the abracadabra instinct

"Realize that the surface personality has no interest in anything which might disturb its darling delusions."
- Vernon Howard



For All
Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
- Gary Snyder



"I'd like to be a Gecko, not permanently, but for ten minutes or so. Geckos are charming small lizardy creatures with suction pads for feet. They live vertically. Walls are their terra firma. For them trees grow sideways, hills are sky, pavements are walls."
- Alan Fletcher
The art of looking sideways

On this summer night
All the household lies asleep,
And in the doorway,
For once open after dark,
Stands the moon, brilliant, cloudless.
- Jusammi Chikako


><((((º>

Ikkyu this body isn't yours I say to myself
wherever I am I'm there
- Ikkyu


"You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret."
- Rainer Maria Rilke



"For it is each one's responsibility to go deeper than ever before, to hear that undertone for himself, or herself, and so move easily beyond the flat world of the map of memory into the freshness of the living present."
- G. BlueStone


"Nirvana is the coolness of letting go, the inherent delight of experience when there is no grasping or resistance to life."
- Ajahn Buddhadasa


"Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don't we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?"
- Jack Kornfield


"Although it is true that in acting without self-interest one's interest will be fulfilled, individuals who put self- interest last discover that their desires are transformed. As their awareness expands, they develop priorities that are aligned intelligently with both the current situation and with larger influences in the world. For this reason, as their aims are fulfilled, their environment evolves."
- R. L. Wing
The Tao of Power



Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.
Who can leap the world's ties
And sit with me among the white clouds?
- Han shan



"In the Sutra on Perfect Enlightenment we read that "In the latter day of the Dharma, sentient beings who aspire to attain the Buddha Way should not be made to seek enlightenment, for if they do they will just end up amassing large stores of knowledge and deepening their self-made delusions."

In the same sutra: "In the latter day, even sentient beings who seek out a good teacher encounter those who hold false views and they are thus never able to attain right enlightenment. This is a known pedigree for heresy. It is the fault of the false teachers. It is not the fault of the sentient beings who come to them for help."
- Hakuin
A Talk on the Dangers of *** Zen



Song of the Diamond Heart
The pine tree's voice is always whispering
Yet how many pause to listen?
For when the churning mind is still,
The Diamond Heart within
Reflects even the falling dusk that
Shrouds every eye and branch
And hears, but listens not.
Walking then, with Courage and Kindness,
Never ceasing to walk in Wonder,
We follow our ancient path.
For the Way of the sword is folded in two;
Like the rose we have thorns,
And like the rose, we unfold
- G. Bluestone



Blyth: "I have just come from Korea, where I studied Zen with Kayama Taigi Roshi of Myoshinji Betsuin."
Suzuki: "Is that so? Tell me, what is Zen?"
Blyth: "As I understand it, there is no such thing."
Suzuki: "I can see you know something of Zen."
- Robert Aitken
Original Dwelling Place



"In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly. "
- Basho
Notes from my Knapsack
Oi no kobumi



"It rains during the morning. No visitors today. I feel lonely and amuse myself by writing at random. These are the words:
Who mourns makes grief his master.
Who drinks makes pleasure his master.
The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master. He also
wrote:
In the mountain village
who are you calling yobuko-bird?
I thought you lived alone.
There's nothing so intriguing as living alone. Chosho, the recluse, said:
If one's guest enjoys a half-day's leisure,
His host loses a half-day's leisure.
Sodo is always moved by these words. I, too, feel it.
Not this human sadness,
cuckoo,
but your solitary song."
- Basho
Saga Diary



I have cultivated
a piece of overgrown
wasteland
All the soil now
is beginning
to shed light
- Muso Soseki



"Why do we persistently forget to come alive to the world as it is in front of our faces? Why do we have to go to all the trouble of making art so that we can return to where we are and have been all along? I think it is because of the way thought works in us. To be present in the midst of our being what we are is a pure sensation that we can never exactly apprehend. It is fleeting and ungraspable. Thought is always coming a second afterward, telling us something, singing a song of the past. Thought includes the aroma of our being alive, but it also includes so much that is made, so much of doing and piling up, that it tempts us necessarily away from ourselves. To find within our thought and perception (for perception is already thought) a settled free and unmade place takes effort, and this is the effort of art."
- Zoketsu Norman Fischer
Zen meditation and the artistic impulse



"The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw your attention in completely."
- Eckhart Tolle



Architecture
Ninety percent of knowledge
is writing it in
code to make it
incomprehensible to others, strangers.

It's the priest instinct
in us, the abracadabra
instinct. It's too simple
to say, I build

it this way because
I like it this

way.
- Jan Haag



The emperor, who was a devout Buddhist, invited a great Zen master to the Palace in order to ask him questions about Buddhism.

"What is the highest truth of the holy Buddhist doctrine?" the emperor inquired.

"Vast emptiness... and not a trace of holiness," the master replied.

"If there is no holiness," the emperor said, "then who or what are you?"

"I do not know," the master replied.



The Shapes of Leaves
Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.
- Arthur Sze
The Redshifting Web



Birth, old age,
Sickness, and death:
From the beginning,
This is the way
Things have always been.
Any thought
Of release from this life
Will wrap you only more tightly
In its snares.
The sleeping person
Looks for a Buddha,
The troubled person
Turns toward meditation.
But the one who knows
That there's nothing to seek
Knows too that there's nothing to say.
She keeps her mouth closed.
- Ngoc Kieu



"The peak experience, the final act, as soon as you try to pursue it in thought, there are white clouds for a thousand miles. Don't stick to the ruts in the road of the ancients - you must travel a living road of your own. East, west, foot up, foot down, using it directly - only then will you know the peak experience that illumines the heavens and covers the earth, illumines the past and flashes through the present. This is your own place to settle and live. When I say this, I am only using water to offer flowers, never adding anything extra. Think of this."
- Daio
Daio's Letters to Meditators
Journal #28 - Zen Readings



Thich Nhat Hanh said at Plum Village in France,
"There are enough Zen centers. We need more Zen corners."


"One of the things that is realized when you see the nature of the self is that what you do and what happens to you are the same thing. Realizing that you do not exist separately from everything else, you realize responsibility: you are responsible for everything you experience. You can no longer say, "He made me angry." How could he make you angry? Only you can make you angry. That understanding changes your way of relating to the world and your way of looking at stress. You see that stress is created in your mental processing of your experiences. It usually has to do with separation. Whenever a threat, barrier, or obstacle pops up, our immediate reaction is to pull back, to prepare mentally or physically to fight or run. If you become the barrier - become the fear, the pain, the anger - by experiencing it fully without judging or avoiding or running away, and then let it go, there is no barrier. Actually, there is no way to pull away from it, you cannot run away. There is nowhere to run to, nothing to run from: it is you."
- John Daido Loori



"Life is constantly giving us our cues. When the bell sounds, the monks put on their robes and go to the meditation hall. When anger arises, the bell sounds and we take refuge in calmness of mind. When confusion arises, the bell sounds and we take refuge in equanimity. When greed arises, the bell sounds and we take refuge in the coolness of appreciating what we already have. In this way, everything in our life is helping and supporting our practice."
- Sojun Mel Weitsman



"In the daytime an old watchman from the local shrine or some villager from the foot of the hill comes along and chats with me about things I rarely hear of such as a wild boar's looting the rice paddies or a hare's haunting the bean farms. When the sun sets under the edge of the hill and night falls, I quietly sit and wait for the moon. With the moonrise I begin roaming about, casting my shadow on the ground. When the night deepens I return to the hut and meditate on right and wrong, gazing at the dim margin of a shadow in the lamplight."
- Basho

<°))))><

"There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
There is nothing you can think that is not the moon."
- Basho


"The autumn moon is incomparably beautiful. Any man who
supposes the moon is always the same, regardless of the season,
and is therefore unable to detect the difference in autumn, must
be exceedingly insensitive."
- Yoshida Kenko
The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko
Essays in Idleness



"As soon as I hear a name I feel convinced I can guess what the owner looks like, but it never happens, when I actually meet the man, that his face is as I had supposed. I wonder if everybody shares my experience of feeling, when I hear some story about the past, that the house mentioned in the story must have been rather like this or that house belonging to people of today, or that the persons of the story resemble people I see now. It has happened on various occasions too that I have felt, just after someone has said something or I have seen something or thought of something, that it has occurred before. I cannot remember when it was, but I feel absolutely certain that the thing has happened. Am I the only one who has such impressions?"
- Yoshida Kenko
The Tsurezuregusa, or Essays in Idleness, of Yoshida Kenko
translated by Donald Keene



"Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you."
- don Juan Matus



"Well, whatever . . . make yourself comfortable; you're here forever.
If that frightens you, consider:
You've always been here."
- James Lane Prior



"Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back and then - one day - you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then - one day - you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe."
- Denis Leary



Strangers A man and a woman happened to sit next to one another on a train. The woman took out a book and began reading. The train stopped at a half dozen stations, but she never looked up once.
The man watched her for awhile, then asked, "What are you reading?"
"It's a ghost story," she said. "It's very good, very spooky."
"Do you believe in ghosts?" he asked.
"Yes, I do," she replied. "There are ghosts everywhere."
"I don't believe in them," he said. "It's just a lot of superstition. In all my years I've never seen a ghost, not one."
"Haven't you?" the woman said, and disappeared.
- Alvin Schwartz



I
night laundry
two legs under the shirts
and trousers

II
night beach
menacing sea
hungry for souls

III
horror movie
theatre washroom
suddenly darkens

IV
late night
the bus leaves me in the shadow
of a haunted house

V
next door's widow death
sound of her forlorn
bamboo bell

VI
roadside pee
asking whatever ghost
around for permission

VII
hungry ghost festival
by the roadside
flickering candles

VIII
chinese funeral
hell notes trail
the path
- John Tiong Chunghoo



Four Chaps In The Library In the process of recalling my college days, I am reminded of that momentous occasion during my first year at St Montague's, when, by some irksome and malign fate, I discovered myself sharing the confines of the school library with three well-read scholars of that time. These were loathsome fellows I normally would avoid at all costs, but owing to the atrocious weather I was compelled to gain a welcome warmth beside that roaring fire.

"What is your name, young chap?" I was asked, by a large scholar wearing a three-piece suit of pin-stripes. His inquiry wore a ghastly cloak of supposed superiority and rank, which I kind of expected, as I was a mere first year student at that particular time.

"Grimshaw," I told him, and as I uttered my name I surveyed the three pairs of beady eyes which were fixed upon my being. I detected a vast amount of arrogance beyond those staring sockets.

"A common name," sneered the fellow, whose own name I knew to be Rhodes-Fotheringham. As I have mentioned, he was large, with a reddened, chubby face and whiskers that hid his stiff upper lip completely. It appeared as if he owned the bottom one only, and I reckoned this to be quite comical, although I dared not to chuckle in their presence.

"Well, Grimshaw," snarled the second chap, whose name was Blake, and who was exactly as tiresome as Rhodes-Fotheringham, "my chums and I were in the process of recounting horrific tales of ghosts and apparitions. If you wish to remain in our company, you must endure this."

"And not go fleeing from the room in fright!" added the third monster, a scoundrel by the name of Atkinson.

I endeavoured not to be afraid, which was not a simple task, as the trio themselves were sufficient to cause a shivering sensation inside me. We were all seated, with discreet distances between each, in huge Victorian armchairs facing the blazing flames of the log fire. The library itself was enormous, and must have contained thousands of books on all subjects. Including the topic of ghosts.

"I remember one chap," said Rhodes-Fotheringham, a cigar of eager proportions in his ample hand, "whose name I cannot recall. He regularly encountered the ghostly figure of an old man in a pale-colored nightgown, who was prone to walking up and down the stairs of the chap's home, and with his head held under his arm!"

Excessive gasps left the mouths of Blake and Atkinson, whilst I myself remained silent and breathless. Rhodes-Fotheringham's features became hidden in the midst of an awful-smelling cloud of cigar smoke, providing an eerie vision of his face, and at that moment I wondered whether he himself was a dreadful phantom.

"Anyway," he continued, with the smoke drifting in the direction of the fireplace, "this chap could stand it no longer, and subsequently decided to take his own life by shooting himself in the head with a pistol. Now it is rumoured that he himself haunts that house."

His two companions seemed quite unsettled by this story, and as the flames crackled in the hearth they each took a copious mouthful of the brandy that was readily available nearby. Then Blake appeared to decide that he was not to be outdone by his friend.

"That is a pretty gruesome tale, old chap," he said in a quavering voice, "but allow me to relate the story of the man whose wife gave birth to an apparition."

"By Jove!" exclaimed Rhodes-Fotheringham, with peculiar puffed cheeks. He appeared to be somewhat perturbed by Blake's proclamation, and I noticed how agitated he became as his companion continued the tale.

"It is indeed true," said Blake, who, in contrast to Rhodes-Fotheringham, was of a thin shape, and was clutching his brandy glass tightly the whole time. "This apparition grew to a fine old age, until he reached a maturity he could not improve on, and now he haunts the church in which his parents had married."

Again, a strange air filled the room, and an odd nervousness prevailed in the three figures that flanked me. I remember thinking how chilling and sinister were those three fellows, to the point where I began to feel rather frightened myself. However, I attempted not to reveal this, as I sat with clenched fists upon that armchair, gazing into the leaping flames opposite my position in that library.

"That is an impressive story," said Atkinson. I had never seen a chap as tall and gangly as he was. His weird-looking legs protruded from that chair, stretched out before him like two huge clothes-props, and behind his gold-rimmed spectacles I observed the most evil pair of grey eyes.

"What about this then, chaps," he said, grasping the opportunity to tell his own grotesque tale. "A soldier in the Great War was lurking in the trenches, with bullets whizzing around his ears, when suddenly he noticed beside him his own ghost. It was identical in every detail, and he was naturally astonished. Seconds later this poor chap was struck in the head by an enemy shot, and was killed instantly. But strangely, he recalls then holding his own dying figure in his arms, for he had taken over the form of the apparition that was beside him!"

"My good God!" cried Rhodes-Fotheringham, with an obvious alarm.

I then looked at Blake, who appeared so petrified he was speechless. I found it quite odd that these three chaps knew so much about ghosts. They seemed to be more than mere students of the college, and indeed I morbidly started to fear what exactly they were. However, I quickly dismissed these thoughts, and seized the chance to reveal some ideas of my own.

"This is all preposterous!" I shouted above the blaze of the fire.

"What?" demanded Blake, who suddenly regained his powers of speech upon hearing my unwelcome exclamation.

"I have never heard of the chap who saw the ghost on the stairs. How do you know this if he shot himself? The same with the soldier in the war. He was dead just seconds after supposedly seeing his own ghost, so how do you know this? And as for the fellow whose wife gave birth to a phantom. That is pure drivel of the finest water!"

Rhodes-Fotheringham was in such an intolerable rage that I thought he would explode before my eyes, and the other two were not far behind in their ire. Each of them was blazing more intensely than the fire was!

"Get out of here!" yelled Rhodes-Fotheringham in a tremendous, booming voice. "And do not return! You are far from worthy of our company!"

This request - or rather, this command - seemed quite popular amongst the three of them, and so it was with a trembling demeanour that I proceeded to leave the library. A chilling silence ensued as I slowly stepped away from them and the fireplace. However, I believe I succeeded in astounding my trio of companions, for I departed from that room without opening the door.
- Paul Bradshaw