Always Fresh and New
Zen Master Guji used just one finger his whole life and never exhausted it. The kong-ans are opportunities, one after another, to pass something on, to realize it, to communicate it, or to perceive one thing over and over from different points of view. For example, "The sky is blue." That's a famous Zen sentence. You could spend twenty, thirty, forty years, ten thousand years practicing with that and it would always be fresh and new. Over time, it becomes more and more your own. When you see the moon in the sky, its light reflects exactly the same way in a million rivers all over the universe. It doesn't change, and nobody owns it. We're like those rivers: the clearer we become, then that reflection is going to look the same in you as it does in me as it does in the next person, because that's the way that the truth is. So I think of it like an opportunity to keep learning or experiencing that kong-an in my life, over and over. (From a workshop on kong-ans in 2000)