Dear Friends, let me tell you a little story a wise man once told me. He said:
"Once I found myself in an unfamiliar country, walking down a strange street. I looked around trying to get my bearings; and seeing two men who were standing nearby, I approached them. `Where am I?' I asked. `Who are you people?'
"The first man replied, `This is the world of Samsara, and in this world I happen to be the very tallest dwarf there is!' And the other man replied, `Yes, and I happen to be the shortest giant!'
"This encounter left me very confused because, you see, both men were exactly the same height."
I preface my remarks to you with this little story because I want to emphasize at the outset how important it is to consider the perception of things.
Hui Neng, the Sixth and last Patriarch of our Chan Path, once came upon two monks who were arguing about a banner that was waving in the wind.
The first monk said, "It is the banner that is moving " The other monk said, "No! It is the wind that is moving."
The Sixth Patriarch admonished them both. "Good Sirs," he said. "It is your mind that is doing all the moving!"
In the world of Samsara, Man is the measure of all things. Everything is relative. Everything is changing. Only in the real world, the world of Nirvana, is there constancy.
In Chan our task is to discriminate - not between the false and the false, but between the false and the real. Differences in outward appearance do not matter at all. The real world is inside us. It is even inside our mind.
