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[Last updated: 6 August 1993]
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                      "Blue Cliff Record case 6".

This text addresses some of the most fundamental and delicate religious 
issues. Therefore, it should be read, quoted and analysed in a mindful 
way.

All copyrights to this document belong to John Tarrant, California 
Diamond Sangha, Santa Rosa, Cal., USA
Enquiries: The Editor, "Mind Moon Circle", Sydney Zen Centre, 251 Young 
St., Annandale, Sydney, NSW 2038, Australia. Tel: + 61 2 660 2993
----------------------------------------------------------------------

                        EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY
                           JOHN TARRANT ROSHI
    (Teisho:  Day Six of the April '93 Sesshin at Gorricks Run, NSW,
                               Australia)

This is the sixth case in the Blue Cliff Record.

Yun Men said, "I don't ask you about before the fifteenth of the month, 
try to say something about after the fifteenth."  Yun Men himself 
answered for everybody: "Every day is a good day."

And Hsueh Tou's poem on the case:

     He throws away one and takes up seven.
     Above, below and in the four directions there is no comparison.
     Passively walking along he stops the sound of a flowing stream.
     Freely he watches the track of flying birds.
     The grasses grow thick; the mists overhang.
     Around Sabuti's cliff the flowers make a mess.
     I snap my fingers.  How lamentable is shunyata.
     Don't make a move.  If you move - thirty blows!

The fifteenth of the month is the time of the full moon and 
traditionally the full moon is associated with enlightenment and 
clarity.  So he's asking, "I don't ask you about before that time; what 
about after that time?"  Nobody else could answer apparently, so he 
answered for himself, "Every day is a good day."

When Aitken Roshi did his final transmission ceremony, Yamada Roshi came 
to Honolulu to do the ceremony with Aitken Roshi's sangha and as part of 
the ceremony Aitken Roshi had to give a teisho and also a public 
dokusan.  During the public dokusan, Yamada Roshi sat behind him in a 
chair with a kyosaku over his knees - all that psychic weight that 
somebody who's been doing Zen for a long time accumulates.  The kyosaku 
looks a very light easy thing to pick up and hit with.

Yamada Roshi was doing koan seminars with some of the senior students 
and he asked us to come up and ask Aitken Roshi particularly difficult 
and obnoxious questions in front of everybody.  And what he asked me to 
do was to ask about this case, "What do you think about 'Every day is a 
good day'?" So you can see from this that Yamada Roshi saw this as one 
of the true tests of understanding. If you can really meet Yun Men you 
will have such a heart at ease in a significant way.  This is not a 
small thing.

Yun Men was a grand master of Zen whom Mr Blythe, as Aitken Roshi always 
calls him, spoke of as being one of those great world figures like 
Shakespeare or Goethe who come along once every five hundred years - 
someone who is truly remarkable.  You can get a little bit of a flavour 
from just this case alone. "Every day is a good day."  You're either 
very foolish or you really know something if you can say that.  Yun Men 
was not actually that easy-going a sort of fellow.  It wasn't "Have a 
good day!" sort of consciousness that he was talking about.

He went to study with Mu Chou for some time, who was a very difficult 
teacher, very old at the time and kind of cranky.  He had this secret 
life in which he made straw sandals for the pilgrims and put them out.  
He'd hide in his room all day making straw sandals and anonymously 
putting them out for people who'd be on pilgrimage and wear out their 
sandals.  There was something very touching about the sweetness that was 
inside this tough old fellow.

But it was difficult even to get inside his room and people would come 
to see him and he wouldn't even open the door for dokusan.  Yun Men went 
three times and finally was admitted.  Something about his footsteps 
must have improved his general field.  And the old teacher, who was in 
his nineties, I guess, opened the door a crack, and Yun Men, being Yun 
Men, thrust it open and jumped in.  And the teacher really grabbed him 
and said, "What is it!?"  And Yun Men immediately became stupified the 
way one does.

So again, there's this sort of creative stupidity that happens when 
we're undertaking a great thing.  In any great shift in our lives we'll 
find something of this I think.  But it's very pronounced in Zen that we 
are really waiting for that apple to drop on our heads so we can 
formulate some sort of new arrangement of the world.  So anyway, he 
became dumb and his teacher, being a frail, helpless ninety-year-old Zen 
master, threw him out, physically.  Yun Men didn't get his leg out fast 
enough and it broke his leg.  He screamed in pain, and at that moment 
gained enlightenment.  He was of the sudden school.

There's something very moving for me about everything involved here.  
That the old man's harshness could have such a good result says a lot of 
good things for both the old man and his student, I think.  The timing 
was right.  And it wasn't like some simple little stress fracture.  Yun 
Men walked with a limp for the rest of his life and had a hard time even 
sitting in zazen.  But he stayed with his teacher for some more years, 
deepening his insight until his teacher at about a hundred, thought he 
was getting a bit long in the tooth to be teaching a real tiger, so he 
sent him off to another teacher, too Hsueh Feng, actually. And he 
studied with Hsueh Feng and became a successor in his line and one of 
the founders of the koan lineage.

Even after he was enlightened, he went to Hsueh Feng and when he arrived 
there he came forward out of the assembly, which took a lot of courage 
in front of a thousand people.  The teacher would stand there and if you 
had the courage you came out and spoke.  And he said, "Where is Buddha?"  
Hsueh Feng said, "Don't talk in your sleep."  Again, just stupifying 
him, I think - the same thing.  Not a harsh thing - sometimes people 
think it's harsh.  It's not.  It's just a barrier put here.

Yun Men bowed and stayed there for three years.  One day Hsueh Feng 
asked him, "What do you see?"  Yun Men said, "My view doesn't differ in 
the slightest from that of all the sages since antiquity."  Something 
happened in those three years.

And here's this great story about Yun Men, how he eventually inherited 
the temple of a person called Ling Shu.  For twenty years Ling Shu did 
not appoint a head monk.  He used to say things like, "Today my head 
monk was born."  And later, "My head monk is tending oxen in the 
fields."  And then he would say, "My head monk is travelling around on 
pilgrimage."  And people didn't quite know what to say about this.  
After a while I think some of them went, "Oh yeah." One day he ordered 
the big temple bell to be struck and ordered everyone in the 
congregation to assemble to receive the head monk at the gate.  The 
congregation was dubious about this, but Yun Men actually arrived - he 
came limping in.  Ling Shu immediately invited him into the head monk's 
quarters to unpack his bundle. People called Ling Shu "the Knowing Sage" 
because he knew this sort of thing. Somebody said, "This says a lot 
about Ling Shu, doesn't it."  And I said, "No. It says a lot about Yun 
Men."  The world received him.  His karma was right.

Once King Yiu, the Lord of Kuang was going to mobilise his army.  He 
intended to go to the monastery personally to ask the master Ling Shu to 
determine whether conditions were auspicious or not.  You get yourself 
in trouble if you're a Zen master - whichever way you answer, something 
bad will happen.  Ling Shu, knowing of this beforehand, sat down and 
peacefully died.

The Lord of Kuang was angry about this and said, "Since when was the 
master sick?"  And the attendant answered, "The master has not been 
sick.  But he just entrusted a box to me which he ordered me to present 
to you when you arrived, your majesty."  The Lord of Kuang opened the 
box and took out a card which said, "The eye of healing Zen deities is 
in the head monk in the hall."  The Lord of Kuang thereupon dismissed 
his soldiers and invited Yun Men to appear in the world at Ling Shu 
Monastery.  This is how Yun Men got himself a temple. Surprising things 
do happen.

I think this story is very interesting in a lot of ways - not so much 
for that sense of the mystery of the dharma that floats around it like 
dawn mist on the river, but we see the level of real issues that we have 
to deal with through a Zen approach.  Zen is so obviously not something 
that you can leave in a temple.

Ling Shu had this great warlord come to him, who obviously wanted to 
declare war.  It's very hard to hold back a general when a general 
really wants something.  He didn't want to get involved with this, but 
there was no way that he could not be involved.  How to keep your 
integrity in this situation is so interesting.  He had a solution which 
seems sort of novel, but very successful, really.  He just sort of went 
on, somewhere else.

But you can see the kind of courage and integrity he needed just to make 
his way through this minefield.  He must have felt it to be such a 
dangerous situation that it required his complete sacrifice.  So he had 
to just let go of any plans he might have had to do anything else when 
this great situation came up.  He had to just walk out and leave 
everything to Yun Men.  Still, it seems he chose pretty well in his 
successor.  But we find ourselves faced with real life situations like 
this where we must choose and either choice is bad, and that's a great 
situation for Zen wisdom to appear.

This whole issue of "Every day is a good day" brings up for me the issue 
of "Well, what is enlightenment?"  It's an odd thing to try and describe 
what enlightenment is.  A few months ago I gave a public talk in 
Berkeley.  It was a fairly long talk, about forty minutes, I suppose, 
and I probably spent about one minute of it speaking about 
enlightenment.  But about 95% of the questions I was asked after the 
talk were about enlightenment.  And so there's some sort of obsession 
that can gather around this word, which is, I guess, OK.  We just have 
to accept that and do something interesting with it.

To describe enlightenment I think means to find some language beyond it 
in which it can be talked about, and I don't think that is completely 
possible.  There is a language problem here.  But we can play with it a 
little bit.  It seems that there are these great shifts in us which seem 
to clarify us like this fire that suddenly illuminates everything.  
Sometimes these shifts are very small but they seem great.  We hear a 
child crying out and we hear that voice as if it's coming from inside 
us.  We see a tree move and we feel that we just moved.  So even this 
small taste of the great world of Zen is so interesting and compelling 
that we tend to get very attracted to it.  And then some people have big 
tastes, I suppose - a big mouthful of it.

We think of ourselves as the "sudden school", rather than the "gradual 
school'. I still feel I'm not sure what this means.  When I see people 
who obviously belong to a gradual school, somehow that helps me find out 
what sudden school might be.  One of the ideas of gradual school is that 
realisation happens over many aeons.  This is an idea that comes from 
the sutras and so many, many lives are needed.   From that point of 
view, a life is a rather brief span.  "It only took me eighty years to 
pass my first koan.  Wow!"   The idea that you might get anywhere in one 
life in terms of realisation in itself is a sudden school idea.

I think the other obvious use of the term "sudden" is that there are 
these shifts in us that are utter.  There is an irreversible quality to 
consciousness. It has its imperatives and its demands and once you have 
seen something it's very hard to unsee it.  We can if we work at it and 
drug ourselves, if we're rather self-destructive, but it's hard to un- 
see something once we have seen it. Once you have a particular point of 
view, it's very hard to go back.  And to shift points of view is a 
matter of doing something entirely.  It's something that happens to us.  
And that is the sudden thing as well.

But I think that everybody's path is unique. I've heard quite a lot of 
enlightenment stories and I've witnessed quite a lot of enlightenment 
stories, I suppose, many of which never happened.  Some of them are very 
genuine and powerful, and there just doesn't seem to be any set way.  
When you read the old accounts you'll find if you read a few of them 
you'll get a very strong idea that there's a set way.

I was wondering why I don't teach the way some people I originally took 
as models teach - you know, from the kensho factories of the world.  I 
do respect the teachers.  Three Pillars of Zen was a book that was very 
influential for me and for many people.  Yamada Roshi wrote a great deal 
of that book.  He doesn't get credited, which is one of the problems 
between him and Kapleau Roshi, but he wrote a great deal of that book 
and collected those stories.  Yamada Roshi is someone I respect a great 
deal.

So there's something good there but I realise that the kind of people I 
want us to become are different from that.  I don't want us just to 
value that blinding flash of insight.  I think it's because that's not 
what I want for myself.  When I first began teaching, really I didn't 
know anything else to want or anything else I was supposed to do.  I 
think I really did value that a lot, and I still do.  But I valued it, 
perhaps, in the wrong way - more than I do now, anyway. Now I still 
value it, but it's like the background has appeared as well and I see 
the background much more.

That is a sort of much wider thing, I think.  It's about this sort of 
inner upheaval which even changes the cell membranes, we might say.  And 
it is something that seems to just go on and on in us.  So there really 
is that insight.  Sometimes it's a blinding flash, we might say, that 
knocks us off our feet.  But sometimes it's not, and I don't care which.  
I really can't bring myself to care which.  In myself or others, it's 
the transformation that's interesting.

And there's an inner shift in what I call character.  You'll find that 
character is an interest of many peoples at many times.  It's an old 
Tang dynasty interest, a very old Chinese interest, actually.  It has 
always been an interest of the Zen world.  This is something that is not 
a matter of narrowness or piety in religion, a following of rules.  The 
character is held together, mediated I think, by what I'm calling 
integrity, which is what makes the precepts something that is 
inhabitable and wide and full.  Without that, something too narrow 
happens.  There is a clarity but the life is too narrow.  Somebody has 
described it to me as "this narrow cone-like consciousness that squeezes 
out wisdom drop by drop" in a tiny, rather meagre sort of fashion.  And 
that's not enough.

So I'll tell a couple of enlightenment stories and see.  I have a friend 
who was enlightened in a very classical way.  He sat very hard for a 
long time and put side his life, as I did and some others of you have at 
various times.  And he would sit and he really didn't get anywhere very 
much except his sitting got better and samadhis got better, but he would 
go in to dokusan and the Roshi would say, "What is mu?" and he would 
say,"I don't know," and go out again, and there we were.

But he'd hear a sound and it would go through him and he would start to 
shake. Or something would fall on the roof and his body would vibrate.  
Or the sound would seem to be coming from inside him.  He thought that 
was sort of propitious.

One day he was in the zendo. Many of us used to sleep in the zendo.  He 
was sitting up at night and people were lying in their sleeping bags 
around him, snoring.  And you know how people snore in different 
overtones and it can be pretty loud.  I had a roommate once who used to 
scream in the night and somehow it was right at sesshin.  It was good to 
be his roommate.  I used to feel like he opened me up when he screamed.  
I used to feel such compassion for him, and the only way I could offer 
my compassion was just to hold that scream for him because he couldn't 
hold it himself.  So my friend was sitting there sort of holding all 
these snores, just having them pass through him.

In the teisho for some reason that nobody any longer remembers, the 
Roshi had mentioned this phrase: "headless corpses and corpseless 
heads".  And he'd be going "mu" and this phrase started to take over his 
consciousness - "corpseless heads, headless corpses, corpseless heads" - 
and he was sitting down there, all these people prone around him, 
snoring and "corpseless heads, headless corpses".  So after a while he 
decided to get up and go to bed.  He got up and went to bed.  He lay 
down and he turned over.  He couldn't get comfortable, and he turned 
over.  And at that moment, he said, the whole world turned over. 
Everything shifted.  And he thought, "Oh that's nice," and he just went 
to sleep.

I'm reminded of when the Dueno Elegies came to Rainer Maria Rilke, when 
he was at the castle.  He was worried about a business matter and he 
went out to walk on the balcony of the Dueno Castle, overlooking the 
Adriatic.  Suddenly this great poem that he knew he had been ready for 
his whole life began to come to him - it was the Dueno Elegies - at the 
same time as the solution to the business problem.  So he went in and 
finished his business letter, then sat down and wrote the elegies.

So my friend just went to sleep.  That was the right thing to do next. 
When he woke up in the morning, everything was shining, everything was 
glowing.  A very interesting thing is he went to his teacher and he 
couldn't explain this to his teacher.  The teacher just rang the bell 
and he left.  He said it took him maybe six months to begin to find a 
language where the two of them could talk about this experience.  So you 
can see you have to digest things, even in its most classical form.  
There's a digestion period.

I'll tell you another story because I think it's a nice counteraction.  
There's another friend of mine, a student of mine who wasn't even 
working on koans, because she didn't really like performing very much.  
She felt she couldn't get the idea of performing separated from the idea 
of doing koans.  It was just too much like university examinations.  
This is a common experience I think.  So why do koans?  So she wasn't 
doing koans.  I couldn't ever completely work out what she was doing, 
actually, but she was sincere so I decided when in doubt, don't worry 
about it.  And it seemed all right.  It didn't make sense, but it seemed 
all right so, what do I know?  I'm just the teacher.

She would meditate, and some years went by and she was sincere but her 
life seemed a bit thin in a lot of ways.  She was just one of those 
sincere Zen people that seems to have given up just a little too much 
for Zen, not realising that that was Zen too, that they were giving up.

Anyway gradually - I guess hearing me talk about koans - I think she 
herself just took up one of the koans.  It sort of leaked into her 
consciousness.  It took her up a little bit.  But she really wasn't 
working on koans and there was no sense for me that she was working on 
koans, anyway.  She was just walking around and she was meditating and 
then some pain from her early life came up - her father.  She was like 
many of us in Zen who were not well-mothered or well-fathered and come 
to the universe to do that for us.  There was all this pain about this 
huge access of feeling.  She was really trained as a scientist and it 
really wasn't her bag.

But this came up for her and she felt that she wasn't supposed to be 
doing this in zazen but she she decided she would just weep away in the 
dojo because it seemed authentic and so she did that.  She came in to me 
and she was talking to me and told me stories about her father whom 
she'd hardly known - the little few stories she knew about her father .  
That was what dokusan was all about.

Then that stopped and everything was still for a while and this koan 
came into her mind and she walks into dokusan one day and she has this 
crushed beer can in her hand.  I thought, "Well, this is interesting."  
So she just walks into dokusan, just strides in and puts it on the 
altar, laughing.  She'd found herself.

We were in this retreat centre and it was beautiful but it had been 
trashed some - there was public access to some parts.  She'd been 
walking around by the bay shore picking up beer cans.  She had been 
moved to do this during sesshin - some mysterious thing.  She had 
followed the impulse, in that case the right thing to do.  As she picked 
one up she realised that it was Buddha and she was Buddha, and the tree 
was Buddha and the beer can - everything was Buddha.  So she naturally 
brought Buddha back to put on the altar.  She spent the rest of the 
sesshin laughing - sometimes aloud in the zendo.  She was a very quiet 
and reserved person, you know.

That's another kind of story and a totally different path, I think.  And 
her path since has been different.  Her path hasn't been a rush through 
koan work as my other friend did.  Her path has been somehow to get a 
relationship that she liked in her life.  She's good at koan work; it 
holds her and she will finish her koan work.  That's a very very 
important thing.  But each koan she tries to relate to her world.

This is something that is still something of a mystery to us.  How do we 
relate the great formal questions of the past to our actual questions, 
our informal organically-generated questions of the moment?  I think we 
are still working with this.  I was having a conversation with someone 
here the other day and she was saying that only after you have solved 
the koan can you see how it relates to your life and you can see all the 
connections.  But when you are working on it it has no relationship to 
your life and isn't this the problem?  There's something very 
frustrating.

I think there's something happens there, where the koan seems to draw 
our blindness to the surface in a way like a poultice used to.  I don't 
know if people still use poultices any more.  The idea was that it would 
draw the infection or the demon out of the body.  A koan sometimes will 
do this.  Often we're in this place where the koan is this dry, helpless 
thing that's just lying there on the floor and we have no relation to it 
at all.  Zen practice becomes like that at some moments - this quite 
useless thing.  What has this got to do with my life?

I think that's a moment when a great inner compartmentalisation that is 
already there in us has somehow come to the surface and taken us over.  
That is the way in which we keep the most important parts of our lives 
out of our practice sometimes.  And this can't be right.  Like my friend 
was trying to keep her whole thing about her early childhood (which 
doesn't have to run her, but is also part of her story) out of her 
practice but, maybe because she'd held it out so long, when it came in 
it was of benefit.  It was a real thing when it came in.

So we must find a way to connect with the questions of our lives.  The 
old stories and the old language are actually very helpful if we can 
find a way.  So one of the first things we need to do in order to have a 
good day, is to have a bad one, actually, I think. You know, until we 
suffer, we don't understand about the need for enlightenment.  And so we 
have to grow dark before we can grow light.  I really do think this is 
true.

And before we can find oneness there needs to be a separation.  We 
really do need to find out how dualistic we really are.  Wu Men says, 
"With realization, all things are one family.  Without realization, all 
things are separate and disconnected."  This is a very clear and 
conventional view.   The next line in the poem is, "Without realization 
all things are one family".  Yamada Roshi used to call this "pernicious 
oneness".  And there's some way in which until that separation has 
occurred within us, we can't then get the union.

So symptoms are very valuable.  The new name for dukha is "symptoms".  
And if we have a symptom, this is why an illness can be a very creative 
thing or some really neurotic, obsessive behaviour which we do and we 
hide from everybody and we only do late at night when nobody's looking.  
They're wonderful those things and we should bring them into our Zen and 
look at them and bring our Zen into them because they're the form in 
which the practice is trying to appear and the koan is trying to appear 
in our lives in that form.

So until you've got a symptom, you're in trouble, I think really.  You 
know you really need a symptom, preferably florid.  It doesn't have to 
be florid - that's just my preference.  That's just clear.  But any 
symptom will do.  And then we get our awareness into our pain and when 
you can get the awareness into the pain you find the pain itself holds 
the good day.

There's a story about one of the great masters of Korean Zen who set off 
on a pilgrimage to China with some friends. There was no wisdom in Korea 
and so they had to go off to China.  It was very difficult and his 
friends turned back gradually.  He was crossing a desert - a frightening 
place - alone, and after nightfall he came to this place where he could 
camp and he stopped.  It was as if he was guided there and he stopped.  
There was a tree there and there was a bowl with this delicious water in 
it, this pure water.  He drank the water and he felt so, so supported by 
the universe and aided by the universe and he felt his pilgrimage was 
right.

So he went to sleep and he woke up in the morning and found that the 
bowl was a skull full of stinking water with slime in it.  He began to 
vomit, and as the vomit came out he became enlightened at that moment.  
And he decided he didn't need to go to China any more and he went back 
and became this wonderful teacher in Korea - that juxtaposition of the 
extreme suffering and then suddenly switching into the extremes - the 
beauty of the dharma and the rightness of the suffering, in that case.

This is a very strong feature of life, and I think when we're open to 
that, we are open to the bodhisattva way.  One of the main errors I 
think I make is believing that, because people are really a nuisance and 
obnoxious and crazy, like most of us are some of the time, we will 
continue to be that way.  But we have to be open to the possibility in 
ourselves of that change occurring.  That very place that we're always 
protecting with cynicism, or with fatigue, or depression or whatever 
we're protecting it with - with being clever and with looking good - 
that very place is the place of our change, and it's out of there that 
the enlightenment will come.  That is the place where the koan really 
dwells.  In some way we have to bring that out, and if we can see that 
in others, that's great.

So, Yun Men's good day   When I asked Aitken Roshi about it in his  
ceremony, he spoke about dying as being the good day - the moment, the 
time of dying.  You can see that if you want to be a bodhisattva and 
help others, you have to permit them to do things like die when it's 
their time.  In our culture we tend to hook people up a lot to machines 
at the time of death - more in the US than here, but still here.  And 
for some people that's right because they have to live entirely within 
the dream of the culture.  They can't live apart from it.  But for some 
of us, that's not right.  We have to allow people their suffering so 
that that moment of transformation can come, where we fully enter the 
suffering and find it is good, and find that the gold is there.   We 
don't even have to suffer I suppose really, to do this, but somehow the 
tradition is that we do.  It says that without the great doubt it's hard 
really to get anywhere.  And that suffering is the doubt.

Suffering is a doubt about our place in the universe, a doubt about the 
nurturing quality of the universe for us.  And it's a doubt about our 
line to eternity and whether eternity will really support us in getting 
a job or having a baby or whatever it is - finding love, finding the 
way, getting breakfast. Really.  For many people it's actually finding a 
meal.  So that is the doubt and the doubt does seem to be necessary.  
That's the symptom and the place of pain.

And then there's the great faith that's necessary, which is so 
contradictory. But it is also so important.  And then there's the effort 
- the great effort that's necessary - the third of the legs.  I always 
feel there should be a fourth leg there.  And I think to me the fourth 
leg is something to do with love.  You really need to love the way; you 
need to love the doubt and the darkness and the light and the noxious 
people you practise with and your own obnoxiousness and all that stuff.

So it is the doubt, I think, that we tend to omit sometimes and not 
value when it comes, and not realise that if it becomes more 
excruciating it's also closer to resolution.  If your pain in your life 
and your situation is becoming worse, if not only do you lose your house 
and your family and your job, but you also get thrown in prison, maybe 
that's good.  OK?  And maybe many things are starting to culminate here.  
Maybe there's a pattern that something is beginning to crystalise out of 
solution, that something is appearing in the world; there is a shape 
happening.  And then the faith and the sincerity have something to work 
with - the effort and the faith and the sincerity.

In his verse Hsueh Tou says, "Around Sabuti's cliff the flowers make a 
mess." Sabuti meditated so well that the devas, the gods, the nature 
spirits started pelting him with flowers and Hsueh Tou thinks this is 
all a bit much.  "Sit down and drink your tea.  Eat your porridge and be 
quiet."  That's his attitude. "The flowers make a mess."  Yuan Wu says, 
"Where is he, that stupid fellow?"

"I snap my fingers.  How lamentable is shunyata!"  You see, when he says 
it's the emptiness that's lamentable, he's saying it's good to come out 
and engage with the world here, that that is the field of enlightenment.  
That is the reason that some teachers actually like to deal with lay 
people.  Harada Roshi, who is really at least the modern founder of our 
tradition, is said to have liked to deal with lay people.  He thought it 
was so difficult to do it as a lay person that if you managed to do it 
at all, you were probably in good shape. But, in another sense, it's 
easier as a lay person because you're always fronted with the stuff of 
life.  So it's harder to get that narrow, comfortable zone of 
consciousness and get stuck in it, because something will always throw 
you out. Some doubt will arise; a symptom will appear and that symptom 
will save you.

So at this time of sesshin what I might say about the good day is that I 
think it can relate to trust here, as well -  trust in the universe, 
trust in this afternoon, trust in our meditation, trust in time so that 
we don't become time-focused in the wrong way; trust in whatever is this 
great process that is working in us, finding its own way to fulfilment, 
if we get out of the way as much as we can and if we give it as much 
sincere effort as we can.
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