Short Story: Recycled Zen

There was a Buddhist Zen master of the early 1920's who resided in Chungczen, a province of China. His name was similar to the province name, and perhaps his parents had picked his name more easily for him by doing this. His name was Chungzencye Dhou, but he went by his surname of Dhou, as it was more simple for people to say.

Anyway, as a youth he was found to be very lazy in all of his habits. Dhou had a tandem bicycle in which he always sat in the back position, and so he allowed another person, usually being his father or his brother, and sometimes even his mother to do most if not all of the pushing, and the pedalling for him.

This went on through his teenage years until one day he was riding along and looking around in a carefree but lazily relaxed style as his mother worked hard and pushed him along once more on this old tandem bicycle.

A man that they had just ridden passed, old and wizen up said in a soft and low gravelly voice maybe to Dhou, or maybe and seemingly to no one in particular.

" Your mother pushed you out once before my son, why allow her to keep pushing you still now too, my good son. Push yourself by not pushing yourself. Cycle your bike by not cycling your bike, but don't never allow another to push or cycle for you ever again, my good lad, ever forever now again. "

He had said all this in his slow but authoritarian and all wise sounding voice which was really only a soft and nearly unhearable whisper amongst the crowd of people who were also now hurriedly moving along and riding their own bicycles in the busy and boisterously noisy streets of the small town.

The old man went on mumbling something else now,

" Take what you can my son, you have a potential to ride more than just a cycle. In the future you will help others one day to ride through their lives with what you can share to them. "

Dhou rode along for another mile or two and with his mother still pushing and struggling with the bike, when it suddenly hit him very hardly in his lazy young head what the old Zen Master had really meant. It had took that long for the soft whisper to reach past his still lazy ears, and which had never really listened to others properly or fully ever before either.

To achieve and to be himself he had to recycle himself by not going along with someone else, or on another person's journey, even if they are the ones that are pushing and doing all of the hard work for you.

Dhou thought and pondered on this so much now, even as his mother continued to pedal along on her tandem bicycle making all the extra effort for the two of them put together. She had carried him since his birth and was still carrying him now. He felt a bit sad and sorry at this thought, as it cycled through his mind and indeed it was about to leave his mind, but he pulled it then right back quickly now to himself.

" Life had to be about taking your own journey. "

Dhou jumped down from the bicycle at this realisation, and he returned to the feet of the old master.

And he said to him, " Can I be your student, O great and revered revealer of the truth? "

The Master smiled, and said gently but so pointedly and meaningfully and with a great love.

" When you are ready to ride your own bike and treat me not as a revered master, but just as another rider you can come back for further instruction, my son. "

So Dhou went off and bought himself another brand new bicycle. He rode it all around the province by himself, and it was his bent, or maybe even his destiny, to one day, maybe now at least fifteen years later to be riding along an old mountain trail and pushing for all he was worth, puffing and sweating and struggling as he made hard work of the steep climb up the mountain track, so rough and rocky was the way.

And then he heard an old familiar voice whispering even quieter than the first time that he had heard it those fifteen long years ago.

He looked around and saw the same old Zen master sitting cross legged on a large rock on the left side of the road or track he was moving along. Dhou stopped and said to him, but what did you just then say? Didn't you say something to me just then?

For even after fifteen years his ears were still a bit lazy, and so his awareness was still a bit lower than he thought that it was actually now. Dhou thought that he had already come a long way since that day. He was a learned scholar of the way now himself.

The old master only smiled and said that by pushing yourself you always miss the real message, and so you should never allow the Zen mind to leave you, and so allow your physical body and thoughts to be all of you as you struggle along. Life is not a struggle, but a cycle and cycling is never a push and never a struggle.

The cycle of life is continuously sweet and is only ever seen by never pushing against it, but by allowing life itself to gently move you through its own cycle, my son. And so he had now finished speaking with these endearing words once more again, and again spoken with an energetic truth but in a way that only the ready to hear them could hear them, or could understand what had really been said.

And Dhou upon hearing these words was recycled again, and so in another word he was enlightened.

Dhou became well known after this, and for the next sixty years of his own long life, he was referred to as the recycled Zen Master. This was because he was always so often seen riding along, and now riding still on his old mother's tandem bike again always insisting that he be up at the front of the bike, and that his student be at the rear.

And Dhou always knew by this test, whether his new student was really cycling for life, for mastership or still only for himself. This was how he himself chose his own students in exactly the same way that the old master had chosen him, but he had never known this until fifteen long years had already cycled so quickly by even as he had cycled along beside life, rather than in life.

The master had already chosen him right from their very first meeting. He had been a passenger in life, rather than a participant and a cycler through the cycles of life, while not really cycling for himself. To cycle without cycling, to do without doing, to be without being. This applies from the old but ever new Tao of life, and is perhaps true of all things here on the Earth, except for the greatest thing of them all.

We should never love without loving.

We should love through loving. God is sending us his love at all times, and we must recycle it through ourselves by receiving it fully and then giving it back out again more fully because we have added ourselves, our love to God's love. And this is loving by loving. Increasing the love in the world and in God's Universe and thereby growing into that love.

And that my friends is love's cycle, forever pedalling forward and spiralling upwards. So the advice here is to simply hop onto God's bicycle of love, and to ride it along with love by cycling for God by cycling for yourself, by being yourself freely, and which is indeed the only and best way of cycling through life.

And so the cycle went on for Dhou, and it goes on continuously for us all in this same way.

Do we cycle for life or are we just cycling for ourselves?

Dhou used to cycle along by not cycling, but he wasn't really cycling at all. Until he cycled along by really not cycling, but now cycling through the extra awareness gained that he was still cycling, but that he was not really just cycling. He had taken that long to become enlightened.

As in the old saying, " We see bicycles as bicycles at the beginning of our journey. " And then later on we find that " Bicycles are not bicycles after all, " and then even later still as we start to be really recycled in our thinking, and so too then also is our vision, and so then we once again see the whole truth that, " Bicycles are really only just bicycles after all. "

They always were.

How should we cycle though our life? We should never leave our own true cycle.