Lockdown today in prison. So we go to Moody’s Diner. And we’d been on-time/early first time in long time. Timely doesn’t always pay.
Our original Buddha-Nature is, in highest truth, devoid of any atom of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy — and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awakening to it yourself. That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside.
Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva's progress toward Buddhahood, one by one; when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature which has been with you all the time; and by all the foregoing stages you will have added to it nothing at all.
You will come to look upon all those eons of work and achievement as no better than unreal actions performed in a dream. That is why the Tathagata said, "I truly attained nothing from complete, unexcelled Enlightenment. Had there been anything attained, Dipamkara Buddha would not have made the prophecy concerning me." He also said, "This Dharma is absolutely without distinctions, neither high nor low, and its name is Bodhi."
It is pure Mind, which is the source of everything and which, whether appearing as sentient beings or as Buddhas, as the rivers and mountains of the world which has form, as that which is formless, or as penetrating the whole universe absolutely without distinctions, there being no such entities as selfness and otherness.
(--from Zen Teachings of Huang Po, - Huang Po (d. 850), Daily Zen) https://www.dailyzen.com/journal/
At poetry today in Quarry Hill there were many A.S. Milne poems by Tina, Lydia, and Sheilah. They were cheerful. Walt read from his wife’s mother’s booklet of poems. And I read Jane Hirshfield.
One by Sheilah, reading Siegfried Sassoon, resonated:
ALONE
"When I'm alone"—the words tripped off his tongue
As though to be alone were nothing strange.
“When I was young," he said; "when I was young..."
I thought of age, and loneliness, and change.
I thought how strange we grow when we're alone,
And how unlike the selves that meet and talk,
And blow the candles out, and say good night.
Alone... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown.
The question remains as institutions, lineages, denominations, and nations all fall apart or fail -- how will we move on into new expressions of beloved forms and familiar expressions?
Begin in your own way, I say.
Sip tea.
Know re-forming affection for one’s mates!
