REGISTER

Quickly, before thinking good and evil,
what is your original face before your parents were born?

—Huineng

For the last fifty years I have baked bread. By my mother’s side, I learned to bake bread that looked less like a chemistry project when you read the label and more like food. Flour, yeast, water and salt—simple ingredients for the staple of life. Of these ingredients, yeast is the catalyst. It brings about the transformation.

There is a parable that notices this: It is like the yeast a baker uses in making bread. Even though she puts only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeates every part of the dough. Domesticated or wild, it will bring about transformation.

A few things about the yeast:

It is all around us. Yeast is in the air. I have a friend who visited us here in Kentucky and collected yeast at the Buffalo Trace Distillery by leaving a little flour out on the grounds of the distillery. The flour receives the yeast, the whole loaf is transformed.

It is alive.

Yeast grows and as it does change happens.

The vast web of interconnection and change is without bounds. It reaches everywhere. The koans, too, are a part of this vastness, inviting us in. The koans are alive.

As yeast joins the flour, the bloom begins. When you receive a koan, sometimes from a teacher or sometimes it just arrives, you welcome the koan into your body, heart, and mind. You begin to see your complete life reflected in the koan. Things come alive. You come alive. Your life begins to foam and bloom.

As the koan holds you, a dialogue of sorts will ensue around who you think you are and what you think life is. Perhaps the koan will show you how with your concepts, ideas and beliefs, you hold yourself apart your life, from the vastness. Your relationship with a koan is personal, vibrant and direct — it is for you alone. It will move with you, live with you. You and all that you do is “in” the koan.

As you awaken to life apart from your image of self, things shift. You find yourself in the transformation ongoing from moment to moment.

—David Parks