What Is the Dao?

What Is the Dao (the Path) Question: What is the Dao? The Chan master answered: Eating and sleeping. Question: I also eat and sleep—how does that differ from the Dao? The Chan master answered: When you eat, you do not eat properly, seeking after a hundred things; when you sleep, you do not sleep properly, being picky in all sorts of ways. This is craving after form, sound, smell, taste, and touch—it is not cultivating the Dao. 

Cultivating the Dao in daily life is done the way the patriarchs cultivated, not the way certain people full of afflictions claim—namely, that one must merge into everyday life, become one with form, sound, smell, taste, and touch, and be "delivered" by the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion—with the result that one cannot break free from the fetters of the five desires. When a person full of afflictions teaches the Dharma, afflictions are inseparable from every word. He himself has afflictions and cannot teach others to escape and become liberated from afflictions; instead, he hopes others will have the same afflictions as himself. Having no experience of liberation from afflictions and no history of escaping afflictions, it is impossible for him to properly guide others, step by step, out of the abyss of afflictions. Moreover, because of his craving for enjoyments, he does not even regard afflictions as an abyss. 

Some Dharma teachers, whether intentionally or not, also instill worldly afflictions—for example, instilling how to stand tall and rise above others, how to be smooth-talking and clever in dealing with people, how to praise oneself and disparage others, how to tolerate sexual desires and quarrels born of anger, inducing sentient beings into all kinds of greedy grasping, and even teaching rhetorical tricks and sophistry for debate. Engaging in these worldly, affliction-laden affairs within Buddhism will ultimately lead and incline one toward the three evil destinies, where one will suffer immeasurably and find it hard to escape. Therefore, if you truly wish to cultivate the Dao well, you should learn more from the demeanor of the ancient cultivators—the Chan masters and patriarchs—learn from their purity of mind and few desires in daily life, and learn from the heart of a practitioner of the Dao: honest and without pretense, indifferent to fame and gain, lofty in aspiration, and single-mindedly devoted to the Dao. 

Modern people need no instruction—their afflictions are already heavy to begin with. Add to this the conditioning of the social environment and customs, and their minds are severely defiled. Every day they chase after things everywhere; the six faculties confront the six objects—form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and dharmas—seeking after every dharma and grasping at every dharma, with the obstruction of the five hindrances extremely heavy. If you truly wish to make a breakthrough in this life, you should awaken as early as possible, constantly and everywhere introspecting on where the afflictions of your own mind lie. Whenever you feel a craving for something, you should bring to mind: I am chasing after things; I am chasing after things everywhere. What does it look like not to chase after things everywhere? It looks like the cultivators of old: cultivating the Dao in the mountains, taking one meal a day at midday, content with few desires, the mind always at peace and joyful. Anything other than this has the nature of chasing and seeking.