Living with the question

During the last Webinar we were looking into the following passage from Genjokoan:

Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and it has its own before and after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off.

As part of the homework we are to read the passage before zazen and reflect on the question:

When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)

For starters, I came to appreciate reading the text before the sitting even though at first the words did not make much sense to me.  Soon I started noticing how doing that opened up my mind to the passage and to Dosho’s question in the activities of everyday life (living practice).  Now I did not have to remember the question itself;  it was following me everywhere. All of a sudden I would come up with the answer after I have dealt with the situation at hand.

Observing how my mind was dealing with the question turned out to be as fascinating and insightful as the question itself. I noticed that when a question was asked (any question for that matter) I immediately experienced a certain excitement in the system charging for coming up with the answer. However, in this case the question was too confusing for the mind and there were no answer at the moment.  Excitement gave way to some unnerving feeling as if the system perceived that something was off, some problem remained unsolved.  I chose to allow myself walking with the question in the midst of everything and seeing the question as something already carrying the answer. Now it was not necessary to verbalise that answer which removed some of the original pressure: I did not have to answer the question, I just had to keep asking it again and again. After a couple of days the question started sinking through the layers of the conditioned thinking and habitual patterns of problem solving.

What more have I learnt from actually dealing with a rather concrete question that I could not answer using the habitual ways of addressing a question?

First, accepting the state of not-knowing as part of the journey. I was under the illusion that once one knew the path everything became clear. Apparently, not always so and moreover, often quite on the contrary: wondering around with the question is part of the path itself.  So no shortcuts here! I was reminded once again that none of the masters knew all the answers at each moment:  Christ, Buddha, Mohammed. All of them had to do their share of wondering around and living with the tension of not-knowing.

Secondly, I noticed the tendency of both interpreting the question and wanting to answer it using the either/or dualistic approach. In this case I had the urge to choose between yes and no. Yet none of them rang true with me. It might be that I was favouring one or the other in my life,  but it doesn’t make it so.  So, once again

When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)