Water Dissolves Water: Baso Döitsu

All of you here! Believe that your own mind is Buddha. This very mind is buddha-mind.

Water Dissolves Water: Baso Döitsu

“Violence” - some words from the Buddha before his enlightenment

"Everyone is guilty." But not in the Catholic sense. A Buddhist takes responsibility for their own heart.

From here: http://zenjournal.tumblr.com/post/4349403030/violence-some-words-from-the-buddha-before-his

Violence gives birth to fear.
Just look at people and their quarrels.
I will speak of my dismay
And the way that I was shaken.
Seeing people thrashing about like fish in little water
And seeing them in conflict with each other,
I became afraid.

The world is completely without a core.
Everywhere things are changing.
Wanting a place of my own,
I saw nothing not already taken.
I felt discontent at seeing only conflict to the very end.
Then I saw an arrow — hard to see,
Embedded in the heart.
Pierced by this arrow, people dash about in all directions.
When the arrow is pulled out,
The do not run, and they do not sink.
-
Interpretation and elaboration:

“The radical suggestion is… that the issue is in your own heart. That’s what triggers the running around… it is obvious that many people are not willing to look at some part of themselves. They get involved in addictive behaviors, they get very busy with work, social relationships, entertainment… The fear resides in our own hearts or minds. The task in Buddhism is that it’s REALLY useful to take that arrow out, to take responsibility for what’s in here… to find the roots of our distress. Someone has to do it.
…
“We try to help the world the best we can… one of the ways we help is to have done the inner work so that we can meet the world calmly and peacefully… to support people and help people by being calm and peaceful in times of distress. If we’re running around in dismay, then we can’t really help people.”

Gil Fronsdal from a recent Zencast.org talk, “Our Attachments, given at the Insight Meditation Center.

What is the Pure Land?

A monk asked Zen Master Joshu, “What is the Pure Land?”
Joshu said, “A puddle of piss.”
The monk asked, “Can you show it to me?”
Joshu said, “Don’t tempt me.”

Vipassana Wolf

Creator unknown.

You Zen Like a Sailor

that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

-Ikkyu Sojun

Small Change

like the sun
i carry what is small
buddha's half smile
evaporating from hot
distant bricks
im in the world
there is no reason
to believe

No Imagination

kamma before Venus
love brooding over skill
let it be said
I had a clear, bright heart
and no imagination

Why Meditation Feels Like Shitting Razorblades... At First

From Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana:

Meditation is a tough job. It is an inherently solitary activity. One person battles against enormously powerful forces, part of the very structure of the mind doing the meditating. When you really get into it, you will eventually find yourself confronted with a shocking realization. One day you will look inside and realize the full enormity of what you are actually up against. What you are struggling to pierce looks like a solid wall so tightly knit that not a single ray of light shines through. You find yourself sitting there, staring at this edifice and you say to yourself, "That? I am supposed to get past that? But it's impossible! That is all there is. That is the whole world. That is what everything means, and that is what I use to define myself and to understand everything around me, and if I take that away the whole world will fall apart and I will die. I cannot get through that. I just can't."

 And then you barely notice that a ray of light is hitting you directly in the chest. And you wonder, was the wall ever there?

Read Mindfulness in Plain English here:
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

tenderending

do i dream the earth's dreams
half-dissolved innocent in silk
a vortex of unconscious song
do i travel a many splendored humiliation
between she and her reverent satellites
tasting of the silver vibrating essence of
fools who dwell upon her dark crescent
to build churches for them
to dance with elements of non-being
is it i who yelps longingly with coyotes
for bloods of the new bardo
or am i an android dreaming of electric sheep
on the dark side of the earth
you never see

is it told by stars that light will sweat
and make a language of textures slipped
filtered through the singing trees
shared among bodhisattvas and chupacabras
banging away eternal youth on warped space
meeting allies in caves and
dancing like awkward foreign worms
never straying from our common abyss
am i not that
pierced by a familiar light
subdued by electric natives with
a wooded breath reaching back
with or without earth
on the dark side of the word
you never see

I can has peace of mind?

Breathe gently. Look within. Let what is both empty and full devour you like a human hot dog.

Pukenjolly's Yoga Sutra

"You have to learn to taste your own vomit, and then delight in it." 

 -The Venerable Robina Courtin on the Buddhist path to enlightenment.

May This Blog Find You Disturbed

"We must always be disturbed by the truth."

-Dogen, a thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist teacher

Cat Explains Meaning of Life

Source: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/enso.html

The Reality of Enso

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

At 6:30am, at the gentle sound of the Burmese gong, I emerged from a deep state of absorption to find myself in the meditation hall of the Chuang Yen Monastery in upstate New York, surrounded by twenty shuffling men. I hadn't twitched a muscle for one hour and hadn't eaten since noon of the previous day, but neither stretching nor hunger were on my mind. I was aware of one and one thought only, which instantaneously pierced the very core of my being: everything I had read about the Japanese Enso symbol was real.

I do not mean "real" in a handwavy philosophical sense, with a lingering shadow of a doubt that it could be just nonsensical "Eastern mumbo-jumbo". I use the word "real" in a very physical sense, in the same way one would use it to describe a chair, or the beating of one's heart, or the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I saw it with an unprecedented clarity of mind. Occasionally, I had approached similar clarity in the Russian baths when I jumped from a hundred and fifty degree sauna into a pool of ice cold water. The heated body, forced to deal with a tremendous temperature gradient, violently contracts the blood vessels to preserve heat, ridding the mind of every last thought in the process. The baths, the sauna, the pool, life's trials and tribulations, victories and defeats, are momentarily eradicated from consciousness along with the everpresent notion of self, leaving for only a few precious moments the magnificent clarity of pristine awareness.

But the clarity of mind induced by the ancient ritual of Russian baths disappears as quickly as it appears. For an untrained mind it is clarity without insight - a mere glimpse of a glimpse of freedom that is possible to achieve. It was only with the slow, painstaking effort of meditation that my mind was able to relax long enough to see for just a few brief moments the reality of Enso and the remarkable beauty and harmony it symbolizes.

Making a pilgrimage from the comfortable Western life of fast food and flat screen TVs to the raw asceticism of a Buddhist monastery to see Enso is not unlike going on vacation from the urban jungle of an inner American city to a picturesque European village. Initially, returning to the previous way of life seems like a personal sacrifice, but after a short while the routine takes over and the memory of what could have been dims. In the same way, momentarily seeing Enso is only intellectual sightseeing. Being one with what it symbolizes every moment of one's life requires a far greater effort than moving from the New World to the Old, in exchange for a far greater reward. I would trade any material fortune to have that clarity always with me, if only because I now know that the purity of mind it affords would allow me to rebuild this fortune effortlessly. I say this because for the contemporary mind this prospect is far more attractive than the real gift - that one who has purity of mind needs no fortunes.

So far I've been using the familiar possessive verbs when talking about attainment of clarity, but in reality it is not a process of acquiring but the process of letting go. It is about letting go of the idea that following one's breath for an hour is a stupid practice, letting go of the feelings of discomfort from sitting on the floor, letting go of the tenseness of the large muscles on one's back and the tiny muscles on one's skull and face. It is about letting go of the desire to move, just a little bit, just this once, and of the overwhelming desire to get up and do something, anything, anything to avoid sitting quietly with one's own thoughts. It is about letting go of furious anger directed at the creaking door that keeps stealing one's attention, letting go of a dozen itches that inevitably arise all over the body, and letting go of the desire to laugh because of the absurdity of the situation.

Then follows letting go of the racing thoughts about everything but the breath - thoughts about hunger, and what's for lunch, and how you haven't had lunch with some friend for a while, and what gift you'll get him for his birthday. It's about letting go of the expectation that you could follow your breath for a little longer than you could before, and letting go of the worrying that your mind is filled with so much trash. It's about letting go of planning, and remembering, and randomly arising sexual images, and the archetypal fantasies of saving beautiful women from dire situations in order to win everyone's admiration, and fears that one day your parents will pass away, leaving you in the world completely alone. It is about letting go of everything and just following the breath, the beautiful, radiant, subtle, magnificent breath amidst infinite emptiness, admiring its gentle tides... only to hear the gong and open one's eyes, and remember that you are you, sitting on the floor in a room among other people, and that you're hungry, and noticing that your leg fell asleep, and realizing that you have a million neuroses that you were able to briefly let go of by the magic of following the instructions left by some ancient sages.

It is then that you realize that your neuroses, and thoughts, and worries, and expectations, and projections, and addictions creep into everything you do, from intimate relationships, to casual conversations, to writing essays, to building software, to sweeping the floor. And you know that if you could free yourself permanently from restlessness, and dullness, and anger, and lust, and fears, and doubt, just like you did for a few precious minutes just now, in a twitch of a finger you could amass fortunes, or change the world, or paint a perfect Enso, or... you could just be content with listening to your own breath.