Recycling . . . I "borrowed" a story that I heard in a podcast by Insight Meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal and worked it into my talk last Sunday at the Atlanta Zen Center, workshopped it a little last Monday night, and then re-told it today up at Chattanooga. It's really more of a thought experiment than a story, but here you go:

Imagine a room with a beautiful wooden floor. You can imagine it a parquet floor in celebration of the Celtics 3-0 lead over the Magic in the Eastern Conference Championships if that makes it easier for you (there, got that off my chest!).

Now imagine that a party is thrown in that room, and when I say "party," I mean "par-tay." Kegs of beer, barrels of peanuts, and lots and lots of pretzels and popcorn, all of which get dropped on that beautiful wooden floor along with cocktail napkins, paper plates, crushed plastic cups, and various other detritus.

What would happen if no one bothered to clean that floor, and the next week another party was held? We can imagine that the party-goers would trample over the previous week's trash and grind the trash from that week's party into the underlying filth.

Now, imagine that this happens week after week, and no one cleans up. Ever. More and more trash builds up over that lovely parquet floor until it is no longer visible. Further imagine that the parties become so popular that they just continue every week for years and years, and eventually the next generation takes over and continues the tradition, and then their children and then their children's children, and so on.

What would the floor look like then? We can imagine a layer of hard-packed soil made up of peanut shells, popcorn, and paper products, cemented together with dried beer, and incorporating everything dropped onto the floor over the generations. Eventually, that layer of filth would get several feet thick, and no one would even remember that there was once a parquet floor under that thick layer of trash.

Now, one day, one of those great-great-grandchildren reads in a book that the party room once had a parquet floor and maybe even sees a picture of it. He gets to wondering if he dug down through the by now almost clay-like sediment if he couldn't see the parquet floor for himself and verify its existence. Everyone else tells him he's crazy - they all know from their experience that the room has a dirt floor and believe it's always been that way. But the person who read the book is not so sure and is really curious, so he clears off, say, one square foot of floorspace and starts digging down.

The experience is a mixed one - as he digs, he comes across interesting newspaper articles, nostalgic CD covers, old Polaroids, and other interesting stuff, but he also encounters squashed bugs, vomit, and excrement (how did that even happen?). But he is not deterred and keeps digging, regardless of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.

And eventually, he reaches the floor and clears off the little square foot of parquet. With a little polishing, it still shines and now he knows that the floor is real. He's confirmed this for himself - he's seen it, he's touched it, he's even polished it. No one can ever convince him now that there is no parquet floor.

Then looking around the room, he sees that the parquet probably once extended from wall to wall, from east to west, from north to south. He sees that it might take a lifetime, but if one were to continue the excavation, soon the entire, original floor in all of its natural beauty would once again be manifest.

This, obviously, is an analogy to spiritual practice. Our true nature has become buried under a lifetime of various delusions until we no longer even know that there's a true nature beneath all of the accumulated sediment. But we might be lucky and come across the teachings of a spiritual teacher, either from direct contact or reading, or word of mouth, or some other means, and if we get curious enough about it, we might start a practice of digging down through those accumulated layers. In Zen, that practice is sitting meditation.

And then one day, lo and behold, we get a glimpse of that true nature, a taste of our reality. And at that point, there is no turning back. Our life practice becomes digging and excavating (zazen), strengthened by the unshakable faith created by our direct experience. A Buddha can be said to be a person who has completely removed all the sediment from wall to wall without a speck remaining. If it's not taking the analogy too far, a bodhisattva can be said to be a person who has stopped short of complete excavation in order to encourage and help others remove the soil from their floors.

It's a fun story to tell because it can so easily be embellished as the audience's attention demands, and it lends itself to several different levels of interpretation. I bow in deep gassho to Sensei Fronsdal for posting the podcast and sharing the story with the virtual sangha on the internet. I hope that my re-telling here provides someone else with another tool in their toolkit for spreading the Buddha-dharma.

By the way, it was a nice summery day for a drive up to Chattanooga and back and I was home by a little after 4:00. Also, Eliot and I saw the fox again today.