I once heard a Zen scholar tell the following story. He was from Japan and did not speak English well, although well enough. He impressed me, at first, with his high good humor. Despite problems of language, he smiled and laughed a lot, and his pleasure in talking to us was infectious. Then he told the following story, which he meant, I think, as an explanation of the Zen idea of satori or enlightenment. It is as good a parable as I know for what it means to have gotten a "special" way of thinking into your bones. Since I have never been able to find anyone who could tell me where this story has been written down, I have to reproduce it from memory.
In the middle of the ocean, there is a special place, which is a Dragon Gate. It has this wonderful property: any fish that swims through it immediately turns into a dragon. However, the Dragon Gate does not look any different from any other part of the ocean. So you can never find it by looking for it. The only way to know where it is, is to notice that the fish who swim through it become dragons. However, when a fish swims through the Dragon Gate, and becomes a dragon, it doesn’t look any different. It just looks like the same fish it was before. So you can’t tell where the Dragon Gate is by looking closely to find just where the change takes place. Furthermore, when fish swim through the Dragon Gate and become dragons, they don’t feel any different, so they don’t know that they have change into dragons! They are just dragons from then on.
You could be a dragon. Notes.- The satori icon -and further info- could be found here. The above text was extracted from the book "Tricks of the Trade" by H.S. Becker.
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