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Perfect and You Can Use a Little Improvement 33 Fingers: Case 9 Traditionally, during sesshin, I've given talks based on one of the classic koan collections, the Mumonkan or the Blue Cliff Record. Although at this center, we don't practice formal koan study, nonetheless I think that it is part of my job to bring out these old koans to help us sharpen and inspire our practice. It's not always easy to what those old stories are pointing to; sometimes we can bring them alive in our present-day practice, sometimes they lay inert on the page or seem merely to be particularly opaque riddles. At one time, of course, they were nothing of the sort - they are the record of vivid, often life-changing encounters between students and teachers, encounters whose very vividness caused them to be remembered, written down and studied over the centuries. But there is nothing sacrosanct about these stories Ð if Zen is going to be a living and not a fossilized practice, it must inspire generation after generation to take the old lessons, and make them new. Today's case is taken from a modern koan collection called 33 Fingers, [Clear Glass Publishing, 1994] compiled by Michael Wenger at the San Francisco Zen Center. Whether Zen students a thousand years from now will be repeating the stories he's collected is anybody's guess, but for now, they offer us a collection of sayings and doings of modern masters from a variety of schools, to remind us that Mumon, Unmon, Dogen and Rinzai are still with us, sometimes wearing robes, sometimes wearing jeans.
The Case: Shunryu Suzuki addressed the assembly, " Each one of you is perfect the way you are and you can use a little improvement."
Commentary: Sometimes a teacher uses a sharp sword, sometimes a kind hug. Here Master Shunryu used both at once. Granting way and denying way. Zap! How can perfection be improved upon, or is it a dead end? Improvement is always running away from where you are. Our teachers were never complacent nor were they flighty.
Verse:
"Each one of you is perfect the way you are and you can use a little improvement." Suzuki Roshi marvelously summed up in one line something I've tried to say may times, but never so succinctly. What he's saying may sound paradoxical unless we see the true relationship between "perfection" and "improvement." Another way of putting it might be to ask what motive does a Buddha have to practice? If everything is perfect just as it is, why sit long, long sesshins, why go through this tough way of practicing? Do we do all that as a means to an end, and when we finally "get" it, then we can ease up? That's how we think if we imagine we have to keep improving in order to someday be perfect. But that's really completely backwards. We don't practice to become perfect. Practice is the expression of our perfection, which is to say, an expression of who we are. Fully being who we are expresses itself in practice. To continually practice is to be continually aware, to be continually aware is to be aware of our habitual resistance to life-as it-is. Being human, that resistance never ends once and for all, and our practice never ends once and for all either. Why should it? Do we expect to eat or breath or sleep once and for all and never have to do it again? Been there, done that?! Not if we're going to stay alive!
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