Tag Archives: zen

thinking like a mountain

Posted on by

3

thinking like a mountain;
feeling like the sky

meeting mySelf
in all that displays within the field of awareness

knowing I am ever here, as this,
being lived by the breath
within the Breath

I bow deeply
before my compost heap

– ml

 

Frederick Franck, Eye-I

 

Through a genuine experience of identifying with all beings, we may come to see our own interest served by conservation, through genuine self-love, love of a widened and deepened self, an ecological self.

When we plant a tree we are planting ourselves. Releasing dolphins back to the wild, we are ourselves returning home. Composting leftovers, we are being reborn as irises and apples. We can “think like a mountain,” in Aldo Leopold’s words, and we can discover ourselves to be everywhere and in everything, and we can know the activity of the world as not separate from who we are but rather of what we are. The practice of the “nonlocal self” means that when we work for the restoration of the rain forest, we are restoring our “extended self.”

– Joan Halifax Roshi, The Fruitful Darkness

Joan Halifax Roshi and Upaya Zen Center

Sculpture by Frederick Franck at Pacem in Terris

 

I never knew

Posted on by

12

Take off the backpack
Lie down in the long grass.
Pull up the blue sky-blanket.
Rest.

So many years of Dharma practice,
Straight-spine diligence, straining toward
enlightenment.
Today.
This hillside.
Just this.

Lie down in the long grass.
Let the earth take you.
Deer tracks and horse dung
and the eye within the eye,
revolving and luminous.

I never knew this.
Did no one ever tell me?

I remember my Zen master in the interview room,
‘Trust yourself,’ he said. ‘Just be yourself.’

I think his meaning was this:

Take off the backpack,
Lie down in the long grass.
Let the sky take you.
Rest.
Breathe space
into space
into space.

I never knew there was this much light!

~ Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin
October 31, 1998

You may already be familiar with this beautiful poem by Helen Dhara Gatling-Austin. I know it has been posted on many a blog and group over the last couple of decades, but to my mind, it’s one of those classics that never age or fail to inspire. It deserves frequent airings! For this post I sourced it from the Nonduality Highlights archive.

so what is the reality, itself?

Posted on by

0

Homage to Daido, Roshi

. . .

What is real, what is reality, what is truth, what is life, what is death, who are you?

To imitate the teachers doesn’t impart strength.

To understand the teachings doesn’t do a blessed thing for your life.

But to realize reality transforms your way of perceiving yourself and the universe—and it shows, it’s felt, it functions.

So what is the reality itself?

~ John Daido Loori, Roshi

source – Zen Mountain Monastery website

floatingrocks


There is a deeper dimension to nature and the insentient than what we see on the surface – a realm that goes beyond morphology, chemistry, biology, ecology or physics.  Science most often speaks to what things are.  Zen art points to what else things are.  It speaks not only to the object and its effect on the audience, but moves beyond to present the object’s underlying reality – its intrinsic nature.  And when we personally experience this intrinsic nature, we realize that to know objects only through dissecting, cataloging and understanding them, is to miss their full reality.  It is to fall asleep amidst the mystery and to become numb to the wonder of our lives on this great earth.

~ John Daido Loori, Roshi

~

source – Catalog notes accompanying Daido Roshi’s exhibition Jinzu

photo:  Floating Rocks copyright John Daido Loori

~

For more on Daido Roshi, please visit his pages at *the awakened eye* website:  the zen of creativity and creativity will never make sense

~

the perfume of God

Posted on by

0

A little something this sabbath to soothe the soul.

John Daido Loori, Roshi, has left us. He died last Friday morning. He was such an inspiration to us;  his human-being, his Zen-being, and his artist-being. I am grateful beyond words for all of him.

I wish someone would create a video like this one, using his photographs and words. Perhaps you?



source – Katie Davis’ blog

John Daido Loori, Roshi – Zen Mountain Monastery

John Daido Loori – zen photographer

.

make no apology

Posted on by

2

This Unlit Light: who is not enlightened?

 

Why is it so hard to accept that one is already fully, utterly wideawake?

I’ve a wispy memory of beloved Ramesh writing in one of his books that this acceptance is perhaps the ultimate hurdle for the seeker. And herein lies the clue: the seeker.

The seeker-self  is about to become redundant. Totally irrelevant. The seeker-self is smelling its own death. It cannot afford to accept the awesome and evident fact that seeking – which is the natural movement of Wholeness returning to Itself – is not the action of a self of any description. The seeker-self is a construct, just like any other version of a self. And it turns out it’s the only impediment to the search!

It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it.  But then you cannot get rid of it.  And while you cannot do either, you remain silent and it speaks.  You speak and it is gone.  The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.
~ Lao Tzu

For the weary, frustrated, disgusted, infuriated seeker-self the days are numbered. There will be a eureka. In its own good time, according to its own pattern. It will be a eureka moment that renews and relights itself with every breath. And when that comes to pass you will know that it is simply ridiculous to deny it. Why would you apologize for what you are?

You hear the birds?
You see the sun?
Who is not enlightened?
~ Zen saying

 

sitting zen

Posted on by

2

This Unlit Light: sitting zen

 

After three days of sitting
hard by the window
following grief through
the breath

like a hunter
who has tracker for days
the blood spots
of his injured prey

I came to the lake
where the deer had run
exhausted

refusing to save
its life in the
dark water

and there it fell
to ground
in our mutual
and respectful quiet

pierced
by
the pale diamond
edge of the breath’s
listening
presence.

~ David Whyte
Fire in the Earth

 

Bankei’s Unborn mind

Posted on by

1

This Unlit Light - Bankei's Unborn mindOne thought leads to another and lo – Bankei turns up to say something about the Unborn.
Actually, this enigmatic Zen master used the word Fu-shō – Unborn – to sum up his entire teaching:

Your unborn mind is the Buddha-mind itself, and it is unconcerned with either birth or death.  As evidence of this, when looking at things, you’re able to see and distinguish them all at once.  And as you are doing that, if a bird sings or a bell tolls, or other noises or sounds occur, you hear and recognize each of them too, even though you haven’t given rise to a single thought to do so.  Everything in your life, from morning until night, proceeds in this same way without your having to depend upon thought or reflection.  But most people are unaware of that; they think everything is a result of their deliberation.  That is a great mistake.

If you harbor the least notion to become better than you are or the slightest inclination to seek something, you turn your back on the Unborn.  There is neither joy nor anger in the mind you were born with – only the Buddha-mind with its marvelous illuminative wisdom that enlightens all things.

– Bankei

The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, 1622-1693
Translation by Norman Waddell