Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [7]
AWAKENING THE BUDDHA WITHIN
Not that long ago, while I was leading a weekend retreat in Texas at a church there, a local Montessori school invited me to come and talk to their students. There were about seventy-five children between the ages of seven and eleven, and I wondered exactly what I was going to do. From the moment the kids started trickling in the door, they came right up, climbed on my lap and all over me and started asking questions. I had a brass bowl-shaped gong with me, and at the end, we did the Gong Meditation: Follow the sound of the gong, see where it goes, and “just be there” for a moment or two with the sound.
The next day one of the women in the retreat came up to me at lunch to tell me that her eight-year-old son Ryan had come home and told her that something very unusual had happened that day at school. “A monk from Tibet, New York, came,” Ryan reported excitedly.
Ryan said that the monk—me—taught them about God and Buddha and the Gong Meditation. When his mother asked what that was, he said, “Well, he told us to watch where the sound went and to listen carefully. I didn’t know you could watch a sound and listen at the same time. It was very interesting. He said that if you followed where the sound went, that you might get closer to God and Buddha. And I did that.”
His mother said, “Yes, and …?”
The boy said, “Well, when I watched and listened to where the sound went, I didn’t get closer to God. I was God.”
What a delight, I thought to myself. “From the mouth of babes,” as the scripture says.
When I had finished the Gong Meditation, which only takes about thirty seconds, I asked, “So where did the sound go?” And every hand went up. I said, “Sshhh, don’t say.” I couldn’t believe it. Some kids even had both hands raised! How much we adults have forgotten.
I was very touched by their youthful experience of just sensing. They didn’t even question their belief, “What is God?” “What is Buddha?” or “Who am I to say I am God, who am I to know these things?” No such self-editing takes place at that age. Just “Oh yeah, God, I am that.”
Whether you say “The kingdom of God is within” as Jesus did (in Luke 17:21) or that we all have innate Buddha nature as Tibetans do, in the end, doesn’t it come down to the same thing: We are all lit up from within as if from a sacred source. Even a child can experience it. Amazing!
In other words, don’t seek externally for fulfillment; rather turn the searchlight inward. “Hey, what are you gawking at? Don’t you see, it’s all about you!” the twentieth-century Zen master Sawaki Roshi once said. It’s a fact: You’re not going to find truth outside yourself. Not through lovers or mates, not with friends, not with family, and certainly not via material success. The only place you are going to be able to find your truth is in your genuine spiritual center. Truth is found by living truly—in your own authentic way.
Wouldn’t it be sweet to come home and find the Buddha there, simply and utterly at peace, desireless with a hearty warmth and genuine nobility of spirit? Wouldn’t it be satisfying to be like that, to be in touch with your own authentic being? That’s why an Indian master, when asked what advice he had for Westerners seeking enlightenment, said, “Stay where you are.” A statement that is simple, yet profound. Be wherever you are; be whoever you are. When you genuinely become you, a Buddha realizes Buddhahood. You become a Buddha by actualizing your own original innate nature. This nature is primordially pure. This is your true nature, your natural mind. This innate Buddha-nature doesn’t need to achieve enlightenment because it is