seeing through

I wandered into zen around 1963. I read John C.H. Wu while in novitiate with the Franciscans in Lafayette NJ. I sat next to the bookshelf during conferences and his book kept saying ‘pssst’ ‘pssst’.

I looked through Wu and continued looking through these 63 years. While never seeing clearly, the practice of looking through has been a subtle melodic accompaniment to what seeing might be. 

Enlightenment means seeing into

your own essential nature,

and this at the same time means

seeing through to the essential

nature of the cosmos and of all things.

Yasutani, 1885-1973) 

Hakuun Yasutani (安谷 白雲, Yasutani Haku'un; 1885–1973) was a Sōtō Zen priest and the founder of the Sanbo Kyodan, a lay Japanese Zen group. Through his students Philip Kapleau and Taizan Maezumi, Yasutani has been one of the principal forces in founding western (lay) Zen-practice.

 --wikipedia

Some have said it’s not so much the looking at as it is the looking as. 

Curiously, these days I’ve noticed a distinction arising. There is glancing and there is gazing. When im feeling blah and off to some sit down/lie down passing altar in front room, I glance, I merely note, and pass. No feeling, no lingering. 

Other times, passing through or sitting in white chair, I gaze. I take in what is there. I let pass through what is permeating on its way through. I linger.

The glance says ‘I note.’ The gaze says, ‘I am not’.

It might seem a facile distinction, but, these days, presence and non-presence seems to depend on how I feel and whether I want to continue...anything.

“[T]he essential nature of the cosmos and of all things” -- I suspect, must contain the birth and death of stars, galaxies, and the smallest forms of life -- all arising and departing according to some impulse/logic we have not yet been able to figure out. 

I watch my body packing its valise with things it will not need. I note my energy has been sent by UPS to an undisclosed location. My thoughts wander Penn Station looking up at arrivals and departures afraid to approach ticket counter with empty wallet. My breath is a child holding on to the sleeve of a worn coat covering a body chilled with season change.

I glance at things.

Periodically I gaze.

I don’t know what I am seeing; I don’t know what I am seeing through.

another nice mess

I give up.

Where?  

If all things are returned to the One,

To where does that One return?

--(Saying appears in classic Zen records, such as Case 45 of the Blue Cliff Record, attributed to the Tang dynasty master Zhaozhou Congshen (Jōshū). [1])

Often at the scene of an accident there will be a cop waving people to keep on going saying, ‘Move along; nothing to see here!”

These zen masters of sidewalks and roadways are unnamed bodhisattvas in the lineage of Jōshū urging us to enter the prospect that where we are is where we are going and that where we have been is where we’ve never left.

One is, after all, One.

I walk out into chilly October Tuesday morning, pass water, kinhin (經行) to wooden gate by road, watch sun begin descent from atop bald mountain like some rusty rustic blanket ballet falling from bed when sleep grows old and body asks for movement.

An aside: 

(--Radical environmentalist and author Edward Abbey, famously said that if you cannot urinate outside on your own property without being seen or bothered, your neighbors are too close and you have moved too near to civilization. [1, 2])

I often lose track of what day it is these days. I listen to nuns in France chanting Laudes. Simple morning prayer whose Latin benignly obscures facile delve for meaning leaving only aesthetic attention to their cadence melody.

The silence in wohnkūche suffices as naved monastic enclosure chapel in imagination good enough for me. The thin thread of geographic location stretches wraith-like these days as worn-through consciousness billows with slightest breeze into chimerical phantasmigoria. 

Who needs to go anywhere when I am (we are) already there?

Where does the one return?

Yes!

Or as my Jewish neighbor in childhood Bensonhurst used to say again and again, “Don’t ask!”

On my doorjamb, this:

     שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

• Transliteration: Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad
• 
  
• Translation: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Or, “The Lord Alone.”)
• 
  

The monastics sing:

 Omnes Angeli ejus,        All his Angels, 

 laudáte Dóminum de cælis               Praise the Lord from the heavens!

Perhaps the universe is One.

And there is no reaching or transcending this One.

And here we are!

Hmmm, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!” (Oliver Hardy)

knock, knock, knock

 green Adirondack chair

facing bald mountain --

yellow burnt orange

slow revelation of color

turning clouds drift west

to east as mountain sits still

this wide zendo facing one

another cushioning silent love

overlooking the obvious

 I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist, but this: https://youtu.be/dJtbSg0MaMQ?si=OZomq1IXzEYt9zh4

A day will come when we will ask how in God’s name this state of affairs came about and was allowed to continue.

There will be sorrow and deep regret in the asking.

christ graciously hear us

 what if there were no ‘mistakes’

if everything that has happened 

has happened of necessity

all of it, no accident, no mistake

what logic applies, what reasoning

the necessity of everything?

if you ask me have I sinned

I’d say October leaves

on ground belong to earth

I would say both hurt and joy

are yesterday’s notes on a page

torn out beside an ink-dry pen

cruelty

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/opinion/midterm-ads-ramaswamy-acton-ohio.html

OPINION, 

DAVID FRENCH, There Is Nothing MAGA Won’t Sink To, Oct. 25, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET

and no crowd is blocking the way.

What is Takuan writing about? Surely not pickled radish. Hmmm!

Like the empty sky,

It has no boundaries,

Yet it is right in this place,

Ever profound and clear.

When you seek to know it,

You cannot see it.

You cannot take hold of it.

But you cannot lose it.

In not being able to get it,

You get it.

When you are silent, it speaks.

The great gate is wide open

To bestow alms,

And no crowd is blocking the way.

—Takuan Sōhō (沢庵 宗彭; December 24, 1573 – January 27, 1645)

The unnamable?

 The untamable?

The no-name reality?

The redoubtable and misnomered Hashem?

Despite our immersion in it we are fish unable to name water, birds unable to word sky, earthworms without an idea of soil, humans without a haiku of air.

And yet, we pass through and go on.

There is no believing in God. There is only moving-through-reality.

This moving-through-reality is our nature. When we move mindfully and with a semblance of grace we practice our True Nature.

This True Nature is our surround, our inner core, our permeable and pervasive presence without name or form.

Just now . . . the cawing of crow!

Just now, the arriving cat stepping on chest.

Just now . . .

night

 My world gets smaller

I look at full moon

Between ragged and bald mtns —

Only moonlight

ascolta il suono di ciò che viene detto

Tolstoy writes:

At the beginning of each chapter, besides a brief indication of its subject, I have given the words which correspond to that chapter from the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. 

When I had finished my work I found to my surprise and joy that the Lord's Prayer is nothing but a very concise expression of the whole teaching of Jesus in the very order in which I had arranged the chapters, and that each phrase of the prayer corresponds to the meaning and sequence of the chapters: 

1. Our Father, Man is a son of God
2. Which art in Heaven, God is the infinite
3. spiritual source of life.
4. Hallowed be Thy Name, May this source
5. of life be held holy
6. Thy Kingdom come, May his power be
7. realized in all men
8. Thy will be done, as in heaven, May
9. the will of his infinite source be fulfilled as it is in himself
10. So on earth, so also in the bodily
11. life.
12. Give us our daily bread, Temporal life
13. is the food of the true life.
14. Each day. True life is in the present.
15. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,
16. And let not the mistakes and errors of the past hide that true
17. life from us.
18. And lead us not into temptation, And
19. may they not lead us into delusion,
20. But deliver us from evil, And so there
21. shall be no evil.
22. For thine is the kingdom the power, and the glory,
23. And may thy power, and strength, and wisdom, prevail.

    (--From Preface by Tolstoy to his Gospel in Brief)

Dog, Ensō, cat, Panta rhei (Ancient Greek: πάντα ῥεῖ) translates to "everything flows" or "all things are in motion.”), and I lounge on porch as sun drifts off to the side diminishing warmth of sunporch. Captain of Sandokai-Edelweiss has gone to Rockland to check on damage to hull from last week’s banging against Journey’s End Marina dock from high winds and sea.

October leans to its conclusion with chill sun and lovely colors. I’ve begun Chemo pills and my body feels gossamer and insubstantial unless it is showing me ways to be annoying. Nights are 70 minutes of unconscious and then awake to pass water, then down again. A series of naps until dawn. So, too, the day, body’s attempt to retrieve sleep as the co-monastic attempts to feed me anything that will permit me passage from room to room.  

I love juxtaposing Wittgenstein and Tolstoy with Heather Cox Richardson and Sgt Curtis' traffic stop videos. We watch Britbox last few nights (that steely-jaw’d flawed copper Bancroft). She got her comeuppance last night.

Mustered up strength to get to CAT scan Thursday (uh oh) and prison Friday (still a joy). Aside from these excursions I am a sluggish fool. 

But of good-enough cheer. 

Trump and politics have become detritus and slither offshore in my attention. 

I would love to learn to pray. And remain close to ground as I do so.

Mostly I sit still and 

    ascolta il suono di ciò che viene detto 

    (listen to the sound of what is being said.)

Being, listening, and stillness -- these, I suspect, are good ways of learning prayer.