Waking Up (Applies a Long Passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden)
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is the foremost literary expression of the spiritual life published in America (originally in 1854). At the end of the book, Thoreau says encouragingly, “The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands.”[1]
He continues with this stirring passage:
Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterwards in Massachusetts, -- from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection andimmortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, -- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, -- may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last![2]
Given that this passage may be hard to read, with its 19th-century penchant for long sentences and internal subordination, it seems to me to reflect the usually slow progress of a zazen practitioner towards waking up. As far as we know, Thoreau was not a zazen practitioner, but he says keep going in whatever route you have chosen (his was walks in nature) towards waking up. The last sentences of his book are, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”[3]
Waking up to a firm realization of non-separateness, or to the unity of life, is the goal of zazen. May we all patiently persist in practice, like the strong and beautiful bug, and eventually experience the dawning of our day
Footnotes
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Boston, 1997 and 2004, p. 311.
- Ibid., pp. 311-312.
- Ibid., p. 312..