* According to the Kegon teachings, when applied to human activity ri-ji-muge denotes seeking for the Buddha in the mind. The ji-ji-muge concept denotes looking for the Universal Buddha in the body. Following out the former idea, the flesh is regarded as a shackle imprisoning the enquiring spirit, so that by retiring from the world one should reduce it to proper submission and thereby obtain enlightenment. With the ji-ji-muge concept, however, illumination can be found only through perfecting flesh by bringing out its latent potentialities and thereby uncovering the Buddha hidden in the human heart. When applied this concept to the Mahayana schools of Buddhism, one may say that ri-ji-muge is the Way of Sitting (Zazen in Soto), while Ji-ji-muge is the Way of Moving in the World.
(see P.K. Eidmann’”The Lion Roar”, Jodo Publishing, 1947 also various books by Kegon scholars such as Shinya Kasugai, Ryosho Takamine)
(—from, Ji-ji-muge and Economics of Enlightenment, Chris J. Czerkawski, (Received on April 1, 2005, Hiroshima Shudo University Repository)
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? [Dogen]
Do not fragment your attention but see what each moment calls for. [Dogen]
Old buddhas and new buddhas reveal their bodies and expound dharma. [Dogen]
Use your own hands, your own eyes, your own sincerity. [Dogen]
Take continuous care. [Dogen]
http://oaks.nvg.org/dogen-quotations.html
In the premodern world, ethics received its authority from cosmology. The sacred order of the cosmos dictated the right order of society and the normative virtues for individuals. Each society thought its way of life reflected the universal and sacred natural order of things. With the emergence of the comparative study of cultures, through modern historiography and the social sciences in the nineteenth century, the cosmic world-views of all cultures were relativized. At the same time philosophy, which had already declared its independence from religion, attempted to find a new authoritative ground for ethics in the Enlightenment ideal of a universal rationality independent of any given culture. We now live in a time when this modern attempt is widely viewed as having failed. Indeed, Jean-François Lyotard suggests, in The Postmodern Condition,4 that a key indicator of the emergence of our postmodern situation is the collapse of all metanarratives, whether the ancient cosmic religious stories or modern cosmic stories of universal rationality and scientific progress.
According to the metanarrative of the Enlightenment, in the ancient childhood of the human race people lived by stories (myths), then in the medieval adolescence of the human race, humans embraced rationality (logic and speculative metaphysics). Finally, in the modern adulthood of the human race, humans learned to think for themselves, threw off their childish and adolescent ways and embraced empirical scientific rationality and technological progress. “Man” had “come of age” and no longer needed story – or so the story goes. Contemporary narrative theorists like Stanley Hauerwas 5 and Alasdair MacIntyre 6 have pointed out that even the modern claim of the narrative independence of rationality is dependent on a narrative – the story of the three ages of the human race. They have rightly argued that all rationality is narrative dependent. If this is the case then our postmodern situation is that, on the one hand, our metanarratives (grand stories) have been relativized and, on the other hand, we cannot escape narrative. So with what are we left?
(—from, Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics Online and in the Classroom, Introduction, For the second edition of: Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics, (2011) by Fasching, deChant, Lantigua), Wiley Instructor Companion Site
I would have said, “So what are we left with?” But I suspect, “So with what are we left? is better grammar. Still, the question is good — do we have a story that makes sense today?
I love stories. Here’s what I’m left with: You and I are stories being written. The old stories are there for us to read. The many stories of many people are here for us to listen to. We are left with one another. And what are we? And what are we doing?
My story says we are ever-beginning. You and I, so too our culture, era, and community, come alive to the extent we speak with and listen to one another. Talking about ethics together is part of ever-beginning.
I like the word ethos. The Oxford Dictionary defines it: “The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.”
When all is said and done, I have more than one face. I don’t know which is laughing at which.
Love is so excessive a feeling that I prop my head up in my hands.
Arising from the passions, this realm of dreams isn’t fundamentally a domain of lies. In the end the face is dispersed. In the place where the fabric of things rips open - in the lacerating rip - nothing remains but a person introduced into the fabric’s texture.
Layers of dead leaves aren’t steps ascending to a throne, and tugboat hoots disperse illusions of enchantment.
Though still, what would correspond to the magnificence of the world if no one spoke to us and communicated a (no doubt indecipherable) message: ‘As to this fate that befalls you, this fate you consider yours (the fate of the human being you are) or that you consider the destiny of existence generally (of the immensity you form part of), nothing allows you to reduce it to the poverty of things that remain only what they are. On the contrary, whenever a casual lie happens, or whenever something is transfigured, don’t you hear an appeal which must be answered? You can’t claim you wished for the journey, only that you are it. And who would challenge the utter distance, the extremity, the desirability of the way? Desirability?! Am I the measure of mysteries? If, perceiving me, you hadn’t chosen an unreachable goal, you wouldn’t even have approached the mystery!’
--Georges Bataille, p95, The text appeared in translation as chapter 5 of the ‘February-April 1944’ section of On Nietzsche , tr. Bruce Boone (Paragon House, New York, 1992), pp. 68-71.https://archive.org/stream/BatailleTheBatailleReader/Bataille%20-%20The%20Bataille%20Reader_djvu.txtOne mystery we live with is the current president of the United States.
I came back to myself.There is a corruption of identity that is profitable to those trafficking in dissemblance and intentional manipulation of ordinary and (perhaps) unaware populations -- (unfortunately, most of us).
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”
I Went into The Maverick Bar
--by Gary Snyder
I went into the Maverick BarIn Farmington, New Mexico.And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.My long hair was tucked up under a cap I’d left the earring in the car.Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables,A waitress asked uswhere are you from? a country-and-western band began to play “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” And with the next song, a couple began to dance.They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties;I recalled when I worked in the woodsand the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity.I could almost love you again.We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars—In the shadow of bluffsI came back to myself.To the real work, to“What is to be done.”
(--from, Not Here Yet, BY GARY SNYDER| Remarks by Gary Snyder on Buddhism, Ecology & the Poetics of Homelessness. https://www.lionsroar.com/not-here-yet/
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”
(--from, All Along The Watchtower WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN) https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/all-along-watchtower/
In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.
(—from, Before you can be with others, first learn to be alone, by Jennifer Stitt, on Aeon, 11 July 2017). https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-aloneI sit with firebox in wohnkuche since 4am watching extra log put in at 3:20am doesn’t exceed its reach. It is a nervous instinct that worries about what to do if chimney fire jumps out of box constraint and screams freedom to a frozen sky. Radio station from Finland automatically goes on at 5am playing classical pieces.