life's fitful fever
"In the willing, not doing, of the impossible, the impossible is achieved. Everything is will, everything is subjective. Stop thinking about the why and wherefore of life. Cease wanting this, and not wanting that. It is foolish to fear death all your life, and die anyway at the end of it. Don't read the philosophers and the sages and saints, or try to solve all the Zen problems, the meaning of Mu and of the sound of the clapping of one hand, and all that nonsense. Be free of them and of all things, so that you can play the piano nonchalantly and incompetently before an audience of ten thousand, and be buried alive with equanimity and boredom."
- R. H. Blyth
"Any reflective person recognizes how much learning happens outside the realm of analytical deduction. Most of what one knows comes from sensory, intuitive, and imaginative faculties. Reason may later examine and organize this learning, but one first assimilated it holistically."
- Dana Gioia
"Emotions drive the threesome of attention, meaning, and memory." In essence, that just about sums up what we know about learning: attending to information, constructing meaning, and lodging it in our memory. Brain researchers have shown that emotions are critical to patterning, which is the way that information is organized in the brain, how we are able to retrieve that information. Emotions assist in both evaluating and integrating information and experiences.
However, as we know, not all emotions facilitate learning. Stress, frustration, anger, fear - all can overwhelm the brain with hormones and thought patterns that totally shut down one's ability to learn. When major emotional flooding occurs it is true that one literally cannot think straight."
- Eric Jensen
Teaching with the Brain in Mind
"In the old days, evil things spread rapidly, but now good things spread rapidly. If you understand . . . everything begins to appear wonderful and beautiful, and it naturally makes people stop wasting or stop desiring unnecessary things. This awakening is contagious and it will be transmitted to everybody soon."
- Ryoju Kikuchi
"Those with eyes lead those with eyes, those who have none lead the blind. All lead, all are led. The expression the blind leading the blind comes from the Nirvana Sutra."
- R. H. Blyth
- Kabir
"Everyone has this third eye; all living things, and even inanimate things, have it. All use it without knowing it. It is with this eye that we read poetry, and, oddly enough, listen to music. We may go so far as to say that this eye is things as they really are, since things see themselves (only) when we use it."
- R. H. Blyth
"Siubi was asked, "What is the secret of Zen?"
"Come back when there is nobody around and I shall tell you."
The inquirer returned. Siubi took him to a bamboo grove, pointed at the bamboos and said, "See how long these are. See how short these are!"
Suddenly the questioner saw.
What did he see? He had a revelation of sheer existence.
Where there is revelation, explanation becomes superfluous. Curiosity is dissolved into wonder."
- Frederick Franck
"The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking-at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking-at the world - through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes, stereoscopes - the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.
If we could still really see what day after day is shown on the six o'clock news, we would burst out in tears. We would pray, or kneel, or perhaps make the sign of the cross over that screen in an impotent gesture of exorcising such evil, such insanity. But there we sit, programmed as we are to look-at, to stare passively at those burning tanks, those animals choking in oil spills. We perfunctorily shake our heads, take another sip of our drink, and stare at the manic commercials until the thing switches back to smiling bigwigs reviewing honor guards, rows of corpses, and beauty queens preening.
No wonder that once the art of seeing is lost, Meaning is lost, and all life itself seems ever more meaningless: "They know not what they do, for they do not see what they look-at."
"Not seeing what they look-at" may well be the root cause of the frightful suffering that we humans inflict on one another, on animals, on Earth herself."
- Frederick Franck
Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing
"I am a poor candidate for a Zen life. And yet, there is nothing quite so total as being completely tuned into the present. To the moment. How you get it really doesn't matter.
Human beings are complicated. You can live in the past, you can dream all the time of the future, but every now and again you need to be right there. But it's hard because most of the modern world isn't worth paying attention to. Who wants to pay attention to the traffic jam on I-10? The more you live in the suburbs or urban areas, the more you want to shut everything down - see little, hear little, smell nothing. Who wants it? Who needs it? The total sensory experience of living in a shithouse.
When you walked by a period of life when you could have been really happy, you should have seized it. You should have leaped upon it. I just try to let myself go. It's not necessary to live in the moment every day, in the traffic jam with smog creeping in your window, listening to bad rap music on the radio. But when it's there you have really got to live it. The best reason for living it is knowing you are going to die. It's no big deal. I have had some sense of my own mortality for a long time. It's not a negative thought. It's just the way things are. If you want more life, that's fine. But you should get as much out of the life that you have got left as you can. I wish I had a clue as to how to find happiness, but I know it slaps you in the face all of the time. You just have to stop long enough to pay attention."
- Doug Peacock
"Seeing is encountering reality with all of your being. To encounter reality deeply, you cannot leave part of yourself behind. All of your senses, your emotions, your intellect, your language-making abilities – each contributes to seeing fully."
- Robert H. McKim
Experiences in Visual Thinking
"Always be ready to see what you haven't seen before.
It's a kind of looking where you don't know what you're looking for."
- Corita Kent
Chosetsu asks, "What then is it?"
Jinne replies, "It is nothing like "what is." Therefore, we can not explain it. Suppose that there is a clear, transparent mirror. If it does not face a thing, no image is reflected in it. To say that it mirrors an image means that because it faces something, it just mirrors its image."
Chosetsu asks, "If it does not face any thing, is there or is there not a reflection in the mirror?"
Jinne replies, "That the mirror reflects a thing means that it always mirrors regardless of whether it is facing or not facing a thing."
Chosetsu asks, "When you say that it always mirrors, how does it mirror?"
Jinne replies, "When I say that the mirror always mirrors, it is because a clear, transparent mirror possesses an original nature as its essential activity of always mirroring things. Analogously, the mind is originally undefiled, and naturally possesses a superb light of wisdom that illuminates the perfect world of nirvana."
Chosetsu asks, "What can it see?"
Jinne replies, "Seeing is not like something you can call a thing."
Chosetsu asks, "If it is not like anything one can call a thing, what does it see?"
Jinne replies, "It sees. That is the true seeing. It always sees."
- Yanagita
"I will settle something for you right now: the ultimate rule is to see your own mind clearly. An ancient said, "The mind does not know itself, the mind does not see itself." So how can you see it clearly? Mind does not see mind; to get it, you must not see it as mind.
Do you want to understand? Just discern the things perceived; you cannot see the mind itself.
All that is necessary is that there be no perceiver or perceived when you perceive [no separation of perceiver and perceived], no thinker or thought when you think [no separation of thinker and thought]. Buddhism is very easy. Just let go, then step back and look.
How about when they say the sound of the rain has given you a sermon? Is that correct? I do not agree; the sound of the rain is you giving a sermon. But do you understand?"
- Fo-yen Ching-yuan
Like in a mirror
Form and reflection look at each other
You are not the reflection
But the reflection is yourself
- Tozan
When you are here, bring back your light towards the inside.
Enlighten the surroundings.
Open your hands and refuse nothing.
- Fuyo Dokai
"Is it possible to meet each other or to meet the flower, the bird, or the new day without anything interfering? And if the past does come up, to see that it is memory coming up? And not be ruled by it, not be compelled and narrowed down by it? To see it and to wonder whether it has to interfere? Whether perhaps there is an energy of meeting, of listening and looking, which can disconnect the belief that we think we know what he, she or it is?"
- Toni Packer
"Buddha is Sanskrit for what you call aware, miraculously aware. Responding, perceiving, arching your brows, blinking your eyes, moving your hands and feet, it's all your miraculously aware nature. And this nature is the mind. And the mind is the buddha. And the buddha is the path. And the path is zen. But the word zen is one that remains a puzzle to both mortals and sages. Seeing your nature is zen. Unless you see your nature, it's not zen."
- Bodhidharma
known sound
After I can no longer see her
she says to me For a while there is all
that asking about how the body becomes
itself as it goes and what it is becoming
what is happening to it where it is going
step by step one moment at a time
and then all that falls aside like a curtain
and the body is gone with its worn questions
hollow joints marrow and breath and instead there is
the way whatever lived in it goes on as itself
neither before nor after neither moving nor still
and while the body was going somewhere
the way was there to begin with in the feet themselves
wherever they went and you know the sound
- W. S. Merwin
"A distraught monk approached the Zen master. "Please, Master, I feel lost, desperate. I don't know who I am. Please, show me my true self!"
But the teacher just looked away without responding.
The monk began to plead and beg, but still the master gave no reply.
Finally giving up in frustration, the monk turned to leave. At that moment the master called out to him by name.
"Yes?" the monk said as he spun back around.
"There it is!" exclaimed the master."
"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
Most people are on the world, not in it - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death . . . Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast - all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our sisters and brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share Heaven's blessings with us, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. "Our lives are rounded with sleep."
I went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
- John Muir
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
- Mark Strand
Sleeping With One Eye Open
"You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I'll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back."
- Doug Peacock
"Buddha means one who has woken up from the dream of self-image. We can't really understand what waking up is until we wake up. We can talk about it but we can't really describe it as such. Someone who is sleeping might dream about being awake, going to work, meeting friends and so on, but it is a dream. So, usual mind cannot encompass Awakened mind within itself. We can't put a big box into a small box. Only Buddha can realize Buddha.
The Teachings say that you are Buddha. It is not a matter of becoming Buddha. It is a matter of realizing for yourself that you are Buddha and that there is a fundamental Awakened quality at the core of your experience. It is a matter of realizing for yourself that sanity, honesty, clarity, wisdom and compassion are your basic nature, that all conditions are inherently unconditioned, that Awareness is all that is ever going on and it is never limited.
This means having some sense of being Buddha, even if only on a feeling or intellectual level, a deep sense that no matter how screwed up you can be, you are basically sane after all. No matter how you might find yourself getting caught up in things, there is still a basic clarity that's available to you."
- Anzan Hoshin
Before Thinking
"The more we create, the more we love and lose those whom we love, the more we escape from death. With every new work we round and finish, we escape into the work we have created, the soul we have loved, the soul that has left us. When all is told, Rome is not in Rome; the best of a man lies outside himself."
- Romain Rolland
"The artist within must fight the battle for Meaning with pen on paper, or brush on canvas, or chisel in wood and stone. But his Way, as that of Everyman, leads from ignorance, delusion, folly, self-inflation and phoniness to truth and authenticity . . . The point of practicing an art is less to discover who you are than to become your truth, to be able to shed all sham, imposture and bluff in relation to yourself and others. True art is not an indulgence of the little self, but a manifestation of the Self."
- Frederick Franck
Art as a Way
When no one listens
To the quiet trees
When no one notices
The sun in the pool.
Where no one feels
The first drop of rain
Or sees the last star
Or hails the first morning
Of a giant world
Where peace begins
And rages end:
One bird sits still
Watching the work of God:
One turning leaf,
Two falling blossoms,
Ten circles upon the pond.
- Thomas Merton
"One spring, as peach blossoms filled the valley below with a spray of white fragrance, an ancient sage wandered the Heights of Shang. There on a hillside stripped of everything else, he saw a large and extraordinary tree. So huge it was, the horses that drew a hundred chariots could be sheltered under its shade. "What a tree this is!" he thought. Imagining the amount of timber it must contain, he marveled that the tree had never been cut down.
But as he sat beneath it and looked up into the tree's branches, he saw how twisted and crooked they were. Turning in every direction, none of them were large enough to be made into rafters or beams. He reached up and broke off a twig, tasting the sap. It was sharp and bitter. "This tree would be useless for tapping," he concluded, "producing no syrup of any worth." The leaves, too, gave off an offensive odor as he broke them. They were too fragile to be woven into mats or braided into baskets. They would not even make good mulch! Even the roots, as he studied them, were so gnarled and knotty that one could never carve a bowl or fashion a fine decorative box out of them.
The sage said at last; "This, indeed, is a tree good for nothing! That is why it has reached so great an age. The cinnamon tree can be eaten; so it is cut down. The varnish tree is useful, and therefore incisions are made in it. We all know the advantage of being useful, but only this tree knows the advantage of being useless!" The wise man sat in the shade of that great tree for the rest of the day, as a light wind drifted up from the valley below. He breathed the scent of distant peach blossoms and sat in studied silence, happily contemplating his own uselessness."
- David R. Brower
adapted from a poem by Chuang Tzu
Of All Things Most Yielding
Acting in the Way of Nature
often means not acting -
Not doing anything.
Indeed an empire can often be won
By doing nothing at the right time.
Indeed a life can often be lost
By trying to do too much.
- Lao-tsu
Far off there in the distance – is that a peach tree? An apricot?
Up to the gate without bothering to ask whose house it might be;
The whole spring, just like some crazy butterfly,
I'll go anywhere for the sake of blossoms.
- Kisei Reigen
"As long as you are conscious of yourself you can never concentrate on anything."
- Walpola Rahula
What the Buddha Taught
"Man thinks and acts without noticing. When he thinks, "It is fine today," he is aware of the weather but not of his own thought. It is the reflecting act of consciousness that comes immediately after the thought that makes him aware of his own thinking."
- Katsuki Sekida
O to Be a Dragon
. . . . . If I, like Solomon, . . .
. . . . . could have my wish -
. . . . . my wish . . . O to be a dragon,
a symbol of the power of Heaven -
. . . . . of silkworm
. . . . . size or immense; at times
. . . . . invisible.
. . . . . Felicitous phenomenon!
- Marianne Moore
Is there anyone who can hear the dragon singing?
"What is the Way?" a monk asked.
Kyogen said, "A dragon singing in a withered tree."
The song of the dragon is the wind blowing through the dead branches and bringing out the life that is unexpectedly in them.
The dragon in the withered tree
really sees
the Way.
- Sozan
Remember
That to have the eyes of an artist,
That can be enough,
The ear of a poet,
That can be enough.
The soul of a human
just pointed
in the direction of the divine,
that can be more than enough.
I tell you this to remind myself.
Every gesture is an act of creation.
Even empty spaces and silence
can be the wings and voices of angels.
- Michele Linfante
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres -
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our
business.
- T. S. Eliot
East Coker
Four Quartets
Ungan asked Dogo, "How does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many hands and eyes?"
Dogo said, "It's just like a person in the middle of the night reaching back in search of a pillow."
Ungan said, "I understand."
Dogo said, "How do you understand it?"
Ungan said, "All over the body are hands and eyes."
Dogo said, "What you said is all right, but it's only eighty percent of it."
Ungan said, "I'm like this, Senior brother. How do you understand it?"
Dogo said, "Throughout the body are hands and eyes."
- The Blue Cliff Record
I came from brilliancy
And return to brilliancy.
What is this?
- Hoshin
Untitled
Am I just the ghostwriter
of my former selves?
The words crawl forth
from primordial pools
to form oceans on paper.
- Jacob Hayes
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