.
To correct the misunderstanding, being imperturbable does not mean merely sitting with eyes closed. True imperturbability involves completing numerous tasks simultaneously, embodying the essence of a Zen master.
