“Carrying fuel, drawing water from the well and he says, ‘How mysterious.'”
Zen says everything is divine so how can anything be special? All is special. Nothing is non-special so nothing can be special. Each leaf of every tree and each pebble on every shore is special, unique, holy. It is not that the Koran is holy, not that the Bible is holy. When a lover writes a letter to his beloved that letter is holy.
Zen brings holiness to ordinary life.
A great Zen Master, Bokoju, used to say,
How wondrous this. How mysterious. I carry fuel, I draw water.
How wondrous this. How mysterious.
Carrying fuel, drawing water from the well and he says, ‘How mysterious.’
This is the Zen spirit. It transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. It transforms the profane into the sacred. It drops the division between the world and the divine.
Osho, Zen, the Path of Paradox, Vol 1, Ch 1 (excerpt)
Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
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