The Shin Jin Mei, The Verses of Faith Mind is attributed to Sosan, the Third Patriarch. The first line is “The Great Way is not difficult, only avoid picking or choosing.”
Well, we may readily think Sosan is being ironic, because when we start practicing, The Great Way seems very difficult indeed. Not just difficult, but impossible to see at all. It’s as if all we experience is a repetitive cascade of thought and emotion.
Yet somehow, with enough practice, we will step through this, and then The Great Way will be visible. And will be ours.
Sosan uses the term ‘faith mind’, because the faith is that this mind, this body, this experience is Buddha.
And we don’t see that, because in encountering what we deem this repetitive cascade of thought and emotion, we have already stepped forward into duality.
Our task is not to imagine that we can step forward further, this time into non duality, wholeness, but rather to fall backwards –