know mind | no mind

"For years I have noticed that whenever Roshi Fukushima writes me a letter, he always signs it with the statement, "With my Zen mind."

Zen mind is a simple mind. In this mind, there is a childlike innocence. In India there is a saying which goes something like this: the deeper the river, the less noise it makes; the shallower the stream, the more noise it makes. What is suggested here is that a person of depth has a certain quiet innocence about him. On the other hand, a shallow personality is more childish than childlike. From where does this simplicity stem? Religiously speaking, when people encounter something other than themselves, they stand in awe and wonder in the presence of something higher and beyond. Zen simplicity is a consequence of encountering the Buddha nature. As D. T. Suzuki has pointed out, the experience of satori brings a certain sense of passivity and the sense of the Beyond. The sense of humility, simplicity, and childlikeness are manifestations of a deep encounter with the Real. With the loss of ego, one becomes a conduit of peace and tranquility."
- Ishwar C. Harris
The Laughing Buddha of Tofukuji:
The Life of Zen Master Keido Fukushima



"When it comes to the teachings in Zen, one of the reasons why the teachings seem so paradoxical, and so hard to understand, is exactly because of this point. Within the teachings themselves, there's always the effort to indicate that you can never pin the teaching down as this or that particular set of beliefs. It's possible that is the main teaching of Zen, the main contribution that Zen makes to the Buddhist teaching. Don't hold onto anything, especially the teaching, and especially the practice. Because the teaching that you can hold onto could never be the real teaching, because the teaching is really just life. Life as it really is. Not as we imagine it, but as it really is, right where we are."
- Norman Fischer



"This is ecstasy. To be caught up out of one's self in joy over some reality is exactly the sort of experience God wants each one of us to have, for remember we are made in his image, and this is our true destiny. Right here is where the creativity of life is to be found - when we let the child within us out to play and to leap and to celebrate."
- John Claypool
The Light Within You



A monk asked Seng ts'an, "Master, show me the way to liberation."

Seng ts'an replied, "Who binds you?"

The monk responded, "No one binds me."

Seng ts'an said, "Then why do you seek liberation?"



"You have too good a mind to throw away. I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his light and do what little he can and do it as best as he can."
- Walker Percy



"The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there.
It might be good to open our eyes and see."
- Thomas Merton



"I remember when I was living as a monk in England and I would sometimes go visit Ajahn Sumedho in his room and on the wall he had a picture of an old man sitting inside his little brick cottage on a rainy day, and he was sitting just inside the window, looking out, and in his hand he held a cup of coffee. And I remember Ajahn Sumedho saying, for him this was the essence of meditation. It was really nothing more than just relaxing, and watching the happening of existence. Nothing needed to be explained. Nothing needed to be worked out. There's just the event of existence presenting itself. Everything we are is simply presented. Whatever words come out, come out, but they're not important; they're simply the movement or the non-movement of whatever this happening is and it's happening all by itself."
- Darryl Bailey



Student: "Master, what is the secret to meditation?"

Thich Nhat Hanh: "When you sip your coffee, taste your coffee."

"When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Anger - Wisdom for Cooling the Flames



"We must know that it is not enough just to see what the Mind is, we must put into practice all that makes it up in our daily life. We may talk about it glibly, we may write books to explain it, but that is far from being enough. However much we may talk about water and describe it quite intelligently, that does not make it real water. So with fire. Mere talking of it will not make the mouth burn. To know what they are means to experience them in actual concreteness. A book on cooking will not cure our hunger. To feel satisfied we must have actual food. So long as we do not go beyond mere talking, we are not true knowers."
- Takuan Soho



"If you were to put aside what you know because of what other people told you, how much of what you know do you truly know for yourself?"
- John Tarrant

><((((º>

"Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more."
- Marcel Proust



I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.
- Pablo Neruda



"We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written."
- Julio Cortázar



"Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable."
- Kathleen Norris



"How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting."
- Graham Swift



"You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room."
- Julio Cortázar



"All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet's dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic skeptic, has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there."
- Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism



"But when we reach the end of the pier of everything we know, we find that it only takes us part of the way. Beyond that all we see is uncharted water. Past the end of the pier lies all the mystery about our deeply strange existence: the equivalence of mass and energy, dark matter, multiple spatial dimensions, how to build consciousness, and the big questions of meaning and existence. Good scientists are comfortable holding many possibilities at once, rather than committing to a particular story over others. In light of this, I have found myself surprised by the amount of certainty out there."
- David Eagleman



"Once a monk asked Hsuan-sha, "I hear you have said all the universe is one bright pearl. How can I gain an understanding of that?"
The master said, "All the universe is one bright pearl. What need is there to understand it?"
The next day the master himself asked the monk, "All the universe is one bright pearl. What is your understanding of it?"
The monk answered, "All the universe is one bright pearl. What need is there to understand it?"
"I know now," replied Hsuan-sha, "that you are living in the Black Mountain's Cave of Demons."

One bright pearl, coined by T'ang master Hsuan-sha, is symbolic of enlightenment. True understanding is the embodying of the one bright pearl. Since it is embodied, there is no need to "understand" in the conventional sense. Delusion is part of the one bright pearl, symbolized by the Black Mountain (the massive darkness of ignorance) and the Cave of Demons (egotistic self-enclosure). The main thrust of this exchange is that enlightenment affirms delusion.
Awakening involving the total self contains the reality of delusion. If this affirmation is lacking, one bright pearl becomes an empty metaphor.
Even if there is perplexed or troubled thinking, it is not apart from the bright pearl. Coming and going in the Black Mountain's Cave of Demons are themselves nothing but the one bright pearl."
- Taitetsu Unno
River of Fire, River of Water



IV.

Sometimes it seems I had a dream and as that dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths
and closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.

Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light
through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.

Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock
revealed in echoes the edges of the chamber.

Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains
speaking in a language I remembered but could no longer understand.

Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time,
I had no body - only a sense of silence and distance and calm.

It was as if I had just woken from all water into dream.
- Gerard Van der Leun

bearing witness to the miracle of being here

<°))))><

"For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn't know we needed and take us places where we didn't know we didn't want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before."
- Kathleen Norris



"I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses – that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things."
- Pablo Neruda



"I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice."
- Muriel Rukeyser



Burlap Sack
A person is full of sorrow
the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
We say, "Hand me the sack,"
but we get the weight.
Heavier if left out in the rain.
To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The mule is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.
What would it be to take the bride
and leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thick ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?
- Jane Hirshfield
After



"Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it's important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe."
- Pema Chödrön



Questions Before Dark
Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down, consider
your altered state: has this day
changed you? Are the corners
sharper or rounded off? Did you
live with death? Make decisions
that quieted? Find one clear word
that fit? At the sun's midpoint
did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites
the possible? What did you learn
from things you dropped and picked up
and dropped again? Did you set a straw
parallel to the river, let the flow
carry you downstream?
- Jeanne Lohmann
The Light of Invisible Bodies



"To accept things-as-it-is looks very difficult, but it is very easy. If you don't find it easy, you should think about why it is so difficult. "Maybe," you may say, "it is because of the shallow, selfish understanding I have of myself." And then you may ask, "Why do I have a selfish understanding of things?" But a selfish understanding of things is also necessary. Because we are selfish, we work hard. Without a selfish understanding, we cannot work. We always need some candy. It is not something to be rejected, but something that helps you. You should be grateful for your selfish understanding, which creates many questions. They are just questions and they don't mean so much. You can enjoy your questions and answers; you can play games with them; you needn't be so serious about it. That is the understanding of the Middle Way."
- Shunryu Suzuki



Gift
You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.
- Leonard Cohen



"Do you know how to do nothing? Seeing cannot take place until you pause. Real creativity cannot occur as long as the creative impulse is constantly sublimated into habitual activity. At this late stage of conditioning, doing nothing alone can allow transformation to happen. Yet doing nothing must be based on clarity of vision. Knowing how to pause, not just outwardly, but throughout your being is a consummate art of living. Knowing really how to pause is the action of intelligence itself."
- G. Bluestone



"There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place."
- Robert Penn Warren

><((((º>

In another time, we will want to know how the earth looked
then, and were people the way we are now. In another time,
the records they left will convince us that we are unchanged
and could be at ease in the past, and not alone in the present.
And we shall be pleased. But beyond all that, what cannot
be seen or explained will always be elsewhere, always supposed,
invisible even beneath the signs – the beautiful surface,
the uncommon knowledge – that point its way. In another time,
what cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted
to say that language is error, and all things are wronged
by representation. The self, we shall say, can never be
seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
- Mark Strand
A Suite of Appearances



"Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy."
- José Maria Eça de Queirós



"How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow."
- Robert Penn Warren



Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
- Pablo Neruda



"I am pleased enough with the surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there? What else do we need?"
- Edward Abbey



"One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand - to see that heaven lies about us here in this world."
- John Burroughs



"The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted."
- Franz Rottensteiner



"Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales. Woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings. Mysterious life filled the night. With new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him."
- P. D. Ouspensky



"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."
- Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth



Kneeling
Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase

For silence; the sun's light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.

Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speaks
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.
- R. S. Thomas

<°))))><


"Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn



"When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then flows back again. One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive."
- Henry James



"We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception."
- Terence McKenna



"Another aspect of the whole truth must be the perception that there is no fundamental difference of "inner" and "outer." One must see that ones own feelings, aches, desires, ambitions, fears, etc., are no more important in a fundamental sense than are those of other people, and that all of these "inner" workings are just going on in the same way that it rains and the sun shines. This is also very hard, but if one doesn't see it, then one is confused, and can only perceive truth in its fragmentary form, and not as a totality.

I have tried working at the latter problem, and after some work, I occasionally got a glimpse in which one felt that reality is in a different dimension. In this new set of dimensions, one saw that the inner and the outer are basically one. However, this glimpse lasted for only a moment. I think that I saw why it didn't last. In this state of unity of "inner" and "outer," the new truth starts to operate. But this operation implies a totally different kind of action - an openness that is at variance with all the norms of common life. It also makes one very vulnerable, as nothing can be kept from oneself or concealed. To continue in such a state would require a kind of love that does not exist in me, and that probably exists in very few people. So fundamentally, our understanding is limited by the absence of love. Understanding without love is impossible, as is love without understanding."
- David Bohm
Bohm-Biederman Correspondence
[a collection of letters exchanged between a theoretical physicist and an artist]



"What is your life about, anyway?
Nothing but a struggle to be someone. Nothing but a running from your own silence."
- Rumi


This means that we have barely
disembarked into life,
that we've only just now been born,
let's not fill our mouths
with so many uncertain names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.

I intend to confuse things,
to unite them, make them new-born
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling.
- Pablo Neruda



"Let me enjoy this late summer day of my heart while the leaves are still green and I won't look so closely as to see that first tint of pale yellow slowly creep in. I will cease endless running and then look to the sky and ask the sun to embrace me and then hope she won't tell of tomorrows less long than today. Let me spend just this time in the slow cooling glow of the warm afternoon light and I think I will still have the strength for just one more last fling of my heart."
- John Bohrn



Deep in this mountain
is an old pond.
Deep or shallow,
its bottom has never been seen.
- John Daido Loori



Notes From the Stacks
Raindrops fall by the handful
upon the metal roof.
In the gray morning light through
the window in the monastery
library, a monk wrapped in robes
the color of cooked squash
reads a book on mindfulness.
A thousand books on awakening surround
us here. On liberation, the Path, contemplation,
wisdom, emptiness, calmness, thisness
thatness, nothingness. I could spend my
life in this room, as handfuls of
water fell.
The poetry of the path is here, too,
yet another beautiful distraction -
'Old Path, White Clouds,' 'Golden Zephyr,'
'Spiritual Muscles,' 'Emptiness Yoga,'
'The Wisdom of No Escape,' 'Calm and Clear'.
I gather up these fragments, looking to fashion
a shelter, unsure if I am just
dabbling along
The Way.
- Douglas Imbrogno
The Library Poems



"There was once a lady who was arrogant and proud. Determined to attain enlightenment, she asked all the authorities how to go about it. She was told, "Well, if you climb to the top of this very high mountain, you'll find a cave there. Sitting inside that cave is a wise old woman. She will tell you."
Having endured great hardships, the lady finally found this cave. Sure enough, sitting there was a gentle spiritual-looking old woman in white clothing, who smiled beatifically. Overcome with awe and respect, the lady prostrated at the feet of this woman and said, "I want to attain enlightenment. Show me how."
The wise woman looked at her and asked sweetly, "Are you sure you want to attain enlightenment?" And the lady said, "Of course I'm sure." Whereupon the smiling woman turned into a demon, stood up brandishing a great big stick, and started chasing her, saying, "Now! Now! Now!"
For the rest of her life, that lady could never get away from the demon who was always saying, "Now!"
Now - that's the key. Mindfulness trains us to be awake and alive, fully curious, about now. The out breath is now, the in breath is now, waking up from our fantasies is now, and even the fantasies are now. The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you're always standing in the middle of a sacred circle.
Whatever you're doing, you're doing it now."
- Pema Chödrön
Comfortable with Uncertainty


><((((º>


"Years of solitude had taught him that, in one's memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises."
- Jorge Luis Borges
August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986