Stuck on a Rule
One of my favorite Zen stories goes something like this:
In the evening, as they were arriving at their destination, the younger monk finally spoke up, “Sir, we have taken a vow to never touch a woman.”
The elder monk replied, “Yes, brother.”
The younger monk went on, “Then sir, what about the woman that you earlier picked up in your arms?”
The elder monk looked at the younger one, then smiled, “I set her down on the other side of the river. You are still carrying her.”
In this story, the young monk is stuck on a rule: “Never touch a woman.” You can see the pitfalls of religion in this, the cost of taking a spiritual guideline literally. It causes you to not see the forest for the trees, takes you out of the moment, leaving you wrestling with a concept, as if the invented concept was somehow more important than life itself.
I am often amused at people using the terms religion and spirituality interchangeably. Religion is obviously a control structure, where inspiration is turned upside down and the rules are placed on top. This is evident in the beliefs being concretized in the early Christian epistles and reaches a pinnacle in things like the Catholic elite holding conferences to definitively decide, and then proclaim, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (1000, by the way).
How many people have been helped by knowing the quantity and position of dancing angels? I would venture to say none. Undoubtedly, though, more than a few egos have gotten off on this piece of “knowledge”, and the idea that the holding of it provides some kind of authority advantage.
In apostle Paul’s epistles, he refers to Jesus of Nazareth as “lord”. In 1 Corinthians, he condemns an immoral member “to Satan for the destruction of his flesh”. It’s scary that you could be an apostle to someone like Jesus and still miss some main points. But this is the fine line in the world of the ego.
The ego is the concept of yourself that comes about by you identifying with something that you are not. Most of us don’t know the difference between who we really are and the concept of who we are. This is where the fine line comes in. If you hear a piece of information through a concept of yourself, you will mis-hear the information. You will miss the point.
The ego is only an idea, and lives only in a world of ideas. It only survives by getting you to consistently enforce or reinforce old ideas, or to generate compatible new ideas. These ideas are constructed around core ideas like superior and inferior, worthy and unworthy, good and bad, and right and wrong.
The young monk in the story is not able to access the truth because he is stuck on an idea of right and wrong. More specifically, he thinks that the actions of the body are more important than those of the heart. In other words, he is stuck on form and is missing the content.
This is the nature of identification. As soon as you identify with the body, you are in a losing game, and have given birth to the ego. The ego can now use all the frailties and imperfections of the body against you, and you will shudder and cower at its judgments. And, the more you identify with these judgments, the more you become entrenched in the game of judgment, the game of the ego.
Rules become workable when you recognize them for what they are. I had a good friend who used to say that “everyone’s instincts are right.” It’s just the implementation that suffers. So, can you see why and how the rule was created? Can you recognize it for its true intent?