Ananda, Buddha’s very intimate disciple, was almost forty-two years continuously serving Buddha, day and night, summer and winter. One night when Buddha was going to lie down, Ananda said, “I don’t generally ask any questions, because every question that I could ask, others ask. And I am always here, so I listen to the answer. I know that any question I have is going to be asked by somebody or other; in these years this has become my experience. But there is one question I don’t think anybody is going to ask. It is very situational.”
Buddha said, “You can ask.”
“The question,” he said, “is not very great. But it has been troubling me for years.”
Buddha said, “You could have asked at any time.”
Ananda said, “I never wanted to trouble you. The whole day you are working on people, and in the night you are alone with me. The question is that I have been watching you for twenty years continuously…even in the night I get up once or twice to have a look at you to see whether you are all right. What has been puzzling me is that you keep the same posture the whole night. You don’t change sides, you don’t even move your leg. Do you sleep or do you remain awake?”
Buddha said, “My body sleeps; it sleeps very profoundly. But as far as I am concerned, I am just a pure awareness. So having found the right position, the one which is the most comfortable, I have not changed it for twenty years. And I am not going to change it till my last breath.”
He died in the same posture. Because of Buddha, the posture has become known as the Lion’s Posture. For forty-two years after his enlightenment, his day and night was a continuity of awareness.
That’s what Daikaku is saying:
To turn within means all the twenty-four hours…
Go on turning in. Whenever you find a moment to turn, turn. And it is such a simple act to turn within – nobody’s help is needed. No ladder is needed, no door has to be opened. Just close your eyes and look in. Sitting in a bus, traveling in a train…you can do it any time, and slowly, slowly you don’t even need to close your eyes. The remembrance simply remains, of its own accord.
That’s what Daikaku is saying:
It is most beautiful when, without being sought, the true action and true impulse appear of themselves. It is when one can know what is the truth of the heart.
What is the truth of the heart? The ordinary commonsense view of the heart is that it is the source of emotions like love or hate or anger. Just as the mind is the source of conceptual thoughts, the heart is the source of all that is emotional and sentimental. That is the commonsense view.
But when Buddha says “the heart” he means the very center of your being. It is his understanding that your love, your hate, everything, arises out of your mind. And I think he is being absolutely scientific; all psychologists will agree with him.