The Spark ("No Water, no Moon")

koans

When the nun Chiyono studied Zen under Bukko of Engaku she was unable to attain the fruits of meditation for a long time.

At last one moonlit night she was carrying water in an old pail bound with bamboo. The bamboo broke and the bottom fell out of the pail, and at that moment Chiyono was set free!

In commemoration, she wrote a poem:

In this way and that I tried to save the old pail
Since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break
Until at last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail!
No more moon in the water!

The insight: we spend a significant amount of time patching things, trying to keep things together. But at some point we have the opportunity to see that it was all part of just one construct, one that can completely fall apart; but even then there is still something to be experienced.

When the bottom falls out, when things fall apart, look at that moment and ask “what is true?”, “what is the experience right now?”, “what does it feel to just be present?”… there are moments in which everything disappears and yet… there, we still are.

The American Zen teacher Charlotte Jono Beck, writes in Nothing Special: Living Zen,

Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That’s all there is. That’s all we are. Yet most of us human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it’s all a shame, and so on; it’s all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.