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Last night I chanced upon an excellent article by Ven. Kobutsu Malone,Osho, on The Buddhist Channel website www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php
As I enjoyed an unusually rainy Arizona night reading Kobutsu's essay on engaged buddhism, I was reminded of the an encounter we had on the last day of our visit to San Francisco.
Buz, his cousin and I spent a Monday morning wandering around Chinatown. We were looking for the Norras Buddhist Temple, the oldest buddhist temple in San Francisco dating back more than 50 years. After entering a small inconspicuous entryway, we climbed four flights of stairs to find a room filled with buddhist treasure.
Aside from the beautiful shrine and altars, every inch of space in the temple seemed to be adorned with an ecclectic assortment of buddhist images and offerings. After a short presentation, we were encouraged to take photos. Our guide invited us to stay as long as we wanted and help ourselves to free literature and books.
Throughout our visit there was a man near the doorway sitting cross legged in a folding chair. With careful attention to detail, he was cleaning a statue of the Buddha. As we were leaving, we stopped to ask him a question about the food offerings placed about the altars. To our pleasant surprise he started into a spontaneous teaching regarding buddha nature. In the middle of our discussion the man enthusiastically jumped up from his chair and pointed to each one of us exclaiming, "You Buddha, you Buddha, you Buddha. Everyone, everything Buddha."
It doesn't get much simpler than that.
As described by Shodo Harada Roshi in The Path to Bodhidharma, "To see every single day, every meeting of every person and thing, and everything we do as fresh -- this is the religious and spiritual way of life . . . If we are not careful we begin to think of our zazen and our life in society as two separate things."
