Look at the beauty of nature: the crystal blue sky, the floating white clouds, the colorful hues of a rainbow after it rains, and the twinkling stars at night. Go climb to the top of a mountain at night, when the moon is bright and the air is crisp, and as far as the eye can see, you can appreciate the panoramic beauty of nature and the vast openness of the universe.
The Buddha often explained emptiness and impermanence by getting people to think about how phenomena arise, change, and decline.
Harmony and beauty within our lives and within our communities often fail due to our insistence on the duality of self and others. When we maintain the duality of self and others, we develop disproportionate levels of love and hatred, attraction and repulsion for other people, which throws our relationships out of balance; the capacity for affinity becomes dormant. We judge everyone around us, putting people into categories such as good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, worthy and unworthy.
Greed narrows our vision as it obscures the wealth of wisdom contained in our inherent Buddha nature. Greed is always based on false premises, it always makes us more foolish and it never produces good results unless it teaches us at last to get control of ourselves. Greed leads us toward danger even as we think we are moving in a direction that will benefit us.
The great masters of the Chan School have always been like leisurely clouds and wild cranes, sometimes dwelling in the mountain forests, sometimes living by the water. With three robes and one mat, they follow their conditions and let things follow their own course. Even when their Dharma conditions are remarkable or they are among royalty, they are not tempted by material gain or moved by power.
Meditation is not about sitting quietly with your eyes closed—this is just one method for developing meditative concentration. What matters in meditation is being able to contemplate and focus the mind. To practice meditation, one must focus on the present moment, stop delusion, and see the mind. In China, the Chan School encouraged the development of meditative concentration through communal labor, like carrying firewood and water.