Zen Keys

The following is quoted from the introduction (by Philip Kapleau) to Thich Nhat Hahn’s Zen Keys with links to relevant articles, mostly from recent headlines. I reorganized the order of the quotes somewhat.

“In the last hundred years this process of constant and explosive change on the social and institutional level has accelerated to a degree unknown to people of earlier ages. Almost daily the newspaper reports new and dizzying crises in the world; famines and natural disasters; wars and revolutions; crises in the environment, in energy and in the political arena; crises in the world of finance and economics; crises in the increasing number of divorces and nervous breakdowns, crises in personal health, in the incidences of heart attacks, cancer, and other fatal diseases, not to mention the number of senseless deaths caused by the traffic in and extensive consumption of illegal drugs. Most people looking out on this ever-changing, seemingly chaotic world see anything but natural karmic laws at work, nor do they perceive the unity and harmony underlying this constant and inevitable change. If anything they are filled with anxiety, with a feeling of powerlessness, and with a sense that life has no meaning. And because they have no concrete insight into the true character of the world or intuitive understanding of it, what else can they do but surrender to a life of material comfort and sensual pleasure?

The contamination of our own and the world’s environment and our squandering of dwindling natural resource through overconsumption, waste, and mismanagement speak eloquently of our greed and irresponsibility.

It is out of this respect for worth of every single object, animate as well as inanimate, that comes the desire to see things used properly, and not to be heedless or wasteful or destructive.

We are deceived by our limited five senses and discriminating intellect (the sixth sense in Buddhism) which conveys to us a picture of a dualistic world of self-and-other, of things separated and isolated, of pain and struggle, birth and extinction, killing and being killed. This picture is untrue because it barely scratches the surface.

There is more to life than what the senses tell them – that in the midst of impermanence there is something always permanent, in the midst of imperfection there is perfection, in chaos there is peace, in noise there is quiet, and finally in death there is life.

For if we could see beyond the ever-changing forms into the underlying reality, we would realize that in essence there is nothing but harmony and unity and stability, and that this perfection in no different from the phenomenal world of incessant change and transformation.

‘In truth I say to you that within this fathom-high body, with its thoughts and perceptions, lies the world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world and the Way that leads to the extinction of rising and ceasing.’”