Zen in Ten: "We Should Not Be Like a Snail"
The Wisdom of Chan Master Sheng Yen
Master Sheng Yen was born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China in 1931, during a time of warfare and pervasive poverty. At the age of 13, he became a novice monk. In 1949, amid the political upheaval in China, he changed his name and served in the Nationalist Revolutionary Army in Taiwan. After ten years in the military, he spent six years in solitary retreat. He became the first Chinese monk to earn a Ph.D. in 1975, which is also the first year he traveled to the United States. In 1979, he established the Chan Meditation Center in Queens, and in 1997, he established the Dharma Drum Retreat Center. Master Sheng Yen died in 2009.1
“After a period of staying indoors, people should go outside and experience, on the one hand, the smallness of themselves, and on the other, the largeness of themselves. In reality, our sense of largeness or smallness is entirely relative to how we see our surroundings.”
“Hanshan, a famous poet of the Tang dynasty, wrote that the clouds were his blanket, a rock was his pillow, and the earth was his bed. Because of his spacious attitude, though he owned nothing, there was also nothing that was not his. Such a person can live very freely and easily, without vexation.”
“Since people might feel a bit lonely coming out into nature by themselves, the tend to go out in groups. But then they just transplant their own little world out into the big world, and they still feel separation: ‘I’m with these people, not with those.’ ”
“We should not be like a snail that carries its house on its back and shrinks back into it when another creature comes along. It is better not to put people into categories based on your social distance from them, whether or not you know them.”
“It is also good to feel intimate with creatures around you—the birds, butterflies, and so on. Just as smoke from a chimney disperses into the air, we should disperse our sense of ‘group’ or ‘family’ and truly participate in the life around us.”
“When we visit nature we should put down everyday small talk, subjective mental activity, judging and discrimination, and just open up and observe nature.”
“Originally Shakyamuni Buddha did not set out to form a defined group or stay in any one place, because that would promote exclusive thinking, distinguishing between inside and outside, big and small, yours and mine.”
“If we can truly ope up to nature and nature accepts us, then, like the poet Hanshan, we are as spacious as nature itself.”
“People ten to see themselves as exceptional compared to others and to nature, as if they were the crown of creation—an attitude that derives from our ability to reason and acquire knowledge. But actually, nature itself makes no [such] distinction.”
“The ‘Amitabha Sutra’ says that in the Pure Land, the grass and trees are all very pure and majestic, and the breeze and the birds all speak the Buddhadharma. If people can cast off self-centeredness and just see themselves as part of nature, then when the wind blows and the birds sing, they would hear the Buddhadharma. With a pure and equal mind, there is no place that is not the Pure Land.”2
https://www.shengyen.org/eng/
All quotes are from: Master Sheng Yen’s Tea Words: Early Chan Lectures in America (1980-1997). vol. 1. Dharma Drum Publications, 2012.