For all of us this first precept, No Killing Life, is a kind of impossible precept to keep. For many centuries, people who lived with this vow, this spirit of the precepts, are still surviving on this earth. There might be some deeper meaning of this, because if we take this Precept in a literal way, with our human understanding, the only way is to die without food. And yet, not taking food to your system is also killing life, yourself, so this dilemma, this contradiction is set forth to us with this first Precept. Even if we don't directly participate in killing lives, to allow your life to survive is the same thing. So the precept does not just concern your ethical conduct of life. It has to do with your and others basic nature of existence. This subject is the first koan -- to realize your Buddha nature, your true nature.
Bodhidharma taught us the truth of eternity. "When you do not give rise to the idea of birth and extinction, that is called No Killing Life Precept..." Truth of eternity, Jo Ju Ho, is the word he put to it. Jo Ju is eternal dwelling. Ho is truth, truth of eternal dwelling, eternal living. Give birth to no-birth/no-extinction is what this precept is.
Dogen Zenji describes this precept. "Do not kill. Do not let other people kill. Beyond that, flourish our Buddha seeds. This is what No Killing Life is." It covers the ethical truth of life and the deeper meaning of what this life is all about. We eat living food, we learn the living teaching constantly as our food for how to live on this earth. Among all phenomenal currents of life we are constantly supported; we are lived by all beings. That is the truth. We are lived by who or whatever we take. We are lived by teachings that guide the direction of how to exist.
Usually the normal way of conducting this life is to continuously explore our capacities depending on what we really want to do. But one way to live is to show all natures through our existence. The whole attitude of how to live begins to appear in different ways from which we usually perceive our life and world.
Jo relates with the well-being and satisfaction of our desires. All kinds of desires relate to other desires and keep going on and on. We feel it works, and endlessly we do things by our wishing, so desires arise within us. Is it the only way to live? One hundred thousand million lives came into this life, this dynamic life, and we fulfill their wishes, how they wanted to be. That is the way to conduct the precept life. We listen to all existences, how every being wishes to be. The answer is in each moment of life -- continuous existence. To promise new existence in the ultimate condition is the answer to all those who have lived whose lives surround us. This is what I think practice means. Practice and life at this point are the same thing.
The answer requires not just understanding what life is all about, but that we express it. Shikan taza is the immediate answer to it, and getting up from shikan taza is the continuous answer to the question, how to live. How you live is how everything lives. For this reason, one period of sitting is not something we take as a personal exercise to reach some kind of enlightened state. We all know this world is a radiant dynamic of enlightenment, an enlightened functioning. There is no need to seek after enlightenment. We were born as the Buddha, life was born as the awakened existence.
You can become a fantastic dancer in your dream, but in order to become a real dancer, and a real dancing person, you have to train your entire system to that form. Sitting on the cushion is not a relaxation, it is every result of your knowledge, and every experience you have come through sits there each time. It's very serious. Otherwise, because of the good feeling and because once in a while you feel an ecstatic sensation in your body, calmness, stillness, or clarity, you would forget there are hungry people on this earth. There are lots of diseases by which people are passing away. If you do not observe that in your sitting you are just escaping in your desire. It happens if once you mistake or limit the focus of your sitting practice.
To me, every second is like a fighting place. I mean a battleplace. I don't actually fight with people, but to inform your existence in each place is like a battleplace. We have experienced the second world war, and still we hear the fire of war extending. In one place it is extinguished, then it moves to another place. A kind of continuous sign of sickness is what we have.
To create the peaceful world is to sit together. We don't know who comes next to us, mother or lover or stranger...we cannot know beforehand. But sitting together for a couple of minutes or days, gradually we understand, so we see things without argument or fight, because the body system was being made to understand what this body, this life is...how other lives exist.
The great pleasure, the great accomplishment of your way-seeking mind is in realization of sitting, this form of sitting, this place to sit on this earth, this time to sit...the twentieth century. Giving birth to Buddha seed is what shikan taza way is. It is not man's improvement as a better man, it is the actualization of what we are. It is very uncomfortable at first to sit this way. It's rather peaceful to sink in the warm soft couch and have a nice drink. But to recover our lives, all lives, is the basic view of sanity, clarity. How everything is actually arising and falling moment after moment, that is how we take this sitting posture. Continuously observe it, within, without,