There’s something waiting to be discovered in the traditional counsels/promises of the spiritual life:
1. Own nothing,
2. Desire nothing,
3. Listen, listen, listen to the sound of what is being said.
Poverty, chastity, obedience.
Contemplation, conversation, correspondence.
Hiddenness, surrender, interrelationality,
What are we missing?
While we argue about abortion, Bankei tries to catch our attention.
Odd, this way of thinking.
The unborn Dharma disappeared in both Japan and China, and it has long since been forgotten. But now it has appeared in the world again.
Once you come to know without any doubt that the marvelous illuminative wisdom of the Unborn is the Buddha-mind, and that the Buddha-mind puts all things in perfect order by means of the Unborn, then you can no longer be deluded or led astray by others.
Bankei (1622-1693), https://www.dailyzen.com/
The difference between being here and not being here is beyond me.
Maybe a coffee and donut will help.
Here is where the heart is.
Here, the placing mind stretches geographical stepping-stones.
Here, you are, as you are, whole and entire.
With, or without, being born.
As an altar boy
Kneeling at consecration
Something happens — what
Exactly is unknown, an
Unspoken stillness pervades
(Clearing throat) I want
To thank Nobel Committee
Passing over me
I’ve done nothing of any
Significance nor hope to
Rain, wind, and Friday
Night in middle October —
Assertion is ground
(These are words of carceral
Men) morning conversation
Come on — where is there to go? What am I supposed to wear?
What gibberish should I chant or pray or muffle into my sleeve?
No thanks.
I’m not stepping anywhere.
Hello?
Anyone there?
A Vision of the Bodhisattvas
They pass before me one by one riding on animals"What are you waiting for," they want to knowZ—, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me"Some day you'll drop everything & become a rishi, you know."I knowThe forest is there, I've lived in itMore certainly than this town? Irrelevant—What am I waiting for?A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about?Who's to make the change but me?"Returning again and again," Amida saysWhy's that dream so necessary? walking out of whatever house aloneNothing but the clothes on my back, money or noDown the road to the next place the highway leading to themountainsFrom which I absolutely must come backWhat business have I to do that?I know the world and I love it too much and itIs not the one I'd find outside this door.
Philip Whalen, "A Vision of the Bodhisattvas" from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen copyright © 2007 by Brandeis University Press and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespressSource: The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, 2007)
Anyone?
Hello?
Just as I suspected — there’s no one there.
No forest.
No highway.
No door.
Nothing other than this.
What an absurd man
Afraid to admit he lost —
Raw stupidity.
It is not unkind to tell
The truth about idiots
Some say it is human nature to want for yourself that which belongs to another.
To steal, defraud, rob, traffick, thieve.
It seems, rather, to be belief and behavior better characterized as not-yet-human.
I’d submit that to be human is a higher calling. Some might want to call it a spiritual calling, that to be truly human is to be human-divine.
For me, today, to be human is to let another be another, and to experience and accept another as no-other.
Whatever name put on it, to be human in its most authentic manifestation is to become a transparent presence personifying aseity, haecceity, and tathātā.
Itself, this, and thus — a humanity recognizing the integrity, individuality, and inherent inchoate nature of authentic existence becoming and being itself without objectification without instrumentality without violation.
Some might call such a way of being a way of love.
However uncomfortable the use of the words ‘love,’ ‘human,’ or ‘god’ might be, it is a profound trust and hope that these three expressions of earthly existence just might be made manifest in our everyday experience and ordinary thinking.
May it be so!
Aseity (from Latin ā "from" and sē "self", plus -ity) is the property by which a being exists of and from itself.[1] It refers to the Christian belief that God does not depend on any cause other than himself for his existence, realization, or end, and has within himself his own reason of existence. This represents God as absolutely independent and self-existent by nature. Many Jewish and Muslim theologians have also believed God to be independent in this way.[1] This quality of independence and self-existence has been affirmed under various names by theologians going back to antiquity, though the use of the word 'aseity' began only in the Middle Ages.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aseity
Haecceity (/hɛkˈsiːɪti, hiːk-/; from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as "thisness") is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person's or object's thisness, the individualising difference between the concept "a man" and the concept "Socrates" (i.e., a specific person).[1] In modern philosophy of physics, it is sometimes referred to as primitive thisness.[2]
Haecceity is a Latin neologism formed as an abstract noun derived from the demonstrative pronoun "haec(ce)", meaning "this (very)" (feminine singular) or "these (very)" (feminine or neuter plural). It is apparently formed on the model of another (much older) neologism, viz. "qui(d)ditas" ("whatness"), which is a calque of Aristotle's Greek to ti esti (τὸ τί ἐστι)[3] or "the what (it) is."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haecceity
Tathātā (/ˌtætəˈtɑː/; Sanskrit romanised: tathātā; Pali romanised: tathatā)is a Buddhist term variously translated as "thusness" or "suchness," referring to the nature of reality free from conceptualisation elaborations and the subject–object distinction.[1] It is a central concept in Mahayana Buddhism,[2][3] having a particular significance in Chan Buddhism as well. The synonym dharmatā is also often used.[citation needed]
While alive the Buddha referred to himself as the Tathāgata, which can mean either "One who has thus come" or "One who has thus gone",[4] and can also be interpreted as "One who has arrived at suchness".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tathātā
After watching film on human trafficking, this thought:
Evil is taking the benefit for yourself what belongs to itself, what belongs to themselves.
There is depravity in believing and acting on the belief that things and persons belong to you.
Let us pray for and act towards each and every being, each and every thing, belonging always and only to itself, one-ly to ITSELF.
God forgive us!
*Where you live is how you live. (Translated from Italian)
Love of the place.
Merely being-here.
At this time.
Fiddle music from Celtic Colours in Cape Breton parsing the grammar of morning at Ragged and Bald Mountains in Camden Maine of a Tuesday.
The fact of it!
Here, from the book “The Fate of Place” by Edward S. Casey, Chapter Title: Proceeding to Place by Indirection: Heidegger, this:
I do not want to be absolutely dogmatic by asserting that one cannot conceive Being except on the basis of time. Perhaps someday a new possibility will be discovered.
-Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit
The bare space is still veiled over. Space has been split up into places.
-Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Section 22
Unless we go back to the world, space cannot be conceived.
-Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Section 24
What, on Freud's view, dreams provide for an understanding of the uncon- scious mind-a via regia, a "royal road"-the body has provided for place, which by the end of the nineteenth century had come to be as repressed as the libidinal contents of the unconscious mind. Nevertheless, promising and productive as bodily inroads into place have shown themselves to be, they do not exhaust the modes of effective reentry to the place-world. In this chapter we shall consider the contributions of someone who neglected the role of the body in implacement but who managed to find other means of access to place as a subject of renewed philosophical importance. Indeed, it could even be claimed that it was precisely by his deliberate refusal to invoke the body- along with consciousness, its incongruent counterpart-that Heidegger made his own way to place.1 Heidegger's way back to place is a middle way, a via media between body and mind, both of which are set aside in order to concen- trate on what happens between them. In exploring this open between-this between of the Open-Heidegger was drawn into detours that, despite their digressive character, allowed him to glimpse aspects of place overlooked by other thinkers, ancient as well as modern. This is so in spite of the fact that these same detours are described in a vocabulary that is highly idiosyncratic and that, at least at first glance, seems to make little connection with previous descriptions of place.
Heidegger came to a full acknowledgment of the power of place only belat- edly. In earlier phases of his thought, place was important not for its own sake but because of its usefulness in such disparate contexts as the work world, the work of art, and politics. Even when Heidegger abandoned an instrumental interpretation of place in his middle period, he still did not single out place as such. Yet in later writings place (along with region and other related terms) emerged as an increasing preoccupation. Heidegger himself underlined this slow but decisive augmentation of place in his evolving thought when, in a seminar at Le Thor in 1969, he maintained that his thinking had traversed three periods, each with its own leading theme: Meaning, Truth, and Place.
Heidegger gets back into place, then, not as "the first of all things" to be considered (as certain ancient thinkers had assumed), or in reactive flight be- fore infinite space (a flight taken by many modern thinkers), but by indirec- tion: by traveling through diverse "forest paths" (Holzwege), as he liked to put it. To begin with, he returns to place not through but despite the body's involvement in placiality: as if place could be reached around and outside the body itself. Still more tellingly, he returns to place despite his own obsession with inaugurating a postmetaphysical era in philosophy-an era in which one might well imagine place to be a dispensable item, given its preeminent posi- tion in classical metaphysical thinking from Plato through Philoponus, and continuing into the Middle Ages. Yet just as place emerges in the Cartesian abyss between consciousness and body, so it rises, Phoenixlike, from the ashes of metaphysical thought as deconstructed by Heidegger. Thanks to such fea- tures as gathering and nearness, place becomes for him the very scene of Being's disclosure and of the openness of the Open in which truth is uncon- cealed. In the end, place figures as the setting for the postmetaphysical event of Appropriation (Ereignis).
pp.243-244, ch.11, Chapter Title: Proceeding to Place by Indirection: Heidegger! Book Title: The Fate of Place! Book Subtitle: A Philosophical History! Book Author(s): Edward S. Casey! Published by: University of California Press. (1997)Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt2jcbw8.18
Appropriate.**
As one’s own.
Undifferentiated.
Non-differation.
Is this good news?
Is this the heart of Buddhist/Christian thinking?
Not taking anything from anyone — being through time that which is, in itself,
early 15c., appropriaten, "take possession of, take exclusively," from Late Latin appropriatus, past participle of appropriare, adpropriare "to make one's own," from Latin ad "to" (see ad-) + propriare "take as one's own," from proprius "one's own" (see proper). Related: Appropriated; appropriating https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=appropriate
That moment of seeing something, glimpse, kensho, open field, event (Ereignis )
That which draws us into the place we are.
Shhh…
Sharing a Mountain Hut with a Cloud
A lonely hut on the mountain-peak towering above a thousand others; One half is occupied by an old monk and the other by a cloud:
Last night it was stormy and the cloud was blown away;
After all a cloud could not equal the old man's quiet way.
(Kuei-tsung Chih-chih, a monk who lived in a humble hut on Lu-shan (盧山 Rozan) (Essays in Zen Buddhism – Second Series 352))
The old man probably is the cloud.
Look around.
Do you see him anywhere?
Oh, up there!
Isn't he something?
I have fallen off
Zafu landing on feet here
October autumn
Release of leaves onto ground
Where each step is one with earth
Our practice is clear
Everything in and out be-
longs with this order
Bow if you wish, walk
sit, chant or be silent, you
are hereby now and
forever one with one in
the zendo as the sangha
