The Buddha Is Caught by Desire! Mistakes are Us!

Recorded April 26, 2025In this teisho, Roshi Martin looks at an oddly sci-fi (with UFO!) past life tale of the Buddha, our own life, a Grimm’s “fairy tale,” and the Way of the Bodhisattva. “Everything – beings, worlds, galaxies, universes — Buddhist teachings tell us — come and go, with neither beginning nor end. Aryasura, author of the influential 5th century CE Jatakamala, however, states that something does persist. He writes: ‘Earth with its forests, noble mountains and seas may perish a hundred times by fire, water, and wind, as each eon comes to an end, but the great compassion of a Bodhisattva, never.’ (From the “Great Ape Jataka” in, Once The Buddha Was a Monkey; trans. Peter Khoroche.) “According to Buddhist tradition, the aspiration to awaken and live so as to benefit all beings is woven into the nature of reality, is the nature of Original, un-self-centered Mind. Given this, the effort we put into trying to satisfy a small, self-centered, fundamentally illusory habitual narrative of isolated selfness with which we identify as “myself,” must meet with defeat. With this little jataka, the Buddha reveals that he himself had trod that selfish trail to its necessary end. And, having gone the route, at trail’s end he's put up a marker for all to see: ‘Warning! You can never satisfy desire.’” Or, as the Rolling Stones classically complained about satisfaction, “I can’t get no.”“Once we really get this, we are freed to begin looking for genuine happiness. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” (William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.) _________Roshi Martin adds this correction to a Zen verse that he quotes near the start of the teisho. Recalling it on the spur of the moment he regrets he didn't quote it correctly. It should go like this:      Last year’s poverty was not true poverty.      This year’s poverty is absolute.       In last year’s poverty there was room for the point of a gimlet.      In this year’s poverty even the gimlet is gone.                                                       -  Master Hsiang-yen; China, d. 898Unknown object: Photo courtesy US NavyBooks by Roshi Rafe MartinTalks on YouTubeMore information at endlesspathzen.org