"I was told a lovely story about a farmer in Finland. When they were drawing up the Russian-Finnish border, the farmer had to decide whether he wanted to be in Russia or Finland. After a long time he said he wanted to be in Finland, but he didn’t want to offend the Russian officials. These came to him and wanted to know why he wanted to be in Finland. The farmer replied, 'It has always been my desire to live in Mother Russia, but at my age I wouldn’t be able to survive another Russian winter.'"
It's a perfect anecdote to show how we define who we are, what we are, and everything else about our lives simply with the words we choose to use. Not just the words we choose to use in our everyday conversations with others, though those certainly do tell others a lot about us, but the words we use do define our reality to ourselves. The words we use when we think about what we can accomplish in life. The words we use when we try and conceptualize our potential. The words we use during those internal conversations about 'the truth.' The words we use when we try and imagine our limits. The words we use when we wonder about the limits of what is. In all of these cases, if you simply change the words you use, you inevitably change the answer you arrive at.
To be more to the point, though, the point is that by getting rid of the words themselves you get rid of the limits you run up against in these musings. It is the words themselves that limit who we are, what we are, and everything else about our lives. It doesn't matter what words you choose, by using them, you limit yourself.
As i have said many times in this blog, you only get to 'truth' when you sit long enough and quietly enough to begin to see those gaps that exist between two consecutive thoughts as they pass by, and immediately jump through one of those gaps before the next thought arrives. Once inside, away from the world defined by thoughts, ideas, and words, that great expanse called now opens its arms in welcome.
What's this got to do with anything? I was thinking about Kōbō Daishi this evening (like many other evenings) and wondering how well he understood this. When he was in his young twenties, he was a student at the national university, considered highly intelligent and promising by all that knew him, full of potential, and well on his way to a career in the emperor's administration. His future success was certain. Yet, he gave it up, threw everything away, and walked to Shikoku with nothing but the clothes on his back.
So, the question is, did he know, somewhere deep inside, that his intellect was holding him back from a life full of much, much more? Or, at that time in his life, did he simply seem to understand at an intellectual level that there could be more out there than what was defined in all the books he was studying.
Why does one person gladly give up everything for the chance to taste eternity while another will spend an eternity trying to accumulate everything? Why can a few people, content with nothing, find themselves free of everything and aware of it, while others, also content with nothing, find themselves trapped by everything and completely blind to the fact.
Is the difference between them in the word "nothing," or in the word "everything?"
Or is it in the gap between those two words and one's willingness to jump through even though he has no idea, none what-so-ever, what may lie on the other side?
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