84,000 joys abounding
How can we ever lose interest in life?
Spring has come again
And cherry trees bloom in the mountains.
- Ryokan
"The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.
The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month."
- Henry Van Dyke
Standing on a cliff,
Among the pines and oaks;
Spring has come
Clothed in mist.
- Ryokan
"To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life."
- John Burroughs
84,000 delusions
84,000 lights
84,000 joys abounding
- Saichi
"When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be."
- Alan Watts
"Who or what is experiencing one's experience? My Korean Zen master used to say: "What the hell is it?" His main koan was called a huado, or main word. It looks nice there, boldly calligraphed in Korean as a scroll on the wall. What it says is: "What is it?" That's his whole teaching. This gets to the bottom of our basic question: What is it? What the hell is going on? What is this? Who is this? That's what the translation of the huado implies. It is a fundamental existential question, turning our exploration inwards."
- Surya Das
"9th century Zen master, Tozan Ryokai, attained enlightenment many times. Once when he was crossing a river he saw himself reflected in the water and composed a verse, "Don't try to figure out who you are. If you figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself." Actually, you are in the river. You may say that is just a shadow or a reflection of yourself, but if you look carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you.
You may think you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. Yet when you see yourself with a warm feeling in the mirror or the water, that is actually you. And whatever you do, you are there."
- Shunryu Suzuki
Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen
"In Japanese, "not always so" is expressed in just two characters, in English it takes three words. Shunryu Suzuki liked to warn his students that the great secret of Zen lies in just two words, "Not always so." Truly, it cannot be counted."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary
"I tell people to get to know themselves. Some people think this means what beginners observe, and consider it easy to understand. Reflect more carefully, in a more leisurely manner, what do you call your self?"
- Foyan
"In the Genjokoan, Dogen Zenji says, "To carry the self forward and realize the ten thousand dharmas is delusion. That the ten thousand dharmas advance and realize the self is enlightenment." Everything is included here. But the self can get in the way of the self. The self can look for meaning where it isn't to be found. The self can reach for answers where only questions live. The self can look forward to certain outcomes that may or may not come to pass.
Listening is like working on a koan. One works on a koan by letting the koan work on you. You learn to suspend your need to "know" and rest in the ambiguity and uncertainty of the moment. The answer resides in the question, and seeking the answer can take us further away from the issue at hand."
- Robert Joshin Althouse
"Listening, whether to a book or to a person, is the most challenging of the arts, because in listening truly we have to become aware of our own resistances to what is being said, which might be the truth; we must be able to be open and vulnerable in following the thoughts of another person as sincerely, deeply, and imaginatively as we can."
- Krishnan Venkatesh
The Life of a Day
"Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don't want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night's meandering skunk."
- Tom Hennen
"We are tendencies who tend to think we are not tendencies."
- Stonepeace
"I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no directions. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts, and names for things."
- Gerhard Richter
The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993
"What is the true Way?" Joshu asked Nansen.
"Every way is the true Way." Nansen answered.
Joshu asked, "Can I study it?"
Nansen said, "The more you study, the further you get from the Way."
Joshu asked, "If I don't study it, how can I know it?"
Nansen answered, "The Way does not belong to things seen: nor to things unseen. It does not belong to things known: nor to things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or name it. To find yourself on it, open yourself as wide as the sky."
The Three Goals
The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
. . . . . No symbolism, please.
The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
. . . . . In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.
The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
. . . . . Regarding this one, call me when you get it.
- David Budbill
And without the spring,
I would have missed this dawn.
- Shiki
"Each thing is preaching the Dharma incessantly, but this is not something different from the thing itself. Haiku is the revealing of this preaching by presenting us with the thing devoid of all our mental twisting and emotional discolouration; or rather, it shows the thing as it exists at one and the same time outside and inside the mind, perfectly subjective, ourselves undivided from the object, the object in its original unity with ourselves. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry-blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness and the length of the night become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language."
- R. H. Blyth
The temple bell stops ringing -
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
- Basho
Like misty moonlight,
watery, bewildering
our temporal way
- Issa
Winter rain on moss
soundlessly recalls those
happy bygone days
- Buson
"What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and, returning to the world of our daily experience, to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry."
- Basho
"One cannot make good haiku simply by going about one's life in a day-to-day fashion. It is necessary to hone one's senses to the world around one and take an interest in all things great and small."
- Yoko Sugawa
Both field and mountain
All taken by the snow
Till nothing yet remains.
- Joso
On the old pond
Snow falls on the mandarin ducks
This evening.
- Shiki
The sky clears
And the moon and the snow
Are one color
- Sogetsu-Ni
"To understand and begin to use language that directly knows and expresses the universe, you must shake the mud of words and concepts off your feet and walk freely right through the very center of words, not eschewing language, not dependent upon it. Actually, language expresses the meaning of existence as the universe just as wonderfully well as birdsong does, or the movement of the branches shaken by a spring wind, or the chewed bone left under the bushes by the dog. But to hear its real expression you cannot be caught by words and phrases."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
A monk said: "I have been with you, Master, for a long time, and yet I am unable to understand your way. How is this?"
The Master said: "Where you do not understand, there is the point for your understanding."
The monk said: "How is understanding possible when it is impossible?"
The Master replied: "If one reaches the point where understanding fails, it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all - perhaps we only need to wake up."
Climbing the Mountain
I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
for a poem to come.
Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
leaning on my staff.
How I'd love to be a master
of the blue sky's art -
see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he's brushed in so far today.
- Yuan Mei
"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together."
- Ray Bradbury
"If you are a person of gain and loss, you've already lost. It's a matter of remembering that our business here is to learn to love all the way through to letting go. There's nothing much else we can actually do with the overwhelming opportunity of a human life, which is shaped exactly like completely accepting the offer of a lifetime, and shaped exactly like finally letting go."
- Susan Murphy
"Amid all the turmoil and the care - the worry, the fever, the anxiety,
The gloomy outlook, fears, forebodings,
The effort to keep up with the rush of supposed necessities, supposed duties,
The effort to catch the flying point of light, to reach the haven of Peace - always in the future -
Amid all, glides in the little word Now."
- Edward Carpenter
Towards Democracy
On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love
Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.
But they didn't fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.
They're not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.
Yet we must not
Diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.
- Jennifer Michael Hecht
"There is nothing I dislike.
These are the extraordinary words of the great teacher Linji; they are a lifetime koan for anyone who dares to take it on. Lifetime koans like this one never give up on you, luckily. "There is nothing I dislike" is daring and fragrant and alive, and it is like this because it's like this. "There is nothing I dislike" rearranges us profoundly, when we offer ourselves to its energy, its scrutiny, its disturbance in us.
To take on "There is nothing I dislike," or to let it take you on, is to allow the koan to darken you. It will take you into dark places, and you'll have to find yourself and recognize yourself there. This practice is not about tidying up the world and making it clean and bright; it's about recognizing the world as it is and finding right there the radical freedom of being.
The alternative is a kind of carefully scaled-down life. One that is still extravagantly rich in detail and variety and shot through with beauty despite all our efforts, since we live on the blue-green planet, but a scaled-down view of what it was we really wanted while we were here, so very briefly."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
Changsha, one day, went on a picnic in the mountains. When he returned to the gate, the Head Monk asked, "Your Reverence, where have you been wandering?"
"I have come back from strolling in the hills." said Changsha.
"Where did you go?" asked the Head Monk.
Changsha said, "First I went following the scented grasses, then came back following the fallen flowers."
"That is spring mood itself," said the Head Monk.
Changsha said, "It is better than the autumn dew falling on the lotus flowers."
"Our condition is not a regrettable, accidental interruption of holiness: it is holiness. It is it. The blade of this life is so keen and sharp. It wounds."
- Susan Murphy
"Everything is always falling out of balance against a background of perfect harmony."
- Suzuki
Looking, Walking, Being
I look and look.
Looking's a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.
The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.
And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That's
a way of breathing.
breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.
- Denise Levertov
"The pathologies of a lay life relate to a kind of getting lost, a forgetting of the quest, an unconscious immersion in the world. So much time is spent changing diapers or watching the stock market ticker that zazen never gets up enough steam to bring about a real change. We are so close to the greed, the sadness, the anger and the ignorance that it's impossible not to get stained by them. We come home from the hospital and can't stop thinking about the baby who died. The world penetrates us.
The lay view asks itself unanswerable questions such as, "What does enlightenment mean?", trying to link the experience of eternity to the smell of the morning coffee. It assumes there will always be problems and failures. It wonders what its dreams mean and always misinterprets them. It gets lost in symbol and metaphor. The monastic view is uninterested in meaning and tends to think enlightened people don't dream.
The virtue of the lay point of view is that it brings a fertilizing muddle into the serenity of the temple. Blackberry pie, sex, a new car, lessons for the little girl, these distractions and frivolities are themselves the Buddha Way. A coherent temple existence seems, at least from the outside, to be difficult. Fortunately, a coherent lay existence is impossible."
- John Tarrant
The Fortunate and Ongoing Disaster of Lay Life
a teisho originally published in the autumn 1994 issue of Mind Moon Circle
"Everybody has compassion. We shouldn't say to anybody, "You don't have any compassion." We should never say about anybody, "She doesn't have any compassion." It isn't true. Everybody has a big store of compassion. The problem is they don't know how to express it; they don't know how to bring it out. Everybody has plenty of blood but you have to cut yourself for the blood to come out. Compassion is the same."
- Sister Annabel Laity
"We normally have the idea that if we are in hell this is a bad thing, and we'll have to spend a long time with a shovel, digging our way out. But this is not so. Somebody asked Nanao Sakaki, the fine poet who saw Hiroshima, "How do we survive nuclear catastrophe?" He said, "No need to survive. No need to survive hell either." Wherever you are, that can be the pure land. I have always loved Buddhist paintings in the esoteric tradition that show the sufferings of the hell realms, they are rather like medieval Christian paintings, with flames and pitchforks and horns and so on. But there is always a little Buddha sitting in the hell realm, looking exactly like all the other demons, with horns and a big smile . . . So if you are in hell, perhaps you can be one of those demons, a Buddha demon."
- John Tarrant
That Great Sleeping Dragon of Joy
a teisho, 1994
"It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive; nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is not a matter of sadness that things come and go. If it were a matter of sadness, the universe would be filled with nothing but a bunch of Sadsacks. But the universe is filled with joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, dancing and smiling, sunshine and rain. Moment after moment, birth and death, death and birth. Birthdeath. Deathbirth. None of it would be possible without you or me, but me and you are nothing but moment after moment."
- Adam Genkaku Fisher
Answer Your Love Letters
"If you search for your awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of sadness doesn't come from being mistreated. You don't feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather, this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full."
- Chogyam Trungpa
The Sacred Path of the Warrior
Sometimes a crumb falls from the tables of joy
Sometimes a bone is flung.
To some people love is given,
To others, only heaven.
- Langston Hughes
"When we dare to accept and really meet our own narrowness of being, just as it is, without moving toward or away and without adding a single defense, then the very constriction in our lives subtly opens as its own way through. Suffering, which has the sense of "allowing" in its older usage (as in Christ's "suffer the little children to come unto me"), reveals itself as the secret architecture of our liberation, when it is accepted. There is no other way to be free than to be free within suffering. We don't know why this is so, but no life lived on this planet has ever contradicted it. Oddly enough, only by accepting your condition can you stop clinging to it. Then in some strange way the question of who you are and how to be is no longer a barrier."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
"One day you realize or admit that you are imperfect. It finally sinks in that you are not who you thought you were. You begin to feel terrible about not being perfect. Your self-esteem descends to new lows, your feelings hover over you like a low-pressure weather system. In addition to feeling imperfect you now also feel depressed and defeated. You have added one suffering on top of another, depression on top of imperfection, because you have encountered another one of the great obstacles to spiritual work: the difficulty we have with simply suffering, and with suffering in a simple way."
- Jason Shulman
The Instruction Manual for Receiving God
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
- Sheenagh Pugh
"We are waiting for the seasons to change. We are waiting for our time to come around, or that opening to appear in the Tao where we can walk through and touch somebody. Whereas if we had moved before, everything would have been wrong - no point, no effect. Sometimes the right thing to do is to wait. In the hexagram in the I-Ching about waiting, it says you should enjoy yourself with this kind of waiting, you should eat and drink and be of good cheer. We do not need to be dour about waiting because we are in tune with the seasons. It is the right time to wait."
- John Tarrant
"Being ignorant means not knowing the true nature of the self, obscuring our natural and innate correspondence with everything that is, and drawing a sharp line between self and other. That painful and wholly imaginary line is the fake assurance that we can do what we like: we're entitled, and there'll be no repercussions, apart from a possible smatter of applause from the imagined admirers of the self.
And with it comes the joyless hope that joy can be hoarded and does not wither and die in a strictly personal savings account; or the odd fantasy that the existence of others and the reality of their suffering may legitimately be held in doubt. The actual cost of such escape attempts is great indeed. While this way of surviving may ease you past the brutal truths and grueling needs of others that would seize your whole attention if you let them grow more real, it cuts you off from the profound joy that's available only if everyone, everything, shares in it."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
Didn't I tell you it was there?
You could have found it without any trouble at all.
The south wind is warm;
The sun shines peacefully;
The birds warble their glad songs.
Spring blossoms in every treetop.
- Jakushitsu
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
- Li-Young Lee
From Blossoms
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