Liberation

I often attend the meditation class at Bodhi Path Karma Kagyü center at Pasadena. Our resident teacher, Lama Khedrub, was not there on last Tuesday (08/02). So, we formed a peer group to study Chogyam Trugpa's "Cutting Through the Spiritual Materialism". The book is a record of teachings by Chogyam Trugpa in a series of talk during 1970 in Boulder, CO. We were studying the chapter "The Development of Ego". It is about how a being's hallucination binds oneself to the walls of confinement. Chogyam Trugpa postponed the discussion of liberation two times in the Q & A section. I was wondering why he didn't want to talk about it at that moment. Up until almost the end, I suddenly had an insight that probably, Chogyam Trugpa didn't NEED to talk about it becuase once the problem of ego can be solved, there should have no walls of confiement. Then, we don't need to talk about "liberation" anymore. I don't know if my thinking is correct but this is the first time I come up with the sense of Zen on my own. This is pretty much like the Sixth patriarch's 惠能 poem:

菩提本無樹，明鏡亦非臺；
本來無一物，何處惹塵埃！

There is no "I" at the beginning and there should have no liberation at all. Of course, the approach is quite different from his co-student 神秀's approach:

身是菩提樹，心如明鏡台；
時時勤拂拭，勿使惹塵埃！