Your buddha nature is like the sun and moon in the sky, like fire in a piece of wood. Everyone has a buddha nature.
What comes from practicing Zen is something you yourself realize. Talking about food will never satisfy your hunger.
If you don’t quit hanging out with those who study words, you’ll be no different from someone who boils water to get ice or who create steam to make snow.
Sometimes the Buddhas teach by speaking and sometimes by not speaking. But the true form of all dharmas isn’t found in what they say, nor is it found in what they don’t say.
- Hui-ko (487-593)
When Ummon was about to die, he admonished his students in these terms:
“I have four statements.
First is to cut through all mental entanglements, to rely on universal truth.
Second is to let go of body and mind, to shed birth and death.
Third is to transcend the absolute, to establish an individual life.
Fourth is to haul rocks and carry earth, to perpetuate the life of wisdom.”
- Ummon (864-949)
The faint path
Through green grass ends.
A door in white clouds opens.
Zither strings leave off
Where music of pines begins.
As I watch, the river-moon rises.
During the night birds alter the flower bed;
The woodcutter’s son goes early
To water it.
Brushing off the green moss
Of river rocks, we sit
Together in the morning dew.
- Ma Tai (mid 9th c)
And how do you know your mind is originally pure?
The shastras say, “Within the body of every being is their adamantine Buddha nature.
Like the sun, it fills the world with its perfect light.
But because it’s covered by the dark clouds of the Five skandhas (Form, Sensation, Perception, Memory, and Consciousness), it can’t shine forth, like a lamp inside a jar.”
- Hung-jen (601-675)
@rookie54 saidChickpea to Cook (translated by Coleman Barks)
i've been practicing knocking chickpeas back into the pot
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it’s being boiled.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
‘Don’t you try to jump out. You think I’m torturing you. I’m giving you flavor, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being. Remember when you drank rain in the garden. That was for this.’
Grace first. Sexual pleasure, then a boiling new life begins, and the Friend has something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook,
‘Boil me some more. Hit me with the skimming spoon. I can’t do this by myself. I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver, my way into existence. I love your cooking.’
The cook says, ‘I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful. I controlled it with practices, and boiled some more, and boiled once beyond that, and became your teacher.
There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale
With one stroke,
All precious knowledge is forgotten.
No cultivation is needed for this.
This occurrence reveals the ancient way
And is free from the track of quiescence.
No trace is left anywhere.
Whatever I hear and see does not conform to rules.
All those who are enlightened
Proclaim this to be the greatest action.
- Hsiang-yen Chih-hsien (d.898)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and just like that, he was gone
Seeking it from others is forbidden.
For thus it becomes further and further estranged.
Now that I go my way entirely alone,
There is nowhere I cannot meet it.
Now it is just what I am,
Now I am not what it is.
Thus must one understand,
Then one accords with True Suchness.
- Liang-chieh (807-869)
@rookie54 said(((rookie)))
With one stroke,
All precious knowledge is forgotten.
No cultivation is needed for this.
This occurrence reveals the ancient way
And is free from the track of quiescence.
No trace is left anywhere.
Whatever I hear and see does not conform to rules.
All those who are enlightened
Proclaim this to be the greatest action.
- Hsiang-yen Chih-hsien (d.898)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and just like that, he was gone
@rookie54 saidSome days, this thread is the only thing that keeps me relatively sane.
The days and months go by like lightning: we should value the time.
We pass from life to death in the time it takes to breathe in and breathe out:
it’s hard to guarantee even a morning and an evening.
Whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, do not waste even a moment of time.
Become ever braver and bolder.
Be like our original teacher Shakyamuni, who kept on progressing energetically.
- T’aego