how wondrous this
Here where the world ends, and has beginning,
Here where the sunlight-spring of all our minds
Has birth again, and new beginning
The seeker finds.
Here there is body's peace, and the heart's uprising,
Here the illumined minds of other men
Are beacons on a mountain peak uprising
Beyond our ken.
Here there is quiet, and the world about us,
Here there is wisdom foolish men must know.
The earth is dumb with suffering about us,
And I must go.
- Christmas Humphreys
Both Sides of the Circle
Just by being,
I'm here
in snow-fall.
- Issa
Approaching year's end,
east of the river
the weather turns cold.
At the wilderness temple,
dusk spreads
to river and sky.
No wine I know
can melt
this night.
I follow a monk,
who shuts
the gates early.
Lamplit walls
hold
stunted shadows.
Roof tiles
bearing snow
creak constantly.
Drifting about in the world,
I still have
a thousand li to travel;
but just now,
I want to lose myself
in the temple's pure chanting of sutras.
- Jen Fan
Loosing the way
Sitting alone in my empty room
My mind restless and downcast
I saddle my horse and ride far, far away
Climb to a height
And gaze out over the distant scene
A whirlwind springs up, shaking the earth
In no time at all, the sun sinks in the west
Broad rivers churn with foaming waves
Fields stretch endlessly past the horizon
Black monkeys call to their companions
With melancholy cries
geese wing their way south
A hundred cares line my brow
Ten thousand troubles rend my heart
I want to return
but I've lost the way
Here it is, the end of another year
What am I to do?
- Ryokan Taigu
If you don't climb a thousand crags,
how can you learn
all things are empty?
The mountain's head is white and mine is too.
December dies, the year
runs out its string as all things do.
At the summit: one rude hut, the snow,
this lonely body, and the wind.
I lean on the rail, heart sudden struck
the moon rises from within Great River: there.
- Yuan Mei
New Year's Eve Haiku
paying no mind
to the year's last day . . .
a floating bird, asleep
- Kobayashi Issa
sunset's bell
finishes it off . . .
year's last day
- Kobayashi Issa
Issa and I
home alone again -
New Year's eve
- David Giacalone
New Year's Day Haiku
New Year's Dawn
light first gathers
in the icicles
- Jim Kacian
New Year's morning
the first day begins
in the same dream
- Jane Reichhold
New Year's Day
between clouds the sun
a bright beginning
- Jane Reichhold
a mountain of ink
spilled on white paper
New Year's Day
- Jane Reichhold
The years first day
thoughts and loneliness;
the winter dusk is here.
- Matsuo Basho
On New Year's Day
I long to meet my parents
as they were before my birth.
- Soseki Natsume
Have you forgotten the way to my hut?
Every evening I wait for the sound of your footsteps,
But you do not appear.
- Ryokan
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows long.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of the woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe.
When the moon comes out, I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing so many things.
- Ryokan
Though frosts come down
night after night,
what does it matter?
they melt in the morning sun.
Though the snow falls
each passing year,
what does it matter?
with spring days it thaws.
Yet once let them settle
on a man's head,
fall and pile up,
go on piling up -
then the new year
may come and go,
but never you'll see them fade away
- Ryokan
"If you can see the bright sun shining on the snow, if you can feel the icy wind blowing across the face of the earth, then what more can be said? What more can anyone add?
See that intimacy. Make it your own. Then throw it away and keep going. Ultimately, every single thing you do in this practice has to resolve itself into the moment to moment reality of your life. Everything you do, every breath you take, every action you make.
It's an incredible gift to have the opportunity to practice this dharma, to even know that it exists. Millions upon millions of humans have gone from cradle to grave without ever even knowing that it's possible to put an end to suffering, that it's possible to manifest their life in a way that's in harmony with things, that nourishes rather than poisons. The fact that we have the opportunity to realize that - we shouldn't take it lightly. We should accept it with gratitude, and practice it with the whole body and mind. And repay the efforts of all the buddhas and ancestors that have preceded us by giving life to the buddha. And you do that by making it your own."
- The Blue Cliff Record, Case 42
Layman Pang's Good Snowflakes
Homage to Ryokan
I drink my fill.
The clouds grip their purple,
the mountains let go their thunder.
I sit and drink my fill.
How much I long to see
through the man
who sees through the moment.
I sit.
- Seido Ronci
"There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be the day you laugh is also here and now."
- Ramana Maharshi
1.
Snow besieges my plank door
I crowd the stove at night
although this form exists it seems as if it doesn't
I have no idea where the months have gone
every time I turn around another year on earth is over
2.
Bone-chilling snow on a thousand peaks
wild raging wind from ten thousand hollows
when I first awake deep beneath my blanket
I forget my body is in a silent void
3.
The mountains stand unmoving just the way they are
all day they let the clouds roll out and roll back in
even though red dust is countless layers deep
not a single speck reaches my thatched hut
- Han Shan Te'-ch'ing
"To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To "rest in the present" is a state of magical simplicity, although attainment of this state is not as simple as it sounds."
- Peter Matthiessen
Nine-Headed Dragon River
"For a long time, I wondered what the Zen concept of time was. It's like trying to turn your head fast enough to see your own face. You never can, because your face is your face and is not separate from you. Our past is only here now. It is not in some separate moment. There is a Zen saying: "Settle the self on the self." The past becomes settled in the present, the only place it really exists. We are only here right now. In The Experience of Insight, Joseph Goldstein said that the only moment is the present, that we have concepts of the past and future, but they are only concepts in the mind."
- Natalie Goldberg
"Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us. Confronted by the uncouth specter of old age, disease, and death, we are thrown back upon the present, on this moment, here, right now, for that is all there is. And surely this is the paradise of children, that they are at rest in the present, like frogs or rabbits."
- Peter Matthiessen
Nine-Headed Dragon River
"In other days, I understood mountains differently, seeing in them something that abides. Even when approached respectfully (to challenge peaks as mountaineers do is another matter), they appalled me with their "permanence," with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity.
Yet in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe."
- Peter Matthiessen
Nine-Headed Dragon River
"I go down along the canyon rim and sit still against a rock. Northward, a snow cone rises on the sky, and snowfields roll over the high horizon into the deepening blue. Where the Saure River plunges into its ravine, a sheer and awesome wall writhes with weird patterns of snow and shadow. The emptiness and silence of snow mountains quickly bring about those states of consciousness that occur in the mind-emptying of meditation, and no doubt high altitude has an effect, for my eye perceives the world as fixed or fluid, as it wishes. The earth twitches and the mountains shimmer, as if all molecules had been set free: the blue sky rings. Perhaps what I hear is the "music of the spheres," what Hindus call the breathing of the Creator and astrophysicists the "sighing" of the sun."
- Peter Matthiessen
Nine-Headed Dragon River
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.
Playing with the moon, ridiculing the wind, listening to the
birds . . .
Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.
This winter I suddenly realize snow makes a mountain.
- Dogen
Walking in the mountains
unconsciously trudging along
grab a vine
climb another ridge
Standing in the mountains
how many dawns become dusk
plant a pine
a tree of growing shade
Sitting in the mountains
zig-zag yellow leaves fall
nobody comes
close the door and make a big fire
Lying in the mountains
pine wind enters the ears
for no good reason
beautiful dreams are blown apart
- Stonehouse
"Soen relates how once, in London, he was on the point of entering the bathroom when Christmas Humphreys, passing by, said it was occupied. The roshi waited there politely for a long time before he became concerned, after which he knocked, then opened the door. "Nobody there!" He laughed delightedly. "Wait as long as you like! Never anybody there! From the beginning!"
- Peter Matthiessen
Nine-Headed Dragon River
"Zen is very simple . . . What are you? In this whole world, everyone searches for happiness outside, but nobody understands their true self inside. Everybody says, I, I want this, I am like that . . . But nobody understands this I.
Before you were born, where did your I come from? When you die, where will your I go? If you sincerely ask, What am I?, sooner or later you will run into a wall where all thinking is cut off. We call this Don't know.
Zen is keeping this Don't know mind always and everywhere."
- Seung Sahn
"If koan are teaching devices designed to break down intellectual concepts of reality and open the way for a profound apprehension of the universal reality beneath, they are also pure expressions of enlightened mind. "The koan," Maezumi-roshi says, "is quite literally a touch-stone of reality . . . in which a key issue of practice and realization is presented and examined by experience rather than by discursive or linear logic . . . to help us penetrate more deeply into the significance of life and death."
- Peter Matthiessen
"Truth is revealed. It cannot ever be told. It has to appear inside the telling or through the telling."
- James Hillman
The year's doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
. . . . . . . . . . . . tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.
- Octavio Paz
excerpt from January First
"The need to open up an inner freedom and vision, which is found in relatedness to something in us which we don't really know. This is not just the psychological unconscious. It is much more than that. The real inner life and freedom of man begin when this inner dimension opens up and man lives in communion with the unknown within him. On the basis of this he can also be in communion with the same unknown in others. How to describe it? Impossible to describe it."
- Thomas Merton
"It is imperative to cut off the mind road. If you do not cut off the mind road, you will be a ghost, clinging to the grass."
- Wumen Huaikai
The mind road has no end
One day, as the big temple bell was being rung, Buddha asked Ananda, "Where does the bell sound come from?"
"The bell."
Buddha said, "The bell? But if there were no bell stick, how would the sound appear?"
Ananda hastily corrected himself. "The stick! The stick!"
"The stick? If there were no air, how could the sound come here?"
"Yes! Of course! It comes from the air!"
Buddha asked, "Air? But unless you have an ear, you cannot hear the bell sound."
"Yes! I need an ear to hear it. So it comes from there."
Buddha replied, "Your ear? If you have no consciousness, how can you understand the bell sound?"
"My consciousness makes the sound."
"Your consciousness? So, Ananda, if you have no mind, how do you hear the bell sound?"
"It was created by mind alone."
- Seung Sahn
The Whole World Is A Single Flower
"In fact, everything we encounter in this world with our six senses is an inkblot test.
You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at."
- Shiqin
"The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not."
- Thomas Merton
"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire
with God:
but only he who sees takes off his shoes."
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Tiantong's first phrase of winter:
Old plum tree, bent and gnarled,
all at once opens one blossom, two blossoms,
not proud of purity,
not proud of fragrance;
falling, becoming spring,
blowing over grasses and trees,
balding the head of a patched-robe monk.
Whirling, changing into wind, wild rain,
falling, snow, all over the earth.
The old plum tree is boundless.
A hard cold rubs the nostrils.
- Nyojo Zenji
Treasury of the True Dharma Eye
"Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible."
- Alan Watts
"There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with."
- Jusan Ed Brown
"Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Childlikeness has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage. When a man reaches this stage of spiritual development, he is a Zen artist of life."
- D. T. Suzuki
"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."
- Marcel Proust
How mysterious.
I carry fuel,
I draw water.
- Bokoju
"This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake."
- Arthur Koestler
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