This week’s Zen stories are telling us that the enlightened master, the enlightened person, is a very simple ordinary person… in fact the enlightened person might be the only ordinary person.
This is the only person who is not hankering to become something else, or pretending to be something else.
This is important to understand because we tend to get sucked in by beautiful charismatic religious teachers. This Zen story is the anecdote. The path is very different if we are looking for a totally ordinary person to guide us to enlightenment. More important than that, our approach to life changes when we are looking to become ordinary, not to become some mystical magical person.
It’s relaxing and easy to look for the most ordinary aspect of ourselves. That is who we are, who we always have been.
Zen Stories
That’s one of the reasons Zen stories are so important. They always seem to have a little funny twist to them, but they are telling important truths.
Like Mulla Nasruddin… He forgot to wear his clothes. That’s not how an enlightened teacher would behave. Right? That’s pretty forgetful!
And we have Bankai, who was a very famous Zen master, and he is just so normal that he’s out working in the garden. A new seeker comes along and doesn’t recognize him. The gardener looks so normal and plain that he just doesn’t recognize him at all.
This and That
So on one side this is really important because it stops us from hankering after this magical mystical thing that is so glittery.
On the other hand, this makes everything pretty dang tricky. How the heck to you find a teacher? How you tell who is the most ordinary person around… because they are ordinary. They laugh when they laugh, they make mistakes when they make mistakes. Hopefully they pretty much wear clothes most the time.
Everyone I meet
I have a little trick I would like to offer you. I made a decision, a long time ago, after listening to Zen stories to help me find the ordinary masters of the world. My rule is that everyone I meet, every time I meet someone, I decide they are enlightened already.
It saves me from having to decide, right? And who the heck am I to decide if someone is enlightened or not anyway?
Second of all, this is a good way to change my perspective about everyone. It makes life very, very simple, particularly in spiritual circles.
So I decide that everyone that I meet is enlightened… until they convince me otherwise. Try that for a while see how that makes your life different.