" 'Becoming like this' and renouncing preferences can be a joyful, playful business with considerable creative payoff. Zen Master Banzan showed how. Or rather, a butcher showed him how, quite by accident, when Banzan overheard him talking to a bossy customer. The customer demanded, 'Show me your best cuts of meat. I want only the best meat in your shop!' The butcher protested proudly, 'But everything in my shop is best! There's no piece of meat in my shop that is not the best!' Banzan was struck by collateral lightning, you might say. 'Everything is best!' hit him with such force that he could never quite shrink the world back to his own small terms again.
"In some parts this is called 'enlightenment'. But really, it's just consistently dropping the resistance in your mind while doing all you can to be of some help. After a while, it will be hard to tell you from a cool breeze passing right through.
"This best has no room in it for better or worse; in fact it has trouble separating you from me, or valuing this leaf on the tree while finding that one hard to like. That threadbare leaf on the ground, is it not as completely itself and in place as a shining one still intact on the tree? 'Everything is best' sees right through preferences to the reality of infinite relationship in which everything counts and is completely worthy of awareness and care. 'This' is a word for it in the present koan. 'Become like this.'
"It's actually not so hard to try it out. Watch waves rolling to shore or breaking onto rocks for an hour or so and try to find a single one you can't admire. Or a patch of grass with one blade of grass that fails to be the best.
"Another Zen troublemaker, Linji, was heard famously to say, 'There is nothing I dislike.' This did not make him a pushover, just a bit more fluid, responsive and in the right place at every moment, the way the creek flows, the mountain stands its ground, the clouds dissolve and form. What makes such relaxed readiness possible is having no constant interruption from a self that needs to say, 'But what about me. I deserve the best!'
"We all deserve the best, it's just a matter of seeing how you already have it. When you can see in all directions nothing but the best doing its best, we're freed up to be of some use. Until then, the sense that so much is wrong, and that it has grown too late to fix it may defeat even the best of us.
"Nothing is held back in the natural world, neither life nor death, and by this unparalleled generosity we continually test our limits. Giving away what we are, and have, until life goes back in to the mysterious place it came from — that's the only way to hold the gift of being here. Our limits are transparent, with no final state. They don't need to hold us back, so we just go beyond them. That's 'becoming like this' too, a more fearless generosity that knows that uncontrived reality is the only safe place from which to act.
"So 'I have already become like this' cedes a lot — everything, to be exact — to the way things are, and the generosity hidden in that is easy to appreciate because it embodies love that leaves nothing out. This 'already' quietly contains a lifetime of rigorous practice of awareness.
"It takes all you are to know yourself this way. But that's love, and it keeps us entirely on our toes and in the world."
