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Delicious Delusion

Your idea of wanting to control your passions and delusions is itself delusion:
it exchanges the awakened mind for delusion.

—Bankei

Shortly after last week’s koan about “not an inch of grass for a thousand miles,” this koan from Bankei came along to keep me company. I appreciated the way Bankei and Dongshan were coming from different directions to the same place regarding our relationship to delusions (or grass).

What the 17th century Japanese Zen teacher Bankei calls delusion is what the 20th century Tibetan teacher Lama Yeshe used to call negative mind. Not negative just because it was an unpleasant experience such as anger or sadness, rather, negative because it resulted in negative consequences.

My personal favorite of his various ways of addressing delusion—negative mind—was when he would call it “chocolate.” He would often say, “Negative mind … isn’t it wonderful? Like chocolate.”

There is nothing negative about chocolate, unless you eat too much of it. If it is a difficult kind of negative mind like sadness or anger, then it’s a “delicious” opportunity to savor the flavor of it—which will lead to savoring that flavor less in the future, so long as I don’t judge myself for being an idiot for doing that which I might know better than to do.

Having had an introduction to meditation that likened delusion to chocolate has left me particularly open to what Bankei is saying. A meditation practice is not about controlling passions and delusions, it’s about becoming a connoisseur of them.

Join us Tuesday.

—David Weinstein

COME JOIN US on Tuesdays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation.
Register to participate. All are welcome.

David Weinstein Roshi, Director of Rockridge Meditation Community