"Would you like some water?"

 Zen people have for some time sought reality by means of immediacy. 

"This right here is it," they say, waving vaguely at the walls, the table, the cup of tea on the table. 

They recommend years of sitting uncomfortably to practice seeing what is right there. 

Why? 

Even their critics will yield the point that this exercise seems useful to the amateur ontologist, but often wonder: how is knowing this supposed to make me a better person than before? (The critics tend to be preoccupied with morality.)

What's being got at by "immediacy" is that the chair, the tea, the walls and you are equal. 

They are dharmas (in the sense of interrelated elements of a universe), and as such not subject to a hierarchy of values. 

Delusion is when we impose such hierarchization on them. 

Dogen trained his cooks to avoid hierarchization even of fresh versus wilted vegetables.

Buddhist precepts don't bother with ontology. 

"Just do it!" 

Or maybe just don't -- they tend to be prohibitions. 

Their design is to prevent the suffering caused by delusion/hierachization. 

This is a way of promoting skill in honoring the social contract, which is what is meant by "morality."

When we are practicing, we are presumably keeping the prohibitory precepts, because we aren't, while sitting, prone to lie, steal, abuse, gassip and so on; so that's already less of those things floating around than if we did not practice. 

Conversely, the positives, i.e. the pure precepts, eightfold path and the paramitas, are helpful in setting conditions for good practice.

One might say that the helping hands of Avalokiteshvara begin with mudra.

Sitting well in order to see the equality of dharmas ("things as it is," said Shunryu Suzuki) promotes the honoring of the social contract. 

Honoring the social contract promotes sitting well in order to see the equality of dharmas: "suchness."

 

Dongshan, the traveler shown in the above illustration, is said to have come to a stream and was halted in the middle of the ford by seeing his reflection in the pool above the riffle. 

Suchness!

I picture him coming to the ford decades later with a student monk. 

The monk says, "oh, hey, isn't this the place where you had your great enlightenment experience?"

Dongshan reaches into the folds of his robe and produces a bowl, which he dips into the pool. 

He extends his hand with the bowl toward the young monk.

"Would you like some water?"