Those who donated to our crowdfunding Indiegogo campaign last fall are getting daily e-mails this month as a thank-you and part of the May Sit. We wanted to share these with everyone, though they are a day or so later. This was the May 2 offering.

The first text in italics is from Cultivating the Empty Field by Zen Master Hongzhi, translated by Taigen Daniel Leighton with Yi Wu. The commentary following it is from one of the teachers at Dharma Rain Zen Center.

Empty and desireless, cold and thin, simple and genuine, this is how to strike down and fold up the remaining habits of many lives. When the stains from old habits are exhausted, the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters. Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon having the same color, this field is without boundary. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response, then turn around and enter the world. Roam and play in samādhi. Every detail clearly appears before you.

Sometimes we feel entirely stained. It is hard to stand up straight and be seen. But at any given moment, all of this can fall away. As we are broken, as we are flawed, we are also whole. We are also vast and spacious. How to do this monumental task? How to see that the world of a thousand, thousand things is one world? Enter the world, Hongshi says. Turn around, look up from your own confusion, and see that you are also part of the world. You are also the same color as the snow and the moon. Today, look up from your work and see that everything around you is whole in itself.