Breathing

Maybe today
Seeing clearly
Will come to see
Nothing other
Only Itself --
No inside
No outside
No yes
No no
Just this
Now here

Nowhere

What is outside is inside. Inside is outside. Everything is between.

Moving through itself.

We should cultivate Buddhahood
Within our own nature and should
Not seek it outside the body.
If deluded, the self-nature is a living being.
If enlightened, the self-nature is a Buddha.
Kindness and compassion are
Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva.
Joy and indifference or renunciation are
Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva.
The ability to purify self is
Sakyamuni Buddha.
Impartiality and straightforwardness
Are Amitabha Buddha.
- Altar Sutra

It doesn't matter if you disappear tomorrow. What matters is you are here now.

With no disturbance. No barriers.

Going nowhere.

Quiet of morning. Erik Satie and Debussey. Dog sleeps by wood stove. New York Times digital whispers world.

I don't have an opinion about those who say the end of the world is upon us. Of course fragility. And uncertainty.

Meditation cabin stands ready with pause and practice nearing.

No obstruction. With nothing to obstruct. Even that must go.

Though they liberate their minds directly and develop to this state, they still are unwilling to dwell there. They sense the slightest thing as mountainous; anything that seems to cause obstruction they immediately push away.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

A student writes a brilliant essay. It begins to travel. Good for her. She's on to something.

Mu-ge, our version of no barrier, arrives on the bed. The long haired coon cat has one paw on my right foot.

No one knows anything. We only pretend to understand. It's our best quality -- theater.

The voidness of the universe
Is capable of containing all
Things of various forms and shapes,
Such as the sun, moon, stars,
Mountains, rivers, the great earth,
Springs, streams, mountain torrents,
Plants, trees and woods,
Good and bad people,
Good and bad things,
Heavens and hells,
All the great oceans.
All these are in the void.
The voidness of worldly people
Is also like it.
- Altar Sutra

In prison this morning. A conversation about Kant, Kierkegaard, and Aristotle on friendship. Charlie, Doug, Saskia and I. We have much to think about.

And so we think in the open with one another.

Except that they lose track of things and eat too many ice cream sandwiches.

In those who attain Zen, mental machinations disappear, vision and action are forgotten, and there are no subjective views. Zen adepts just remain free, and are imperceptible to anyone, either would-be supporters or would-be antagonists. They walk on the bottom of the deepest ocean, uncontaminated, with free minds, acting normally, indistinguishable from the average person.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

I think it is odd that we do not assassinate the ocean after it has committed tsunami destruction. Nor do we hang from a gallows a tornado after crashing wide swaths to smithereens. And rivers walk free even after they destroy whole towns. What an outrage!

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights
By MICHELLE ALEXANDER
Published: May 14, 2011

Columbus, Ohio

THE legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites.

Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former “get tough” true believers to suddenly denounce the costs of imprisonment. “We’re wasting tax dollars on prisons,” they say. “It’s time to shift course.”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15alexander.html?_r=1

No one reprimands a rainy day for slippery conditions causing cars to crash.

I'd like to get to the bottom of this discrepancy.

Are only some varieties of violence OK?

We've got to start using our human measuring stick on nature.

That'll get things rolling.

At dawn and dusk today, there, where prayer alone suffices, I sit in cabin on cushion with silence.

It is proper to doubt. Do not be led by holy scriptures, or by mere logic or inference, or by appearances, or by the authority of religious leaders. But when you realize that something is unwholesome an bad for you, give it up. And when you realize that something is wholesome and good for you, do it.
- Buddha

Prayer -- silence alone or with words. -- releases us from the noise of negativity and positivity.

In the awe-full nearness to nothing, that which we call by many names turns with immeasurable patience to us waiting as we do when nothing seems to make sense.

Remember this -- and only this.

There's nothing else.

Don't go for the bait. Don't bite the hook. There are always those wanting to reel you in, own you, sell you off.

There's much to learn about becoming free.

When a buddha appears in the world
And expounds various teachings
According to people's inclinations,
All of the teachings are expedients,
Just for the purpose of breaking through
Obsessions, doubts, intellectual interpretations,
And egocentric ideas.
If there were no such false consciousness
And false views, there would be no need
For buddhas to appear
And expound so many teachings.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Heidegger says that world worlds and things thing.

If that's not clear, imagine this -- the world is not what we think it is. The world is itself. The world does not stand out from itself. The world, thus, does not exist.

We are looking for someone to encourage our learning.

Finding a Teacher

In the woods I came on an old friend fishing
and I asked him a question
and he said Wait

fish were rising in the deep stream
but his line was not stirring
but I waited
it was a question about the sun

about my two eyes
my ears my mouth
my heart the earth with its four seasons
my feet where I was standing
where I was going

it slipped through my hands
as though it were water
into the river
it flowed under the trees
it sank under hulls far away
and was gone without me
then where I stood night fell

I no longer knew what to ask
I could tell that his line had no hook
I understood that I was to stay and eat with him

(--Poem by W.S. Merwin)

It flows away, without me, no question, unhooked.

The tuna melt and spinach salad with Saskia is delicious.

It matters. The war matters. Assassinations matter. The mind that conceives of war and assassinations -- that mind matters.

No matter how deluded.

There are certain facts. Irrefutable realities.

The Department of Defense has identified 1,555 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It recently confirmed the death of the following American:
SPAULDING, Riley S., 21, Specialist, Army; Sheridan, Tex.; Second Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry.■
(10May2011, NYTimes)

I cannot explain the feeling of grief. Nor do I take solace in jingoistic exclamation of accomplishment. Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead. Still, I cannot abide it being called 'justice.' Justice might no longer be a useful concept, "More honour'd in the breach than the observance." (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

He is dead as is the past the past.

High School Reunion

I didn’t go.
What’s changed over fifty years since graduation?

Faces smile into apertures, they are happy
they remember something I don’t from those years

the glide following final report card
cleats returned to property room

administration recording names and notes
filed in drawers and mostly forgotten

But the smiling faces look through time --
I only recognize three faces -- Joe who became

a Franciscan, Bob who played baseball, and Terry
(unmistakable visage), he played football

I stayed in Maine away from the beer and hail
fellows well met a long commute from those days.

I sent haiku but got no response. No medallion,
no recalling events manufactured in a fog
--10may2011/wfh

The classical music station times off in the middle of The Cakewalk Suite by Gottschalk. There is sudden quiet.

It's hard to imagine the silliness of our quest for and articulation of meaning and reality. The thought passes through and I realize how absurd I am. This cheers. Nothing more than a passing breath, a fleeting glimpse, a moment giving itself up for what is now next.

There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding our reality and that it must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.
- Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950)

Dust and echoes.

Good companions.

En route.

Stephen Hawking wonders about space aliens.

Hell, we're the aliens. The cosmos is the only natural expression of itself. Hawking thinks the contact has been made.

I listen to the oddities of communication parried back and forth between humans and I am certain that intelligent life continues to ignore us.

Mahaprajnaparamita is a Sanskrit
Word which means "the great
Wisdom which enables one to reach
The other shore." This should
Be performed by the mind and has
Nothing to do with verbal
Repetition.
Verbal repetition without using
The mind is like an illusion,
A transformation, dew and
Lightning; but verbal repetition
Coupled with use of the mind,
Will ensure a union of mind and mouth.
- Altar Sutra

I read students' final essays in philosophy. They're no aliens.

They are the beginning phonemes of phenomenological manifestation.

The conversation wants to continue.

"A" you're adorable. "B" you're so beautiful. "C" you're a cutie full of charms. (from the Alphabet Love Song)

We need to sing more.

The wonderful thing about being nobody in this society, culture, and existence is the practice it provides for that which we call 'death' when the body as we know it will lay itself down and be no more.

Do both prospects seem undesirable?

No matter. Pay it no mind.

Over the course of centuries,
Zen has branched out into different schools
With individual methods,
But the purpose is still the same-
To point directly to the human mind.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

We have the opportunity to practice here, in this society, this culture, and this existence that which will assist us in the occasions of life and death.

LISTENING
(A Meditation by Anthony de Mello, SJ)

"Every word, every image
used for God is a distortion
more than a description."
"Then how does one speak of God?"

"Through Silence."

"Why, then, do you speak in words?"

At that, the Master
laughed uproariously.
He said, "When I speak, you
mustn't listen to the words, my dear.
Listen to the Silence."

Whenever the feeling experience of being a stranger arises it is an opportunity to return to the practice.

What is the practice? If I told you I would break it. But when it is felt/experienced by us, it becomes itself whole again.

The Silence Itself.

The silence of God, the silent mind, the mere and simple presence of one another to each other.

Here we are.

As we are.

Nobody...

Home!

As if?

As if?

When your original reason
For studying Zen is not right,
You wind up having labored
Without accomplishment.
This is why ancients used
To urge people to study Zen
As if they were on the brink of death.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

It's not a question of what to do.

It's a matter of how to be.

Brink...?

...Nothing!

To study zen is it.

The song was right:

" Everything is beautiful
In its own way."

Only this:
To see

Through life,
Life.

Hugh Gumpel dies.

"There is," someone says,
and we stick to that "there is."
See there's nothing—
Only the sound
Of the pine wind from the beach.
- Japanese Folk Zen saying

His painting of blue-green rudder graces the bookshed.

This misty rainy night.

Don't tell me that all is well now that our military has shot a man in the face.

The company of all the dead that I include in prayer merely increases.

I'm pleased so many are relieved.

Me?

There's no joy in anyone's murder -- no matter what narrative is pinned on it.

The idea of friendship is true, is real.

In prison this morning Saskia, Charlie, Doug & I talk of Kant, Montaigne, and Aristotle.

No, that's not it. We are talking about ourselves.

We approach one another.

As friends do.

Let there now begin a healing and retrieving of virtue and dignity, respect for human life, justice, and friendship.

We have been haunted, hunting, and hunted for a long time.

Some different grace and way-of-being is now invited by us and is now inviting us.

Let us lead. Let us follow. This emerging truth sustains.

And so it is.

Osama Bin Laden, says President Obama, is dead.

As Sunday gives way to Monday.

We settle things by an ancient, obsolete, and uncertain ritual -- murder for murder, death for death.

We'll continue to try to transcend, and will, someday, find a new way.

The quiet life.

Grasses bury the river bank,
Rain darkens the village;
The temple is lost in tall bamboo
I can't find the gate.
They're gathering wood and brewing herbs
I'm sorry a monk is sick;
They've swept the ground and burned incense
It cleans my spirit.
Farm work not finished, though we're into Little Snow;
Lamps lit before the Buddha,
Signal of dusk
Lately I've developed a taste for the quiet life.
I think how we could talk together
Through the night.
- Su Tung-p'o (1072)

It cleans my spirit.

We like the thought Jesus resurrected.

It is comforting to think the absurdity and treachery of modern times will not remain the reality once we learn to transcend illusory limitations and include the diversity of difference.

A cold evening in my empty room;
Time flows by like the incense smoke arising.
Outside my door,
A thousand stalks of bamboo,
Above my bed, how many books?
The moon has come to whiten
Half my window,
The only sound in any direction
Is the singing of insects.
In this there is boundless feeling,
But as I encounter it,
There are no words.
- Ryokan

Conveyance.

Think conveyance.

Beyond boundaries.