The primal light, empty and effective, illumines the headtop. The primal wisdom, silent but also glorious, responds to conditions. When you reach the truth without middle or edge, cutting off before and after, then you realize one wholeness. Everywhere sense faculties and objects both just happen. The one who sticks out his broad long tongue transmits the inexhaustible map, radiates the great light, and performs the great Buddha work, from the first not borrowing from others one atom from outside the dharma. Clearly this affair occurs within your own house.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)
The fundamental teaching of Buddhism is nothing but the doctrine of One Mind. This Mind is originally perfect and vastly illuminating. It is clear and pure, containing nothing, not even fine dust. There is neither delusion nor enlightenment, neither birth nor death, neither saints nor sinners.
- Han-Shan Te-Ch’ing
O God! give musicians sweet honey!
To play the drum, give them tireless hands!
They give their physical strength [to play] for love;
Give them true strength in return.
They fill my ear with your message;
Give their fortune to hundred eyes to see the king!
Like pigeons they coo in love;
Give them the safe sanctuary of your kindness.
They sharpen the intellect with your praise;
You, too, praise them in return.
-Rumi (Divan 2342:1-5)
Translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz,
'Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi',
University of South Carolina Press, 1998.
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.
Wendell Berry
NO PATH
'There is No Path that Goes all the Way'
Han Shan
Not that it stops us looking
for the full continuation.
The one line in the poem
we can start and follow
straight to the end. The fixed belief
we can hold, facing a stranger
that saves us the trouble
of a real conversation.
But one day you are not
just imagining an empty chair
where your loved one sat.
You are not just telling a story
where the bridge is down
and there’s nowhere to cross.
You are not just trying to pray
to a God you always imagined
would keep you safe.
No, you’ve come to a place
where nothing you’ve done
will impress and nothing you
can promise will avert
the silent confrontation,
the place where
your body already seems to know
the way, having kept
to the last, its own secret
reconnaissance.
But still, there is no path
that goes all the way,
one conversation
leads to another,
one breath to the next
until
there’s no breath at all,
just the inevitable
final release
of the burden.
And then,
wouldn’t your life
have to start
all over again
for you to know
even a little
of who you had been?
...
‘NO PATH”
In RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press. David Whyte
Study the patterns of transcient existence
the outcome of a game of chess isn't fixed
a monk in the mountains needs to be free
people in the dust grow old unaware
wind blows tea smoke over my bed
the stream drops petals into a pool
with thirty-six thousand days
why not spend a few being still
- Stonehouse (1272-1352)
One continuous clear void,
the night precisely midway;
the moon cool, spews frost.
When light and dark are merged
without division, who distinguishes
relative and absolute herein?
Thus it is said,
“Although the absolute is absolute,
yet it is relative, although the
relative is relative, yet it is complete.”
At this precise moment,
how do you discern?
How clear—twin shining eyes
before any impulse!
How stately—
the eternal body outside forms!
- Hung-chih (1091-1157)
@karoly-aczel saidI have always said organized religion is the scourge of mankind.
just suspicious?
It's black and white my friend,
Anyone that doesn't have independent thought at the heart of their paradigm should always be heavily scrutinized
People are often hindered by environmental pheno-
mena from perceiving Mind, and by individual events from
perceiving underlying principles; so they often try to escape
from environmental phenomena in order to still their
minds, or to obscure events in order to retain their grasp
of principles. They do not realize that this is merely to
obscure phenomena with Mind, events with principles.
Just let your minds become void and environmental
phenomena will void themselves; let principles cease to
stir and events will cease stirring of themselves.^ Do not
employ Mind in this perverted way.
--from The Zen Teachings of Huang Po