In practicing good it is not the self that does good. The self is forgotten. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. The presence of self, the subtlest hint of self-centeredness, creates the difference between a 'do-godder' and the manifestation of true compassion. In compassion, in practicing good, there is no agent that is doing good and no one who benefits from it; there is no subject or object. There is not even any sense of doing. Compassion happens. It happens the way you grow your hair. There is no effort involved. 'The doing of good' is not even known to the self. Knowing depends on the words and ideas that describe reality. There is no intimacy in knowing. Knowing involves the knower and the thing that the knower knows, and that implies separation. This practice has nothing to do with knowledge. It is the experience of intimacy.
Once two Weimaraner dogs, 175 pounds each broke loose and attacked a ten-year-old girl. The girl started screaming for help. Bursting out of a nearby house came a little old woman. The broadcast had her on camera. She was cut up and scarred, and she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She was short, almost like a bird. She had laid into those dogs and started punching them, hitting them, pulling them, and throwing herself on top of the child. Finally she dragged the child into a swampy pond-it wasn't water, just a bunch of muck and mud. Somehow the muck and mud confused the dogs and broke them from their killer trance and they ran off.
The reporter said to the woman: 'You're a hero'. And the woman seemed stunned by that. She was looking to the reporter quizzically. There was no sense of self in this woman's action. The girl wasn't her daughter. This woman was totally vulnerable, yet totally invulnerable because of no-self. This is the intimacy of doing good with no attachment to self.
John Daido Loori
' Invoking Reality - Moral and Ethical Teachings of Zen '
Salam,
Cherine
