everyday koans
"Reality is one single Now. This Now or today is everyday. Every day is a good day. A good day is nothing special. Is there, in the grayness of an ordinary everyday that contains nothing special, something very special? And might this something very special not itself be everyday?"
- Hermann Gundert
"So we have to be patient with ourselves. Over and over again we think we need to be somewhere else, and we must find the truth right here, right now; we must find our joy here, now. How seductive it is, the thought of tomorrow. We must find our understanding here. We must find it here; it is always here; this is where the grass is green."
- John Tarrant
Calling on the name of Avalokiteshvara
originally published in the winter 1991 issue of Mind Moon Circle
Song for Nobody
A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.
A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.
Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
- Thomas Merton
"Every day mind is getting out of bed, eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, going to bed. It is laughing and crying, being anxious and joyful. Everyday mind is walking and talking, sitting down and standing up. It is the mind of suffering, conflict, anger and hatred, love and devotion. How can everyday mind be the way? Everyday mind, we say, is too mundane, too ordinary, and so we want the opposite, we want the magical.
It is our very search, our lust for the miraculous and magical, that hides from us the truth that simply to be, simply to know I am, is already the miracle that we seek. Everything, as it is, is perfect, but you must stop seeing it as if in a mirror, as if in a dream."
- Albert Low
"Knowing who you are is not a mystical thing, but a matter of experience, acceptance, honesty, and compassion. It is knowing you are small and selfish and angry, and great, creative, tender-hearted and caring."
- Jason Shulman
The Instruction Manual for Receiving God
"The basic teaching of the Buddha is that there is no abiding self. Our being is made up of and constantly depends upon other people, animals, plants, soil, water, air, the planet earth, the other planets, the sun, moon and stars. Our very genes are programmes provided to us by our ancestors and from unknown sources back to the earliest green slime and before. Nothing is my own and everything makes me up: my parents, grandparents - the birdsong, portraits by Rembrandt, the scent of the Puakenikeni, and the laughter of a friend. Also forming my being are death in the family, the danger of biological holocaust, misunderstandings, and malicious gossip.
This formation that is me, flowing along, eating and adapting and adopting, is the same formation that is you, with very small variations in our combination of genes and experience that give us our uniqueness. This uniqueness is our own personal potential, and we depend upon each other for sustenance to fulfill it."
- Robert Aitken
"If you are alive, you have to be willing to work hard, which means being present in your life, doing all the things that have to be done to support a life. That means eating and cleaning the body and cleaning the house and filling it up with the things it takes to run the house, and also cleaning up the world and filling the world with all the things it takes to run the world, because you need the world to be there so the house can be there so the body can have a roof over its head. In other words, what else is there to do anyway but work all the time, because that's being alive."
- Zoketsu Norman Fischer
"We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life; not in avoiding pain, but in being pain when it is necessary to do so. Too large an order? Too hard? On the contrary, it is the easy way."
- Charlotte Joko Beck
"Nobody said it was easy, to stay in the fire, stay alert, and forebear. But the alternative is to suffer what is anyway, but with no true or reliable relationship with it."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
"When Bodhidharma was asked, "What is the first principle of the holy teaching", he didn't say suffering. He said, "Vast emptiness. Nothing holy." This is what the Heart Sutra says, too. The Heart Sutra says, "Things are founded on emptiness." This means really that things don't truly have a cause. Things have a virtue in themselves beyond anything we can say that causes them. So you have a virtue in yourself beyond anything that brought it about. Any suffering that arises in you because of your history, any gifts you have because of your history, these are strong things, yet they are also just a pure appearance of Buddha nature. Even your suffering and also your joy. I think in some sense we can't take credit for either. We just have to learn to love our lives so deeply that we welcome whatever comes."
- John Tarrant
Poison and Joy
"Human life itself is granted as an extraordinary gift - as far as we know one of the rarest gifts that anyone can have anywhere in the universe. And everything until this point, from the Big Bang through eons of pure energy, then eons of matter, then eons of life coming into being, life after life after life, has yielded to open the way to you and to this moment. Everything that has ever lived is laying down its life all the way, like a great royal road leading exactly to this life, this consciousness, and this rarest of human chances. What a gift! If you look into a newborn baby's eyes, you can see the gift there still so clearly, the planets and the stars still turning in the baby's eyes. Everything is given. Where it comes from, nobody knows."
- Susan Murphy
"One thing that makes a good koan is that it's difficult to get hold of. It's intriguing and interesting, but you can't quite unpack it. It doesn't immediately reveal itself to you so your doubt and sense of mystery begins to collect around the koan. All our difficulties get poured into the koan, which is what it is for. It is through this that we open the gate of our own living. When we really become one with the koan, we begin to enter our own lives so fully that we are no longer ghosts clinging to our old concepts thinking we know how the world works and living through those ideas rather than directly. When we understand the fleeting quality of life and there's no way we even wish to change that. Whatever we hang onto will be snatched away. We all know that. However much we love it; however well we behave, even if you practice special breathing exercises, it will still be snatched away. Even if we take homeopathic medicines; even if we are made a full partner, it will still be snatched away."
- John Tarrant
To be at Ease in all Circumstances
a teisho given in 1990
a register of known koan collections
random koans (refresh page for next koan)
&
another collection of koans
A monk asked Yang-ch'i, "As it is said, if you want to escape from the clamor in the mind, you should read the ancient teaching. What is the ancient teaching?"
Yang-ch'i said, "The moon is bright in space; the waves are calm on the ocean."
The monk asked, "How does one read it?"
Yang-ch'i said, "Watch your step."
"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness and call that handful of sand the world."
- Robert Pirsig
This is the only moment.
This is the only day.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Spring Dawn
I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn,
From everywhere I heard the cry of birds.
That night the sound of wind and rain had come,
Who knows how many petals then had fallen?
- Meng Haoran
"Just watching the cedar wattle fronds move in silvery light and shadow, with no thought of anything at all; just smelling the sharp scent of rain on warm pavements; just stroking the cat's fur, watching the flames. Truly, nothing is missing. Every day is full of such moments, before and beyond thought. These are tiny intimations of the overwhelming wave that breaks as realization and shows you your true face."
- Susan Murphy
"There is a tempering that needs to go on, an acknowledgment of our vulnerability and all the things that we don't know. The simultaneity of our wisdom and our foolishness. This is "The Clearly Enlightened Person Falls into a Well" koan. You can actually have a very deep understanding of the spiritual world and still do something stupid and still have areas of your life that are inferior and that you're not very good at, kind of stupid at, and that doesn't make you a less spiritual person. But noticing it makes you a more spiritual person. Being prepared to have the shame of it and the disappointment of it, because it's very hard on your grandiosity, somehow that allows the spirit to come through in this purer way. Then something real can happen. Real teaching can happen. Real love can happen and the beauty of the world is the beauty of the Buddha's path just there before us then. But it's not if we're not prepared to accept our own stupidity, not in a complacent way, but in a way that's engaged. We notice what we're not very good at. We notice our pain when we're in it and allow it to be there. We have to allow the darkness in the world in order to experience the light. Our first move, you see, in spirit is always to transcend. We always want to go straight to the light. My own experience was of going up and then down and then not knowing which way was which after a while, I suppose. We have to let in, in some way hold, the opposites, hold the very small parts of who we are along with the rather grand, eternal parts of who we are and not let one take over. When one takes over we become less than human."
- John Tarrant
Soul in Zen
a lecture given in 1992
If you want to take away the I-my-me mountain,
you must get a cane made of rabbit horn.
If you want to cross the ocean of suffering,
you must take the ship with no bottom.
1. Where do you get a cane made of rabbit horn?
2. Where is the ship with no bottom?
- Hyo Bong
"It is exactly the no-way-out situation in which the human being finds itself - that fundamental and unbridgeable inner cleavage of that being which is conscious of itself - that is said to be the way . . ."
- Shin'ichi
"There is so very much in this directly challenging and yet starkly simple question: How am I living right now? Am I really willing to examine this continuously when getting up in the morning, showering, going to the cushion, fixing breakfast, helping get the kids ready for school, relating to my partner and to whatever reactivity arises from how she or he relates to me, when life presents me with what I want and when it offers up what I most definitely do not want, and so on. What do I plan to do with this? How am I meeting, living this?"
- Doug Phillips
"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."
- Viktor E. Frankl
"Our fantasies of enlightenment are rather mechanistic. We'd never approach a work of art the way that we approach our minds. But we think that if I have an enlightenment experience, something static will happen. Nothing static ever happens. It's a river. It's always changing. Your contact with your enlightenment experience will die to the extent that you hang onto it in my own experience. So there's a lot about letting go and then you can have multiple enlightenment experiences. Over and over again we have to let it go. We have to be a person - Lin-chi called it "a person without rank." Because if you've got rank, you're a person walking around with a hat on, a fancy hat of some kind, and some kind of role, and you're not living. And the ecstatic is there everywhere. It's in every moment. It's not just in an enlightenment experience."
- John Tarrant
in and out through the doors of your face."
"What I point out to you is only that you shouldn't allow yourselves to be confused by others. Act when you need to, without further hesitation or doubt. People today can't do this - what is their affliction? Their affliction is in their lack of self-confidence. If you do not spontaneously trust yourself sufficiently, you will be in a frantic state, pursuing all sorts of objects and being changed by those objects, unable to be independent."
- Lin-chi
"We reach the gate that cannot be passed, the gate of impassibility, completely frustrated. The mind cannot know. There's no solution that we can get, nothing we can wrap our mind around. No matter how we adjust our breath, our mantra, no matter how many koans we try to pass or do pass, the bottom line is I Don't Know. Not knowing - and there is no Knowing of Not-Knowing. "Oh yes, I know. I know about don't-know."
- Dae Gak
So high you cannot
Climb or get close to it;
Raindrops scatter in the flying wind.
The gate is barred with green moss.
Suddenly forgetting thought,
Without attainment,
Only then will you be sure
The gate has been open all along.
- T'aego
Can You Imagine?
For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer's night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now - whenever
we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine
they don't dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade - surely you can't imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can't imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.
- Mary Oliver
"Writing for me is a kind of daily practice. Even if you don't have anything to say, you keep your hand in - that's the journal, just jotting something down, observations of the eternal weather . . . thoughts and words can drift through you but once you write them down, they've arrived. And when something beautiful arrives, you want to have enough coordination to transcribe it."
- Joanne Kyger
Igniting the flame of self-awareness
"If you find it difficult to be aware, then experiment with writing down every thought and feeling that arises throughout the day; write down your reactions of jealousy, envy, vanity, sensuality, the intentions behind your words, and so on.
If you write these things down whenever you can, and in the evening before sleeping look over all that you have written during the day, study and examine it without judgment, without condemnation, you will begin to discover the hidden causes of your thoughts and feelings, desires and words.
Now, the important thing in this is to study with free intelligence what you have written down, and in studying it you will become aware of your own state. In the flame of self-awareness, of self-knowledge, the causes of conflict are discovered and consumed. You should continue to write down your thoughts and feelings, intentions and reactions, not once or twice, but for a considerable number of days until you are able to be aware of them instantly.
Meditation is not only constant self-awareness, but constant abandonment of the self. Out of right thinking there is meditation, from which there comes the tranquillity of wisdom; and in that serenity the highest is realized.
Writing down what one thinks and feels, one's desires and reactions, brings about an inward awareness, the cooperation of the unconscious with the conscious, and this in turn leads to integration and understanding."
- J. Krishnamurti
The Book of Life
"Writing is the miracle of making the invisible, visible."
- David Russell
"The human mind is a kind of original egg, endlessly hatching. Extraordinary and intimate transformations are continually secreted beneath the curved white bones of the cranium. They are always rippling beneath our thoughts, gestating within the oyster folds of the brain. Metaphor surges toward thought; dream becomes perception, perception becomes dream. Endless rich becomings that dream themselves serenely as one thing becoming another; this fluid state can be glimpsed underneath and in between the agitations of all the little schemes and notions of the self, the person we call "I".
Some of the ripples and murmurings we catch in daylight are associations, wordplay, puns, jokes, daydreams, fantasies, creative mishearings, mistaken glimpses, memories, hummed phrases, and those rich reflective thoughts you catch sight of as you step from the shower and reach for your towel. Other more deliberative footprints we might call novels, plays, films, paintings, sonatas."
- Susan Murphy
Upside-Down Zen
But if you don't write of things deep in your own heart,
What's the use of churning out so many words?
- Ryokan
From the Manifesto of the Selfish
Because altruists are the least sexy
people on earth, unable
to say "I want" without embarrassment,
we need to take from them everything
they give,
then ask for more,
this is how to excite them, and because
it's exciting
to see them the least bit excited
once again we'll be doing something
for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure,
always desirous and so pleased to be
pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.
- Stephen Dunn
"Subject and object are to be realized as the two sides of one sheet of paper; that is one and yet two. The one piece of paper cannot exist without the two sides, nor the two sides without the one sheet. This analogy fails to satisfy if taken any other way but lightly and quickly, for to what should we compare the universe? How can anything be a true parable of the Essence of Being?"
- R. H. Blyth
"There is no dream and no waking up, at the heart of the matter; no dreamer, no closer in or further away states of mind. There is no object of knowledge to be found here at all. "Supreme enlightenment" is nothing but the experience of seeing with the eye that sees you, just as you are. And yet it is not even a hair's breadth separate from us, just as we are, with our strange and various bodies that life dreams us into, and our even stranger and even more various dreams of consciousness."
- Susan Murphy
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."
- C.S Lewis
"Complete attention is itself a kind of love and is one of the true gifts that we can give to one another."
- John Tarrant
spring's passing
The road enters the green mountains near evening's dark;
Beneath the white cherry trees, a Buddhist temple
Whose priest doesn't know what regret for spring's passing means -
Each stroke of his bell startles more blossoms into falling.
- Keijo Shurin
Yes! No!
How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.
The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.
The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.
How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out
Yes! No! The
swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.
- Mary Oliver
" . . . it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security.
We, however, are not prisoners . . . We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; our dangers at hand, we must try to love them.
And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
With No Experience In Such Matters
To hold a damaged sparrow
under water until you feel it die
is to know a small something
about the mind; how, for example,
it blames the cat for the original crime,
how it wants praise for its better side.
And yet it's as human
as pulling the plug on your Dad
whose world has turned
to feces and fog, human as -
Well, let's admit, it's a mild thing
as human things go.
But I felt the one good wing
flutter in my palm -
the smallest protest, if that's what it was,
I ever felt or heard.
Reminded me of how my eyelid has twitched,
the need to account for it.
Hard to believe no one notices.
- Stephen Dunn
"When you really look closely, any lie offers some measure of injustice to the other and is a breach in connectedness; and a withdrawal of trust, for you are unilaterally deciding that the other is not wholly to be trusted with what you know is really so. A lie of any color sidesteps the present moment and what is actually happening by substituting a greater or smaller contrivance of reality that we secretly hope will ease our way, or help us get what we want. Could what is true to experience, presented in the way of least harm, actually be simpler, more interesting, and eminently worth risking?"
- Susan Murphy
"All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Always a little more fun on the Devil's side. I've been his advocate, have opposed what I most believed, testing if what I believed was true. It sometimes almost was; that's the best I can say. But you can bedevil yourself if you keep playing that game. You don't want to stand in a torturer's shoes for long. Still, when it comes to seeking a truth, a certain cruelty can go a long way - right through the heart of a thing to some other side. Doesn't every far-reaching truth cause a lesser truth to die? Most of us are content to stop at the heart. When I've been good's advocate, playing the less clever role, I've gone as far as good can go. Maybe some orthodoxy or some abomination lost ground for a while. Maybe not. The one time I had the Devil down, thinking he'd give, he whispered, "Remember, the punishment for being good is a life of goodness." I laughed, and he was gone."
- Stephen Dunn
Advocacy
Riffs & Reciprocities
"The egoless: hard to trust they know what should be cherished and kept. The egotistical: they like too much - regardless of content - what is theirs. I admire Whitman's ego, capacious but not big. Shouldn't ego be cultivated until it's at least personality? Maybe then, as some have counseled, we could give it up, or keep it from getting in the way. Divestiture: Whitman's the model; something of him and what he accumulated and made. For us. There'll always be jibes from those who equate ego with a rampant, vainglorious I. There'll always be the cynics who make less of more. Let them have less. I say all this knowing many of us have selves divided. Fragments everywhere. At best a little cutting, a little paste."
- Stephen Dunn
Ego
Riffs & Reciprocities
"Certainty is what we feel when we know a little less than enough. It's only about uninteresting things that we can be wholly certain. This is a refrigerator, for example. Or that's a plum. If some philosophers want to worry about these designations, I'm quite certain a plum is a plum. If it were called, say, a trampoline, I'd know it was the same tasty thing. About matters of the heart only negative capability will do. About real time and imaginary time let the dreamer meet the physicist for a friendly duel. The world of intellect: inseparable from the world of feeling. That's a certainty. It's how it feels."
- Stephen Dunn
Certainty
Riffs & Reciprocities
"What we don't know chains us, leaves us sitting in the valley with a stupid smile. We discover our ignorance as we go. After a lifetime, if we've been attentive, we should fall to our knees before the vastness, the ungraspable minutiae of our world. We should suspect that it constitutes our God. And we so-called experts of this or that, could we have done more than play our one chord? Wisdom is to know, at best, that we make only a little good noise, a few small dents. It's why the wise laugh a lot, why the laughter of metaphysicians echoes in the spaces they probe. We walk out of our houses into the enormity of our task. What kind of ant is that? Who named the phlox? Is that a path or a rut?"
- Stephen Dunn
Ignorance
Riffs & Reciprocities
The Old Poets of China
Whoever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
- Mary Oliver
"We often talk about people as if they have particular attributes as things inside themselves - they have an identity, for example, and we believe that at the heart of a person there is a fixed and true identity or character (even if we're not sure that we know quite what that is, for a particular person). We assume that people have an inner essence - qualities beneath the surface which determine who that person really is."
- Michel Foucault
"I don't actually teach self-acceptance. I encourage people to see that the things they believe about themselves are not true. When you see through all that you have been taught to believe, when you realize who you are, self-acceptance becomes irrelevant."
- Cheri Huber
"He was beginning to emerge from the dark defile. In truth, he had already come through it more than once, and would come out of it again. Treatises devoted to the soul's ordeal were mistaken in assigning successive phases to that adventure: on the contrary, all its phases were intermingled; everything was subject to infinite restatement and repetition. The soul turned about in a circle in its quest.
Long ago, in Basel, and in many other places, he had passed through this same long night. The same verities had been learned and relearned several times. But the experience was cumulative: the pace gradually became surer; the eye could see farther through certain shadows; the mind was at least becoming aware of certain laws.
Like a man who is climbing, or perhaps descending, a mountainside, he was rising or ascending in place; at best, at each turning the same abyss would open below him, sometimes on the right, sometimes at his left. The gain in actual ascent was measurable only as the air became more rarefied, and as new peaks appeared behind those which had seemed to bar the horizon.
But the notion of ascension or descent was wrong, for stars burn below as on high; he was neither at the bottom of the gulf nor at its center. The abyss was both beyond the celestial sphere and within the human skull. Everything seemed to be taking place within an infinite series of curves closing in on themselves."
- Marguerite Yourcenar
The Abyss
"The self, as thinking subject, is continually involved in perceiving everything that is external to it as objects of intellection. In the process, we distance ourselves from reality, critically viewing the world from a hypothetical vantage point that stands completely outside of it. Subject to interminable reflection, our experience is always second-hand. Persons become objective personas, masks that serve as a shorthand notation for categorizing the rich diversity of human personality. Theology is reduced to abstract concepts that can be neatly catalogued. Language becomes exclusively descriptive. Action is the product of calculating purpose, subservient always to ends that lie beyond itself. The world, as a result, is stripped of surprise, immediacy, and laughter."
- Belden C. Lane
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