Compilation: Wisdom from Zen Masters & Spiritual Teachings | Eckhart Tolle

This is what Bodhidharma looked like, or may have looked like. He certainly looks present.

There's a story of. I believe it was a British writer, Paul Brunton, I think it was, who in the 30s visited the guru, spiritual.

Teacher Ramana Maharshi at his ashram in India in order to.

He was preparing a book on the spiritual teachers of India.

The book was later published under the.

Title In Search of Secret India. And he visited Ramana Maharshi.

The guru at that time was not.

Too well known outside his immediate circle. And he had a list of questions, very important questions for his book.

So he came into Ramana's room and.

Ramana looked at him in a state of thoughtless awareness and Paul Brunton looked at him and he didn't ask a single question. All the questions dissolved in the presence on that particular occasion. That was the first time he met him. He may later have asked him questions. Another little anecdote connected with Ramana Maharshi, the famous British writer, visited the ashram, Somerset Maugham is his name.

And again.

He was preparing a book, a novel that involved an Indian spiritual teacher.

And just before he was a To.

Meet Ramana Maharshi, Somerset Maugham fainted, probably because it was so hot. So they carried him into a room.

He was lying there on a bed.

And when he came to, Ramana Maharshi was sitting there next to his bed, looking at him. And he was confused and didn't know what to say. And Ramana Maharshi said something like, silence is the best speech. And that was the end of that encounter. And later on, in a novel called.

The Razor's Edge, Ramana Maharshi appears as.

One of the characters.

But my question is, in the New Earth, you give an example of Hakuing the Zen master, and he's accused of. Falsely accused of false. Well, there's false accusations towards him. And he responds with, is that so? I was wondering if you could give us me some other examples of how a conscious person might answer or respond to that situation and how the ego might respond to the same situation.

Well, the ego one is quite easy to imagine, isn't it? The story, of course, is a story that's been around for some time about the Japanese, the Zen master, just very briefly, to remind everybody, the Zen master who has a reputation, high reputation, where he lives in the town or city, and then suddenly he is accused by the daughter of a neighbor who is 16 or 17 or something like that, who has become pregnant, that he is the father of the baby, the unborn baby. And so the daughter of his neighbor tells that to her parents and they get very angry and of course tell it to everybody. And they run to the Zen master and our daughter just told us that you had sex with her and she's carrying your baby. Dreadful. And he listens and he says, is that so? Yes, you are the father, she told us, is that so? And so immediately, of course, he loses his reputation. Nobody comes to him anymore and it doesn't bother him. He's completely self contained. Present, he is present. The baby is born. The parents come to him with the baby and said, here, you look after the baby, we don't want it, it's your baby. Is that so? They give him the baby. He looks after the baby, feeds it. A year later, nobody comes to see him anymore because he's lost his reputation. A year later, the daughter becomes a little bit more mature and confesses to her parents that the Zen master is not the father, but the boy who works in the butcher's shop next door. And the parents say, come to the Zen masters, you are so sorry. Falsely accused you. She just told us that you're not the father. Is that so? And he hands the baby back to them. And the baby had a very good start in life, of course. And so that was. It's a. The story is to show the absolute non reactivity in very extreme form of non reactivity, not impossible. And the power that is in that, the power for good. Because that situation, which potentially would be dreadful disaster and drama for anybody else with even the slightest ego left, would be a dreadful blow, a disaster that gets transformed into something good through non reaction. Because all the good that comes out of it is the babies. Has had one year with the Zen master, the first year of his life, and is then going back. And then people come back to him. Okay, so you can see how non reactivity transforms a potentially drama, dramatic disaster into good. Your question is twofold. You ask, how would the ego have reacted? No, I don't need to say too much about that. You can imagine how an ego would say, how dare you accuse me. The daughter is evil, she's an evil bitch. She accused me of being. And the parents are just as bad. And then you talk to everybody about it. You call on the phone, you know what they're doing to me, they're trying to. And then all kinds of things. Talk to everybody about it. Bricks, blow it up more and more, give interviews. And of course you're the victim, you become the victim. That's the main thing. So your victim identity becomes stronger and stronger and you're angry. And anger of course is designed unconsciously as the cause in miracles points out. Anger is designed to make somebody feel guilty. That's the energy behind anger. So you want to make everybody. But of course it doesn't really work. And so you have a huge drama. So you can elaborate on that. You could write a play about that. You could have a movie about that Zen. What happened to the Zen master with a. Interesting. An interesting title. Zen baby or whatever. Now, now you couldn't have a movie about this. What actually happened in this story because nobody would watch it. There's no drama in it. Nothing happens. He just sits there. So I don't think you could. You could even if you wrote a script. I think the producers in Hollywood would not finance could be very nice short film. It wouldn't be a long film. Now of course, as if you are present. That is not the only way. It's not what he. The way he dealt with that situation is not the only possible way. There are many other possible ways of dealing with the situation and still be present. For example, he could have said, well, is that so? I would like to have a DNA test though. So it's a practical step. You can still take practical steps. You're not condemned to complete inactivity just because you are present. In fact, if action is possible, you do it. You could even state clearly that's not the case, I'm not the baby. But you're not a victim. You could simply state the truth. This is how it is. And the important thing is the unconsciousness of making yourself into a victim does not happen anymore. And you are not imposing projections onto others deep judgments. The little 17 year old daughter who is not mature enough to tell the truth. You don't need to say that she is evil and manipulative or whatever the ego would come up with. No, you just state it's not the case, it's fine. And whatever else comes out of presence, but there's always non aggression, non projection, non judgment. Because you see clearly that she did it because of her lack of consciousness. So what judgment could you have? This lack of consciousness. That lack of consciousness is not a judgment. But if you make that into something evil in the other person, that's the judgment. So all kinds of ways of dealing with it and still remain present. The story gives us the most extreme way because then we can really learn. It shows us what is possible. So what a wonderful story. And the two one could have even Tell two stories. Tell one story of this is the idea for somebody who likes to. Who is a fiction writer here among you, you could have one story that tells a story from somebody who is dealing with something consciously. And then you have the same story where it develops into hu. Consciousness and drama. Quite interesting. So next time then, if something happens to us, see, bearing in mind, don't become a victim. Don't become a victim. Don't make others into perpetrators, then call them bad or evil. The two go together. So wonderful, these challenges, aren't they?

I just got, as I was coming in, got inspired to tell you that little story. It only takes a few minutes about my mum, because there's some connection with us being here and the event that I relate in that story that happened many years ago when I. I wasn't born yet. So my mom was about 19 years old because I wasn't there yet. It was in the war in Germany. And she received notification one day in the mail to report next week to such and such a place, a weapons factory, some one day's travel away from there for work duty, work service, which was a bit like military service, but for women. And she got a shock and she ran on the same day to the government office and said, that must be a mistake. I was promised I could do office duty. They said, no mistake, you are to report next week to the weapons factory. So the following week she arrived after a long trip to the weapons factory with 100 other young girls the same age. And she was assigned her bunk bed in the dormitory. And work was going to start the following day. And she was on the upper bunk bed. And below there was another girl, same age, and they were both crying. And my mom, being already impulsive as she's been all her life, said she was crying, I'm not staying here tomorrow morning, I'm escaping. And the girl said, are you coming with me? She said to the girl, and the girl said, no, we can't do that. They would shoot us. And the next morning my mom left the dormitory early and there were some trucks leaving, big military trucks leaving the factory. And she just stopped the driver and said, can you give me a ride? And the driver, assuming she had permission or she was on leave or something, he said, yes, jump in in the back. And she got driven out of the factory. And at the end of the day she reappeared at her mom's home, her mom's place. And her mom said, what have you done? They'll put us all in prison. You can't stay here. They'll come. So the next day she went to another city to live with her aunt. And of course the police came a couple of days later looking for her. And my grandmother, her mom said, don't know where she is.

She just disappeared.

We haven't seen her. Then my mom lived in hiding for two or three years until they stopped looking for her with her aunt. And three months later the weapons factory got bombed and virtually everybody who worked there got killed. So the impulsive decision of a 19 year old girl. Everything is connected and interconnected leads to us being here.

As you probably know, Buddhism arose in India. A person, Gautama Siddhartha, awakened about 500 BC. That's 2500 years ago. And a teaching arose. People then called him the one who is awake. Buddha means awake, the root of it in Sanskrit. So it's not a name, it's a title. And then it grew and then much till about a thousand years passed. And then a man traveled. At that time, of course, geographically there was not that much, the distances were so vast between countries. But a Buddhist monk traveled from India, probably it could already have been purser into China.

And.

His name was Bodhidharma, a legendary figure in Buddhism, because he is the one they say who brought Buddhism to China, which was something. When they arrived in China and started talking, people workers hadn't heard this before.

Wow.

But at some point they connected it with some native tradition, which was Taoism. The, the deeper aspect of Taoism could then merged with Buddhism after a while. And of course Daoism, one of the greatest books that I've spoken about, the Tao Te Ching, probably also originated 2500 years ago or so, same time as the Buddha, independently in China. So eventually Buddhism became transformed in China because it mixed up with Taoism and a different form of Buddhism developed. But the interesting story is that this man, Bodhidharma traveled into China and he was the first, they say. And then the Chinese began to gradually adopt Buddhist meditation practices and so on. Fortunately, at that time the Internet and Twitter had not been invented yet. So nobody accused the Chinese of cultural appropriation. I've prepared, I'd like. This is what Bodhidharma looked like or may have looked like. Let's see if it works. To show the image of Bodhidharma. He certainly looks present. And that is also that form of the beginning of Zen. That was the Chinese version of Zen. And then in Japan it became something else. So you can imagine the Chinese meeting this man, looking at them. And then a problem arose because.

They.

Learned about The Buddha and the Chinese writing, of course, is pictographs. It's not like Western writing where the writing represents a sound which represents the thing. So in Western language, Western writing is twice removed from the thing. If you write table, the writing of table represents the sound. And the sound, when you say table, it represents.

The thing.

So they say, what can we do? But there must have been somebody awakened already there in China who came up with the Chinese character for Buddha. They had to come out created, and there it is. And now the amazing thing is it consists of two characters put together. The first one means man or human being. You can see, it's almost. You can see still it's distantly related to a picture of a person. So that is the human being. Now, the next character is usually translated as no or not. It's a character. It's a denial. It's also related to the idea of undoing or dissolving. But it's usually the denial of not. So it denies the first so human being not. And so if you go to scholars, they don't. They might say, well, they did this because they thought that Buddha wasn't really a human being, he was a superhuman. But that's not it. There's a recognition there of the two dimensions that make up a human being. There is form identity and the recognition of the ultimate illusion of form identity. So there's form identity, the person, and the denial of form identity. So the denial of form identity is the arising of essence identity. And so it is incredible how somebody must have had deep insight to create that character that explains the essence of what Buddha means, but it really is the essence of every human being. So in that sense, as you might know, we. The way I interpret the term human being is that the human is your form identity. The human is the person that you are with a history and is both the body and the conditioned mind. That's the human personality. And the being is the unconditioned. The being is your essence identity, which is the unconditioned consciousness. So you are a human being. And in a way, you could interpret that character also as the left side is the human. And then there's the denial of the ultimate reality of the human, and there's the emerging being. So that's just. I mentioned that briefly. Also, I believe in a new earth. So it's wonderful to see that there's a deep understanding behind that character. And I'm interpreting that. I have no idea about Chinese. I'm not a scholar, and I don't write or speak Chinese. But the moment I saw that.

And.

I was told this means Buddha. No. Human being. Human. No. Wow, that's amazing. Do you remember? Or maybe you don't. Or you do. In the Gospels, there's a line that Jesus said. Two words. Deny thyself.

Deny thyself.

And now look at that character.

Man.

Human.

Know. Deny thyself. Which means recognize the ultimate unreality of what you call yourself. Then the essence of who you are emerges, which is formless consciousness.