Cleaning my glasses
Sitting at my study table, I notice a few specks on my glasses.
Removing it from its position perched upon my nose, I hold it up against the light to find that there is not just that few specks I had seen. There were also some botches that I had not seen until I had held my glasses against the light source.
So what's new? Everyone's glasses get dirty and smudged from dirt and handling sometime or the other. And I was thinking that it didn't really affect my vision because when I looked out from behind these frames and plastic, I still see because those little clouds were insignificantly semi-transparent.
It suddenly struck me how similar this process of taking off my glasses to remove the smudges was like learning and practising Buddhism in our daily lives.
Periodically we need to take off our glasses, or the viewing instrument that we use to see the world and check to see if it's still clear and unclouded. Many times like I just found out, there are smudges and blotches, but we are not aware of them, unless we step back, and re-examine our perception in the greater light of the Buddha's teachings.
And many times, these smudges in the form of perceptions, values and in the ultimate sense - ignorance, exist but we look through and dissolve them into our overall field of vision. Unknowingly, unaware, and unfortunately.
And try as I did, there were still some blotches that refused to go under my persistent rubbing. If I were to stare hard enough at that pair of plastic circles hooked onto my ears, I could detect some of those clingy patches. But I could go cock-eyed doing that.
Maybe the solution would be to just remove those glasses and start rubbing them. But then I would need the light to tell me where the spots were.
Walking the path is like this little saga I have with my glasses today. Being aware of the flaws and blotches in my sadly shortsighted and clouded vision of the world, and then doing action to clear up this view. But not before holding up this pathetically conditioned frame of perception against the brighter clarity of the Buddha's insight.
1st September 1999
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