[ Because I didn't like my students ]

Dainin Katagiri Roshi once told his own story:

When he first came to the United States from Japan, he was a young Zen monk in his late twenties. He had been a monk in Japan - where everything was so precise, so clean, and so neat - for a long time. In the US, his students were hippies with long, unwashed hair and ragged clothes and no shoes. He didn't like them. He couldn't help it - he just couldn't stand those hippies. Their style offended everything in him.

He said, "So all day I would give talks about compassion, and at night I would go home and weep and cry because I realized that I had no compassion at all. Because I didn't like my students, therefore I had to work much harder to develop my heart."

 

[ Bruce's remark:

It is natural that when we find ourselves to be 'the worst horse', we are inspired to try harder.

Real compassion is not about being the best horse or the good horse or the poor horsee or the worst horse. It's about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. Whatever our quality is, that's our wealth and our beauty, that's what other people respond to.

In real compassion, we must first have compassion towards ourselves, which doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Real compassion means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry, we can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. It isn't about throw ourselves away and become something better. It is about befriending who we are already. Basically, making friends with our own self is making friends with all people too. The ground of real compassion is you or me, or whoever we are right now, just as we are. The ground of real compassion is ourselves. That's the ground, that's what Buddha means by real compassion. ]

 

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