The Baby's Practice!

Recorded January 18, 2025.Fundamentally, Zen is not about becoming some better you. You are it, just as you are. Even a baby knows it. Maybe only a baby knows it. Perhaps the clearest take on this, koan-wise, is Blue Cliff Record 80 — “Chao Chou’s(Joshu’s) A Newborn Baby.” “A monk asked Chao Chou (Joshu), ‘Does a newborn baby possess the 6th sense or not?’ Chao Chou (Joshu) said, 'It is like a ball bouncing on swift-flowing water.’The monk later asked T’ou Tzu (Tosu), ‘What is the meaning of a ball bouncing on swift-flowing water?’Tosu said, ‘Moment by moment it flows on without stopping.’”In his teisho on this, master Yuan-wu says that of the 16 forms of meditation practice, the baby’s practice is best. Voidness is not biblical in the sense of all was Void on the waters of Creation. Moment by moment, it flows on without stopping — as T’ou Tzu says. No sticking. This is it; right now is IT.  “Form is emptiness, emptiness form” — the fundamental realization of non-dual prajna wisdom. We don’t have to go out and get to it, as if it were elsewhere in either space or time.  An analogy might be living on planet Earth; we are just as far out in space as any planet in the universe. We don’t have to go anywhere to be out in space. Emptiness, too, is not something we have to get to. The fresh eyes of baby practice restores us, and all things. Jesus said you must become as a child again, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Yuan wu says this, too — right in the Blue Cliff Record: “A person who studies the Path must become again like an infant.” Why? Do you see the point?Books by Roshi Rafe MartinTalks on YouTubeMore information at endlesspathzen.org