Living on the Edge

Look at Bodhidharma’s fierce scowl. Strong as an ox, he won’t take any bull. He’s a radical, a rebel, a revolutionary. He knows that it’s society’s job to tame the individual and the individual’s job to get free.

Society’s propaganda will tell you that you are inadequate, that it’s your fate to live in fear and beg for the approval of others, that things are just the way they are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You must resign yourself to a gray existence; you must go along to get along.

But there is Bodhidharma, fiery eyes, teeth showing, intent and determined, a free spirit who will not buy the propaganda of mediocrity. He challenges you to be free enough of society to actually help transform it for the better.

It’s about being personally free and socially active. It is not for wimps. It takes the courage to say no to every attempt to fit you into a category and make you a carbon copy of your next door neighbor. It takes the courage to say no to every attempt to turn you into a beggar, pleading for the approval of others. It takes courage to say no to the needless suffering of your fellow man. No to becoming hypnotized and tranquilized. No to becoming greedy and indifferent. No to becoming clay in somebody else’s hand.

Things were no different in Bodhidharma’s day. Society has always been the free man’s greatest enemy. And the free man has always been society’s greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus or Socrates, Galileo or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left mankind.

Bodhidharma, if we could get him to talk, would tell us that it’s our wanting to be somebody special that turns us into slaves of approval. He is a nobody who works for everybody, who kow-tows to none, condemns none, loves all in his rascal way. I’m not your leader, he might say. Don’t follow me. Be your own leader.

What is in you, let it out. What you really want to do, do it. Don’t yield to doubt. Love is the greatest religion, the greatest philosophy, the guiding light of the free man. Love is what it’s all about.

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Courtesy: Zen and the Art of Making a Living, by Lawrence G Boldt