Disaster Management Of A Sage

Ajit Singh Hakuin Zenji, an 18th century Japanese Zen master, was known for his piety. It so happened once that an unmarried girl from his neighbourhood got big with child.
When questioned by her parents, she named the monk as the father of the unborn child. Enraged, the parents minced no words and lambasted the monk severely.
Hakuin Zenji would neither refute nor accept the allegation. "Is that so?" was all he would reiterate. When the child saw the light of the day, it was brought to Hakuin Zenji.
The monk would now find food for two, though in the wake of his soiled reputation, he would, many a time, receive more barbs than food.
By the time the year was out, the girl-mother could stand it no longer and revealed the identity of her lover, a fish market help, to her parents.
The parents apologised to the monk, repeatedly begged his forgiveness and the cu-stody of the child.
The sage handed over the child to them, mumbling a whisper: "Is that so?" Innocence is neither defensive nor offensive, neither reactive nor proactive.
When first the monk said, "Is that so?", he perhaps meant: "Is this what these people believe?" As he was aware of who he was, he was like an alien to their belief system.
He didn't depend upon their opinion to define himself. To him the charges were irrelevant offscourings that called for no response either in yes or no.
While his reputation played see-saw, he turned around and spoke to existence: "Is that so?" A man of piety owes his allegiance only to existence.
When the child was brought to him, he took yet another existential dispensation. A sage does not question anything dished out to him by existence.
Any hesitation would be tantamount to a disregard of existence. J Krishnamurti would call such an attitude "choicelessness" but a sage does not choose even "choicelessness" because that would mean losing his inner dyna-mics, his inner balance.
In Zazen Wasan, Hakuin Zenji's song in praise of zazen, he sings: "We stand beyond ego and past clever words/ Then the gate to oneness of cause-and-effect is thrown open".
What the child needed immediately was a father's love and protection and not the gossiper of idle village folks. Being in present was his metier.
And so he baby-sat the child till the day he was asked to part with it. Had he not deve-loped any bond with the child? We don't know.
We only know that he remained rooted in the fulcrum of his inner balance. For him depth of living was more meaningful than any length of living.
For length we scour the past and the future but depth happens in the hear and now. There was no knee-jerk action from him, only a lover's plaint to existence: "Is that so?", that is to say, What is this joke, now?
The sound of one hand clapping is a beautiful gift of Hakuin Zenji to Zen. This koan like any real koan cannot be solved. But it is an existential treat to be experienced.
We who bobble in the ambit of bubble chambers created and sustained by a ceaseless flow of frivolous thoughts, would do well to work on it to get a glimpse of Hakuin Zenji's envious, yet accomplishable, state.