You have been reading for a while.
The eyes have been moving across the screen. The mind has been making sense of what they find. Somewhere, the body has been holding a posture. Somewhere, the breath has continued.
This is what you have been looking for.
Not the recognition of this. Not the understanding of this.
This.
The reading itself.
The small pressure of the device or paper. The angle of the light. The faint sound underneath the silence, which is never quite silence.
You will want there to be more.
The mind, having been pointed at this many times now, will say, yes, but where is the shift. Where is the difference between before and after. If this is what I was looking for, why does it feel like the same thing I was already doing.
It feels like the same thing because it is the same thing.
The looking was the only difference.
A monk came to Joshu and asked for the teaching.
Joshu said, Drink your tea.
The monk thought he was being dismissed. He left.
He spent the rest of his life trying to find the teaching elsewhere, never quite noticing that the teaching had been the tea.
The tea is not a symbol.
The tea is the teaching.
The drinking is the practice.
The cup is the cushion.
You can stand up from this screen now and find that you have not lost anything.
The recognition does not have a residence.
It is not stored anywhere that can be left.
It is in the next thing you do.
The walk to the kitchen. The water from the tap. The fingers around the glass.
You may notice the urge to make this special.
To mark the moment. To say, this is the moment of recognition. To put a frame around it so it can be remembered.
The frame is the seeking, returning.
Let it return.
The seeking does not stop. It only stops being believed.
It is still trying to find something. You are no longer expecting it to.
Sengcan, in the sixth century, opened a small text with the line that contains the whole project:
The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
No preferences.
Not no taste. Not no opinions. Not no joy or sadness.
No preference about whether this moment should be different than it is.
The preferring is what made the search.
The preferring is what filled the workshop.
The preferring is what kept the seeker alive.
When the preferring rests, even for a second, the Great Way is what was already there.
It is what is here.
The breath is here.
The reading is here.
You are not having to do anything for the world to keep being.
You can close this.
You can stand up.
You can do the next ordinary thing.
Nothing about this needed to be said.
Nothing about this can be carried with you, because there was nothing to take.
The recognition is not a souvenir.
The next moment will arrive.
It will be exactly itself.
It will not be a special moment. It will not be an ordinary moment. It will be a moment.
You will be there.
Or rather, the being will be there, and you will be one of the things happening inside it.
No preference.
No obstacle.
Just this.
Sources: Joshu (Zhaozhou), recorded in the Zhaozhou Yulu, 9th century. Sengcan, Xinxin Ming (Verses on the Faith Mind), 6th century.