9 posts tagged “zen”
***
"There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.
There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself:
Did they have a meaning?
There must be a time
When the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:
distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness,
the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.
*
"Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Childlikeness has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. When a man reaches this stage of spiritual development, he is a Zen artist of life."
- D. T. Suzuki
*****
"There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with."
- Jusan Ed Brown
*
Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God."
~ Quran, II.115
*
"In youth we believe what the young believe, that life is all choice. We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging
shut behind us each time we select this one or that one should trouble us, but it doesn't. Nor does the fact that the doors often are identical and even lead in some cases to the exact same place. Occasionally a door is locked, but no matter, since so many others remain available. The distinct possibility that choice itself may be an illusion is something we disregard, because we're curious to know what's behind that next door, the one we hope will lead us to the very heart of the mystery. Even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary we remain confident that when we emerge, with all our choosing done, we'll have found not just our true destination but also its meaning."
from Bridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo
*
"When Moses conversed with God, he asked, "Lord where shall I seek you?"
God answered, "Among the brokenhearted."
Moses continued, "But, Lord, no heart could be more despairing than mine."
And God replied, "Then I am where you are."
-Abu'l Fayd Al-Misri
*
The 'guinea-pigging' of vast swathes of the population has, up till now, solved two problems: the 'time' problem (namely, how to avoid addressing the underlying reasons for mental health problems), and how to create new markets amidst the flourishing of generic drug production, particularly outside of the US and Europe. Clearly the interiorisation of unhappiness is far more profitable than the outward realisation that perhaps misery has nothing to do with you personally and everything to do with the world in which you live.
- infinite thØught
Gilead
pg 283-4
Marilynne Robinson
**
You Think This Happened Only Once and Long Ago
You think this happened only once and long ago?
Think of a summer night and someone
talking across the water,
maybe someone
you loved in a boat, rowing. And you could
hear the oars dripping in the water, from half a lake away, and they were far and close at once. You didn't need to touch them
or call to them or talk about it later.
--the sky? It was what you breathed. The lake?
sky that fell as rain. I have been like you
filled with worry, worry --- then relief.
You know the wind is sky moving. It happens all the time.
Marie Howe
from
"The Kingdom of Ordinary Time"
**
"9th century Zen master, Tozan Ryokai, attained enlightenment many times. Once when he was crossing a river he saw himself reflected in the water and composed a verse, "Don't try to figure out who you are. If you figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself." Actually, you are in the river. You may say that is just a shadow or a reflection of yourself, but if you look carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you.
You may think you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. Yet when you see yourself with a warm feeling in the mirror or the water, that is actually you. And whatever you do, you are there."
- Shunryu Suzuki
Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen
**
And I saw the river over which every soul must pass to reach the kingdom of God and the name of that river was suffering - and I saw the boat which carries souls across the river and the name of that boat was love.
St. John of the Cross
Spanish mystic, 1542-1591
**
You continue struggling to see your own truth. When people who know your heart well and love you dearly say that you are a child of God, that God has entered deeply into your being, and that you are offering much of God to others, you hear these statements as pep talks. You don’t believe that these people are really seeing what they are saying.
You have to start seeing yourself as your truthful friends see you. As long as you remain blind to your own truth, you keep putting yourself down and referring to everyone else as better, holier, and more loved than you are. You look up to everyone in whom you see goodness, beauty, and love because you do not see any of these qualities in yourself. As a result, you begin leaning on others without realizing that you have everything you need to stand on your own feet.
You cannot force things, however. You cannot make yourself see what others see. You cannot fully claim yourself when parts of you are still wayward. You have to acknowledge where you are and affirm that place. You have to be willing to live your loneliness, your incompleteness, your lack of total incarnation fearlessly, and trust that God will give you the people to keep showing you the truth of who you are.
-Henri Nouwen
from 'The Inner Voice of Love'via Love Till It Burns
Lorenc "Absolution"
Here, integrity is doubt pursued. Integrity asks what is real and keeps our noses to the grindstone. Its revelations come after inner conflict and hard work. Integrity embraces our natural qualms and the power of refusal -- it leads us to reject everything comforting and offensive to reason, until the bottom of our inquiry is reached.From John Tarrant's
Doubt and StruggleTraditional Zen practice is thought of as resting like an iron cauldron on three legs -- one leg is doubt, one is effort, and the last is faith. Doubt is the first, and usually freely available in our culture. The contribution of the Zen tradition here is to point out that for the growth of awareness we must not ignore our doubts -- they have great value, they allow us to penetrate, to see through the human situation.To give attention to our current situation, including everything dubious and unresolved, is an act of integrity. In the later stages of the inner work, there is a temptation to ignore doubt, since so much seems clear. But fogginess is always with us, and to have integrity is to notice this. the story of Jacob wrestling with a being out of Heaven refers to such a moment of uncertainty. His life was in danger and everything depended on his presence of mind in the coming time. In the night an angel came and Jacob struggled with him. as the dawn came on, the man held on fast, and though he was injured in the hip, he would not let the angel leave until he had received a blessing. Integrity depends on our connection to the spiritual, but that relationship is not a simple or passive one. to earn spirit's blessing we have to be willing to struggle through on our own.An example of staying with, struggling with, doubt and unease was given by an old Zen teacher, speaking about his own process:
I ask myself, "What is bothering me?" And something pops up. Then I ask myself, "What is really bothering me?" Something else pops up.
Then I ask, "What about underneath that?" What's really, really bothering us is always mortality, the fragility of life.
It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.
No Man Is an Island
**
"In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves-- to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make the final judgments and put everything together."
Saul Bellow
**
"The interest of the pretender soul is the same as the interest of the social life, the society mechanism. This is the main tragedy of human life. Oh it is terrible! You are not free. Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out...""When do we get free?"
"The purpose is to keep the whole thing going. The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can't be loved. Because the pretender is a lie. The true soul loves the truth. And when the true soul feels like this, it wants to kill the pretender. The love has turned into hate. Then you become dangerous. A killer. You have to kill the deceiver."
"Does this happen to everybody?"
The doctor answered simply, "Yes, to everybody.... Whenever the slayer slays, he wants to slay the soul in him which has gypped and deceived him. Who is his enemy? Him. And his lover? Also. Therefore, all suicide is murder, and all murder is suicide. It's the one and identical phenomenon. Biologically, the pretender soul takes away the energy of the true soul and makes it feeble, like a parasite. It happens unconsciously, unawaringly, in the depths of the organism. Ever take up parasitology?"
--from Seize the Day; Saul Bellow, 1956
**
"To read, to write... ...the way one lives under the surveillance of the disaster: exposed to the passivity that is outside passion. The heightening of forgetfulness. It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence."**
"Neurologically, contemplative moments are pauses in the automatic activity of conditioned brain-cell patterns. Psychologically, they are transient suspensions of compulsion. Philosophically they are "naked intuition," the momentary direct perception that happens before we begin to think or react. Spiritually, they are tastes of freedom for love ..., the spaciousness of salvation.
Gerald G. May M.D.
The Awakened Heart**
In A Country Once Forested
The young woodland remembers
the old, a dreamer dreamingof an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,and the soil under the grass
is dreaming of a young forest,and under the pavement the soil
is dreaming of grass.--Wendell Berry
**
Seventy YearsWell, anyhow, I am
not going to die young.-Wendell Berry
*
Sabbaths
VIThe question before me, not that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cezanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he's alive
forever, this instant, and may be.--Wendell Berry
All Wendell Berry from "Given"
Poems by Wendell Berry*
link
"A sage of Chelm went bathing in the lake and almost drowned. When he raised an outcry other swimmers came to his rescue. As he was helped out of the water he took a solemn oath: "I swear never to go into the water again until I learn how to swim!"
A Treasury of Jewish Folklore
edited by Nathan AusubelRepentance begs for burdens.
-Michel De Montaigne
It is wisdom to find the tasks that are right for us at each moment of our journey. They may not be the tasks we hoped we should have, et we must simply bear them. In Dante's Purgatorio, the souls carry great stones around the mountain paths and Dante, accompanying them, bends over in sympathy. but they hoist their loads joyfully, are glad of burdens and tasks because burdens and tasks will transform them. In Hell no one learns; even the most magnificent imp just repeats himself. At the bottom of Dante's Inferno, the greatest demon of all is frozen in ice. In Purgatory, though, there is movement, even if slow; and, because there is movement, the stars visible, there is growth.
Cross posted to Alive on All Channels
**
Only Breath
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religionor cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or upfrom the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or anyorigin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.— Rumi
[Rumi was born Jalaluddin Balkhi, September 30, 1207, in Balkh, Afghanistan which was part of the Persian empire back then. One of the most beloved and read mystical poets in America and all over the world.]
**
"We live by the sheer generosity of a moment-by-moment miracle, and it is called the breath. Actually, we could say we live and die by this miracle. Every breath out is a practice of yielding the self to the universe; every breath in is a reincarnation event, the self reborn, fresh. Zen is the practice of agreeing to live with a mind and self as alive and fluid as breathing itself: accepting the offer of each moment, yielding to the passing of each moment.**
A practice is an undertaking with the self: I vow to sit once a day and do nothing, just sit and let things be completely. When we have a practice, we show up faithfully and do sincerely whatever we can to get ourselves out of the way. Hard as it often is at first, we just keep giving way to simply seeing and being what we are.**
Samuel Beckett's potent advice to someone who asked how to become a more accomplished writer was stark: "Try again. Fail better." We grow by being defeated decisively by ever-greater opponents. Resistance announces, "Here I am, your greatest opponent, always on duty: yourself!"**
In the world of time, complications always appear. Character likes slowness and desires us to wait.
Waiting is not provisional time, servant to another moment yet to come -- it is time in itself. It has its own elegance and disciplines. We wait so that we can catch up with ourselves, so that the rhythm can take shape before we start to dance; we wait because we can imagine far ahead of our ability to embody. A person arriving at a traditional Japanese monastery is turned away at first. It takes three days to get in. During that time, at best, we sit alone in a room, meditating; at worst, we stand in the snow. This is not a time to act, but to allow the world to act. During such days only inner events take place and so, invisibly, a transition occurs, as we move from outside the community to inside it. Afterwards, our actions and our appearance do not necessarily change, but everything has been shifted into the realm of the sacred.
When we are blocked, when circumstances are not ripe, we have to find some way of acknowledging that we are waiting, that we are pregnant and not merely asleep. Pausing like this is at the heart of meditation practice. When we attend closely to our lives, though it seems that nothing is happening, in the subterranean currents, reconciliation is setting off, invisible until the moment of its arrival. This waiting is not an effort at working a problem through, nor is it getting out of the way -- it is being in the way just a little, just enough to allow the universe to work the problem through.
There is a moment when Jesus shows his mastery of such timing. In the story, a crowd has caught a woman sleeping with a man not her husband. They are angry and want to stone her to death. It is not clear why they ask Jesus to speak; perhaps they want his blessing on the murder, perhaps there is some unconscious doubt in them. Jesus does intervene but not straightway -- preaching to an angry mob is a ticklish business. At first he distracts: he draws on the ground with a stick. We are not told what he draws; it is the action itself that is important. This is an inventive gesture: it offers no answer, yet keeps the question in suspension. The crowd becomes unsure whether this is his response or not: a gap opens in their certainty. Time passes, and the moment becomes less fixed. Then, when Jesus speaks, the reproof in his words is indirect and points to the quest for knowledge. "let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The men in the crowd are turned inwards and so walk away, each into his own destiny. Like other good solutions in desperate moments, this one came from nowhere, unpremeditated, given by grace.
In the inner life, readiness is one of the most important things. It is like a horse -- the whole body has to turn toward the stream before she will drink. Our animal selves have to be aligned with the change. We have to be faithful to our lives -- eat the cornflakes, write the memo, change the diapers, take the kids to the beach -- and faithful also to that one small thing, which is the know in the current of time, which brings awareness to our waiting. Our integrity is to observe these periods of waiting, the way in certain religious traditions the faithful observe fast days.
The forces of sleep and oblivion are so great that one conscious thing has to be in our lives every day: we need to touch the talisman that keeps us turned toward awareness. Meditation serves our integrity when it is with us daily. Then, when the horse lowers its head and begins to drink, everything will be changed. We can go through life ignoring the existence of that water, but once we have tasted it, we begin to orient our lives toward it.
Waiting in the dark allows us to rest until a solution comes out of the empty world. When we are impeded, we don't despair utterly, our waiting has a dynamic quality. Developing character can be odd work, since it often goes against our normal thoughts of advantage. A strange and successful example involves a friend who had a brilliant but capricious Zen teacher. Suddenly, after many years of training, he had had enough; furious with his teacher, he could no longer bear even to be in the same room with him. Some marriages are like this.
So the man went away and became a leader in his field, all the while working quietly on his spiritual life. Once a year he would go and, in the Asian fashion, bow to his old teacher. He was still angry and disappointed, and this action was the only thing he could find to do with the problem. Year after year he would bow and the teacher would be polite and the matter would rest there. This went on for seven years. Then the student came as before, but this time, inexplicably, his heart was light. It was as if a debt had been paid. It was like that for the teacher too. They laughed and embraced. Their relationship became simple.
This story has an elegant sparseness. Sometimes we can work at a relationship too hard or in the wrong way. Sometimes we have to be patient, to trust the universe to sort out what is beyond our power. But the student did not just leave the matter to fate. He saw that this issue was not an incidental thing, not just a flaw in the road, but the road itself. It contained the problem of the flaws we always find in our mentors, the problem of the self-centered rage in the student that wants acknowledgment more than it wants life or truth, the problem of where to stand in relation to tradition, the problem of love between the generations, and the problem of how wisdom gets passed down. He saw that whatever his teacher's role, he had a task too. In the eventuality, he was true to both sides of the situation. He didn't betray his anger, which had its own kind of integrity, and he didn't ignore the claim of the relationship, which was deep. He found an action, a spontaneous ritual that indicated to everyone involved -- the universe, the teacher, and the student himself -- that the issue was still in play, struggling to find its true form and to give off light.
This kind of ceremonial waiting both requires and develops strength of character. It is different from the pauses of earlier stages of the journey because it includes an awareness that holds even anger in a larger context of connection.
The Knot in the current of Time
-- From
The Light Inside the Dark
Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life
by John Tarrant
**
cross posted to Alive on All Channels
link
- John Tarrant
To be at Ease in all Circumstances
a teisho given in 1990
a register of known koan collections
random koans
(refresh page for next koan)&
another collection of koans
Was it really you
I saw
Or is this joy
I still feel
only a dream?
- Teishin
- Anthony of Egypt -
In this dream world
We doze
And talk of dreams -
Dream, dream on,
As much as you wish
- Ryokan
The moon, I'm sure
Is shining brightly
High above the mountains
But gloomy clouds
Shroud the peak in darkness
- Teishin
You must rise above
The gloomy clouds
Covering the mountaintop
Otherwise, how will you
Ever see the brightness?
- Ryokan
love poems between Ryokan and Teishin
"When you live your life at peace with every circumstance of your life, favorable or terrible, you situate yourself at the still point of the turning universe. Then you are the world of cause and effect itself, you become this. You become, with nothing between you and it, this precarious world. You are precariousness itself and so you are no longer subject to precariousness. When you live like this you are the master of precariousness, the master of cause and effect, and then everything is blessed, just as it is.
Interestingly, the root of the word precarious is "prayer," or "imprecation." When you fully enter precariousness, our ordinary human world of one mistake after another, you are "full of prayer," open to connectedness. Then you can see how a life of human limitation is also a life of grace."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary
Just live that life. It doesn't matter whether it is life or hell, life of the hungry ghost, life of the animal, it's okay; just live that life, see. And as a matter of fact no other way. Where you stand, where you are, that's what your life is right there, regardless of how painful it is or how enjoyable it is. That's what it is.
- Taizan Maezumi
(Many quotes are from Whiskey River)
"Life is enough unto itself; to 'be' is, in its absolute essence, an ineffable, inexpressible, inexhaustible event of beauty and strangeness; the staggering aspect of 'being' is that it is, and that it is thoroughly incomprehensible."
- Jack Haas
The Way of Wonder
"Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north."
- Tibetan saying
To this place of retreat
the world does not follow;
but many old ailments
heal here.
I polish words
of old poems;
view mountains,
and sleep outside my hut.
Colored clouds
cross the setting sun;
cicadas ring
in the leaves of trees.
With this
my heart again knows happiness;
and who would have thought it,
without wine or money.
- Yao Ho
A Leap of Faith
"Actually, Zen does require a leap of faith. To be mindful, you have to believe that life is worth paying attention to. To meditate, you have to believe you are worth getting to know. To reach a state of inner peace, you have to believe that you have peace within you and that your true nature is already complete. You have to believe inner peace is possible, that you are already perfect, that you don't need to add anything to yourself. If, at this moment, you don't believe some of these things, that's okay. If you can take them on faith, at least for awhile - then you can decide for yourself."
- Gary R. McClain and Eve Adamson
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Zen Living
"Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within."
- D.T. Suzuki
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
"If you are wandering about in your head, you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap."
- Dogen Zenji
Fukanzazengi
Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your own hearts.
- Ryokan
"Zen is empty, there is nothing in it.
There is no room for any -ism, not Buddhism, not Taoism.
Who you are is all it is."
- Sam Cheng
{quotes from the great blog "Whiskey River"}
I really enjoyed Anne D.'s comment this a.m.:
“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things unseen.” We are looking at this and trying to see it with new eyes in the theological reflection. Why is this so hard for me? I am drawing a blank and cannot see the sense of it. Maybe in some sense I am numb to the key word “faith.” I see it almost as a negative, a denial of the reality of science, a last refuge of the Christian in argument with the scientist. Perhaps it is time for me to see this word with new eyes and to embrace the reality, even centrality of faith in my life. Yes, it is not scientific; it is not intended to be. It is of the heart, of the core of one’s being, pointing to one’s central truth and the guiding principles of one’s life. Faith is what we are living whether we have examined it or not. One can observe us and know our faith. Or perhaps we could say that faith is belief put into practice.
The church teaches that faith is a gift from God. Is this fair? Does God choose to whom this gift is given and from whom it is withheld? No, it is not God’s choice but our own. Faith is available to those who desire it enough to act upon what they perceive as God’s will. Those practitioners of the will of God will find themselves in the Kingdom.
So says Anne on this rainy morning, on the second cup of coffee."
****
Sometimes I think that we are 'called' to sit with the questions and to help ourselves get more comfortable with no answers. Or maybe , with the fact that the answers change. Maybe God is in the question more than in our ability (or perceived ability) to answer it.
That, at any rate , seems to me to be the 'Zen' side of things. Our anxiety for answers often leads us in the wrong direction.
Thanks for your response. Clearly, I don't have the answer.
:)
*****
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