You are Already Awake
“From the beginning, all beings are Buddha.”
18 th century Master Hakuin’s “Song of Meditation”
All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.
It is like water and ice:
Apart from water, no ice,
Outside living beings, no Buddhas.
Not knowing it is near, they seek it afar.
What a pity!
It is like one in the water who cries out for thirst;
It is like the child of a rich house
who has strayed away among the poor.
The cause of our circling through the six worlds
Is that we are on the dark paths of ignorance.
Dark path upon dark path treading,
When shall we escape from birth-and-death?
The Zen meditation of the Mahayana
Is beyond all our praise.
Giving and morality and the other perfections,
Taking of the name, repentance, discipline,
And the many other right actions,
All come back to the practice of meditation.
By the merit of a single sitting
He destroys innumerable accumulated sins.
How should there be wrong paths for him?
One comment on “You are Already Awake”
Leave a comment
Engage! 
You don’t need to do anything special to be awake. You are awake already. You don’t even need to be a Buddhist. If being a Buddhist helps you to realize that you are already awake, then be a Buddhist. But you could be theist or atheist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Witch-Pagan, Indigenous faith, or any one of thousands of world religions, it doesn’t matter; whatever helps you realize that you are already awake. You don’t even need to be a human; all sentient beings that can sense and respond are Buddha. Being human helps you to be self-consciously aware that you are already awake. Ultimately, the entire cosmos is buddhanature.