no such thing
"There's a famous river, Koda in Xingju, that is crossed by many bridges. One day Jojoza was standing on one of the bridges when three monks approached.
One monk asked Jojoza, "How deep is this river?"
Jojoza grabbed him and tried to throw him into the river. But the other two monks stopped him, holding the monk and pleading with Jojoza.
Jojoza said, "If these two monks weren't here, you would be at the bottom of the river!"
This is a famous story.
It's better to find out for yourself how deep the river is. Zen teaches experiential understanding. A mother teaches her child that fire is hot. But it's better for the child to experience fire. That deep understanding is better.
Zen amplifies experience."
- Fukushima Keido
"When your vision penetrates through and your use of it is clear, you are spontaneously able to turn without freezing up or getting stuck amid all kinds of lightning-fast changes and complex interactions and interlocking intricacies. You do not establish any views or keep to any mental states; you move with a mighty flow, so that "when the wind moves, the grasses bend down."
- Yuanwu
Zen Letters, Teachings of Yuanwu
translated by J.C. and Thomas Cleary
Flying Inside Your Own Body
Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you'll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun's white winds blow through you,
there's nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It's only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun's a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the thick pink rind of your skull.
It's always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.
- Margaret Atwood
"Zen prides itself on being a teaching outside words and letters; thus any book of mere writing - no matter how elevated or enlightened - could not rightly be called essential. The essential Zen, in book form, would more likely consist of blank pages; a reader fills them in. Or not.
For about twelve centuries, Zen teachers have warned their students away from literary endeavor. Book learning of any kind has been regarded suspiciously by serious practitioners as a very dim second best to direct experience. And yet an enormous and illuminating Zen literature has grown up.
Sayings and doings of the ancient Chinese masters were originally recorded, usually by a faithful student. These records were discussed and given out as objects of meditation - the renowned koans, or spiritual puzzles. When Zen reached Japan and other countries, the same thing happened. It appears that Zen teachers of every age (including the present one) found delight not only in reading what other masters said and did, but in commenting about them, and in collecting their comments into books."
- David Schneider
Essential Zen
Kazuaki Tanahasi and David Schneider
February
Blending with the wind,
Snow falls;
Blending with the snow,
The wind blows.
By the hearth
I stretch out my legs,
Idling my time away
Confined in this hut.
Counting the days,
I find that February, too,
Has come and gone
Like a dream.
- Ryokan
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan
translated by John Stevens
Cancer and Nova
The star exploding in the body;
The creeping thing, growing in the brain or the bone;
The hectic cannibal, the obscene mouth.
The mouths along the meridian sought him,
Soft as moths, many a moon and sun,
Until one
In a pale fleeing dream caught him.
Waking, he did not know himself undone,
Nor walking, smiling, reading that the news was good,
The star exploding in his blood.
- Hyam Plutzik
Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry - it was
A chorister whose C preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
- Wallace Stevens
of painting speech, and speaking to the eyes?
That we, by tracing magic lines are taught
how to embody, and to color thought?"
- William Massey
Cold Poem
Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.
I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.
Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe
that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.
In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.
- Mary Oliver
"I have learned to be happy where I am. I have learned that locked within the moments of each day are all the joys, the peace, the fibers of the cloth we call life. The meaning is in the moment. There is no other way to find it. You feel what you allow yourself to feel, each and every moment of the day."
- Russ Berrie
At the south pond, wild geese huddle in snowy reeds.
Above, the mountain moon is pinched thin with cold,
Freezing clouds threaten to plunge from the sky.
Buddhas might descend to this world by the thousands,
They couldn't add or subtract one thing.
- Hakuin
The Road to Wisdom
The road to wisdom?-
Well, it’s plain and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
- Piet Hein
"What is the life of a Buddhist master like?" asked the disciple. "One mistake after another," replied the teacher. "How is that different from ordinary people?" asked the disciple. "Ordinary people just make the same mistake over and over again," replied the teacher. "A teacher is not a teacher on account of infallibility. They are a teacher on account of realism. The teacher can be realistic about himself just as much as about anything else. Buddhism is entirely experimental. Every step is a try-and-see one. If we live at the edge of our understanding then we are always growing."
- Dharmavidya
It is snowing in soft footfalls,
Fred and Ginger in the slate-colored light,
the radiance broken
into white quarks,
a redundancy in the beautiful dusk of white
It snows until the great snow-heart breaks -
throwing its white bouquets at us
and we catch the white-scissored streamers
Look: snow is a broken constellation,
a fabric of diatoms
seeded down to us
A gathering substance like chalk
as it zigzags to earth:
Such joy is not hard to pronounce
- Suzanne E. Berger
"That the universe has in it more than we understand, that the private soldiers have not been told the plan of campaign, or even that there is one, rather than some vaster unthinkable to which every predicate is an impertinence, has no bearing upon our conduct. We still shall fight - all of us because we want to live, some, at least, because we want to realize our spontaneity and prove our powers, for the joy of it, and we may leave to the unknown the supposed final valuation of that which in any event has value to us. It is enough for us that the universe has produced us and has within it, as less than it, all that we believe and love. If we think of our existence not as that of a little god outside, but as that of a ganglion within, we have the infinite behind us. It gives us our only but our adequate significance. A grain of sand has the same, but what competent person supposes that he understands a grain of sand? That is as much beyond our grasp as man. If our imagination is strong enough to accept the vision of ourselves as parts inseverable from the rest, and to extend our final interest beyond the boundary of our skins, it justifies the sacrifice even of our lives for ends outside of ourselves. The motive, to be sure, is the common wants and ideals that we find in man. Philosophy does not furnish motives, but it shows men that they are not fools for doing what they already want to do. It opens to the forlorn hopes on which we throw ourselves away, the vista of the farthest stretch of human thought, the chords of a harmony that breathes from the unknown."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
I sometimes believe I see
That life is two locked boxes
Each containing the other’s key.
- Piet Hein
"Our experience, our deepest experience has taught us something; we wish to convey it to others. When they question its validity, we become angry, losing our mental serenity by holding so firmly to what is, after all, more intangible than snow-flakes or the rainbow. It is not merely calmness of mind that we have lost, however, but what is, this and more, the Middle Way, the knowledge (and practice) that our profoundest interpretation of life also must be thrown overboard together with the sentimentality, cruelty, snobbery, and folly that make our lives a misery. The Crooked Way is not a morally distorted manner of life. It is composed of virtues as much as of vices, of ideals, religious dogmas, principles of freedom and justice, as much as of degradation and tyranny. The Crooked Way is over- grieving at inevitable sorrows, over-clinging to joys which must cease; it is regarding as permanent what is but transitory; always looking for the silver lining, desiring to be in the non-existent and impossible Land beyond the morning star."
- R. H. Blyth
Steak
Drinking in downtown Taejon
my mouth was stuffed full
with a big lump of broiled steak
but suddenly I couldn't swallow it
couldn't spit it out . . .
outside the pouring rain was shouting:
Quick! Say something!
What?
- Ko Un
Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems
It is March
It is March and black dust falls out of the books
Soon I will be gone
The tall spirit who lodged here has
Left already
On the avenues the colorless thread lies under
Old prices
When you look back there is always the past
Even when it has vanished
But when you look forward
With your dirty knuckles and the wingless
Bird on your shoulder
What can you write
The bitterness is still rising in the old mines
The fist is coming out of the egg
The thermometers out of the mouths of the corpses
At a certain height
The tails of the kites for a moment are
Covered with footsteps
Whatever I have to do has not yet begun
- W.S. Merwin
Lines for Winter
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself -
inside the dome of dark
or under the crackling white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
- Mark Strand
nothing wonderful about it . . .
spring's first dawn
- Issa
"In the Second Scroll of Wen the Eternally Surprised a story is written concerning one day when the apprentice Clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached Wen and spake thusly:
"Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?"
Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: "A fish!"
And Clodpool went away, satisfied."
- Terry Pratchett
Thief of Time
"Much as we want to know ourselves, we do not really know ourselves. Do we really want to see ourselves as God sees us, or even as our fellow human beings see us? Could we bear it, weak as we are? You know that feeling of contentment in which we sometimes go about, clothed in it, as it were, like a garment, content with the world and with ourselves . . . We do not want to be given that clear inward vision which discloses to us our most secret faults. In the Psalms there is that prayer, Deliver me from my secret sins. We do not really know how much pride and self-love we have until someone whom we respect or love suddenly turns against us. Then some sudden affront, some sudden offense we take, reveals to us in all its glaring distinctness our self-love, and we are ashamed."
- Dorothy Day
Cruising Cyberspace
In one moment
the Louvre in Paris -
soaking up half a million
pixels of Mona Lisa's smile.
In another, Boston's Jordan Hall -
listening to 12 megabytes
of Beethoven's 9th
with the program and
Schiller's Ode to Joy
just downloaded in hand.
Point & Click
and I'm there -
the miracle of surfing
the Internet, a taste
of angelic power -
wishes fulfilled instantly.
When I'm at Kyoto's
Ryoanji Rock Garden,
a Zen master asks me:
"Is this World Wide Web
outside or inside of you?"
If you say outside,
you'll never find
Indra's jewels.
If you say inside,
you're wasting time
logging on.
Still I reply "inside"
and the master smiles : - )
"Then why are you
carrying all those
spiders in you?"
SWOOSH - a gush
of wind sweeps
my cobwebs clean,
the bamboo blinds
are rolled up and clear
is the great blue sky.
A white crane soars
over Fuji and descends
right into my heart.
- Peter Y. Chou
"Meditation is when you sit down, let's say that, and don't do anything.
Poetry is when you get up and do something.
Somewhere we've developed the misconception that poetry is self-expression, and that meditation is going inward. Actually, poetry has nothing to do with self-expression, it is the way to be free, finally, of self-expression, to go much deeper than that. And meditation is not a form of thought or reflection, it is a looking at or an awareness of what is there, equally inside and outside, and then it doesn't make sense anymore to mention inside or outside."
- Norman Fischer
Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry
But ending illusions is hard.
So many frosted moonlit nights
I've sat and felt
The cold before dawn.
- Shih-wu
Satori is to know that there is no such thing as satori.
No Knowing
Do not follow the path I say
for it does not exist
you cannot find enlightenment
contained within a list
do not follow leaders
they cannot set you free
and perhaps now most importantly
listen not to me.
- Ikkyu
This world
Is but
A fleeting dream
So why be alarmed
At its evanescence?
why is it all so beautiful this fake dream
this craziness why?
- Ikkyu
this ink painting of wind blowing through pines
who hears it?
not two not one either
and the unpainted breeze in the ink painting feels cool
- Ikkyu
To write something and leave it behind us,
It is but a dream.
When we awake we know
There is not even anyone to read it.
inside the koan clear mind
gashes the great darkness
only one koan matters
you
- Ikkyu
"One of Zen’s great names, Ikkyu, means literally, "One Pause". Ikkyu received the name from his teacher upon breaking through to enlightenment. The decisive event that opened Ikkyu’s mind was the cawing of a crow. What struck Ikkyu was not only the sound of the crow, but the pause between the sounds. He wrote, of the experience,
reckless shriek Ikkyu Ikkyu Ikkyu
- Philip Toshio Sudo
Zen 24/7
Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday's clarity is today's stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.
- Ikkyu
"A man woke up and found that he'd been robbed. More disconcerting was the realization that everything had been replaced by an exact replica. Unnerved by this weird situation he called his neighbor. The neighbor, looking at him rather carefully, asked, "Do I know you?"
- Alan Fletcher
the art of looking sideways
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