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LIFE LESSONS | PHILOSOPHY | BUDDHISM
Why you should never forget the first principle
(and how it can change your life and work)
The cumbersome thing in life is that we are so interconnected in a hot boiling soup of phenomena, including ourselves and our selves (pun intended) and our environment, that the only way for us to give some kind of meaning to who we are and what we are doing here is by hammering into our heads the idea that the soup is there and we are here. The soup is the soup — and, like a diner in a restaurant, there is a separate I consuming it.
The troublesome thing in life is that while we see ourselves as diners rather than the soup, we see our fellow human beings as patrons too — and since there is only so much soup, we need to nitpick on the other patrons lest there won’t be any soup for us left.
Take that fateful day when we finally visited Ōbaku-san, the 萬福寺 Manpuku-ji temple in Uji, south of Kyōto. Ōbaku is perhaps the least Japanese temple you will ever see on Japanese soil. Which makes sense, since here is the seat of 黄檗宗 Ōbaku-shū, a Zen community established in 1661 by 隱元隆 Ingen Ryūki (Yǐnyuán Lóngqí, 1592–1673), a Chinese poet, calligrapher, and 禪宗 Chánzong monk, who had crossed the waters with a small faction of Chinese and Japanese students and…
