Tao Te Ching, Verse 15

by Lao Tzu

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it; all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present, and can welcome all things.

~ Translated by Stephen Mitchell (https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html)

Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.  “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”  Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

 Ying’an Tanhua (1102-1163)

The quest of real followers of the path is just to oppose birth and death; they do not look for it in the sayings found in various sources in ancient and modern books. They just step back into themselves and bring it to mind, coolly yet keenly, at the very root and stem. Suddenly their hands slip, they lose their footing, and they’re lost: this is graduation from the study of a lifetime. Perceiving independently, like a solitary lamp, for the first time they are manifestly empowered. They are like mountains; how could the fears of life and death shake them any more?

If you wish to understand easily, simply face the rising mind and moving thoughts throughout the twelve hours. Just following these moving thoughts, right there, you suddenly see clearly that there is nothing to gain, like great empty space. Also, empty space has neither shape nor boundary. Inside and outside are one reality. Both wisdom and its objects disappear. Both reality and an understanding of it are eliminated. The three times, past, present and future, are all equal. Those who have reached such a field are called people of the serene way who have nothing to study and are uninvolved in doing.

If you want to cut off the path of birth and death, you should throw away everything you have always treasured in your mind. Then your six senses will naturally be clean and naked. One day you will have a flash of insight and no longer worry that the road of birth and death will not be cut off. If you do not make real application basic, and instead desire lots of knowledge and intellectual understanding, considering this the subtlety of self-realization, then you will be blown by the wind of knowledge and intellectual understanding, making you colder and hotter, constantly occurring to you, so that your nose is stuffed up and your head is unclear, day in and day out. This is a calamity you bring on yourself—it is not the fault of another.

If people who study the path are intending to concentrate on Zen, they should only concentrate on the Zen of the “solitary shining of a lone lamp in the hall of nirvana.” Do not set up specific periods, hoping to awaken to the path within a certain time. That is laughable. This Zen has no trouble and no pain: the only important thing is to step back and trust completely; hang your pack high and break your staff. Stiffen your spine, and be like wood or stone inside, and like open space outside. Suddenly the tub of lacquer comes apart, and the five clusters and eighteen elements are washed clear and clean; all beings are suddenly liberated. Once you have seen this highway, it is not the place to stop: when you arrive at clear understanding of universal truth, only then will you find true and false, right and wrong, clearly distinguished in every case. This is called insuperably great independent spiritual mastery.

Recently a kind of devil has emerged, referred to in the teachings as bad friends. They each expound different interpretations, claiming to help people. Some teach people to stop their minds and not think at all, cutting off any stirring thought the moment it arises. Some teach people to do nothing at all, not even burn any incense or perform any prostrations. Some only teach people to rationally understand past and present, just like bumbling professors. Some refer to what the ancient adepts held forth with naked hearts, and claim they were setting up schools. Some see a student come and utter a saying that seems right, then half a day later pose a question with another saying; the student presents another saying, and if it fits they say this one has penetration. Now tell me—do these ways of “helping people” actually live up to direct pointing to mind? Clearly there is no connection at all.

Those of superior faculties and great wisdom get the point right off the bat—guidance doesn’t mean gum-beating and lip-flapping. Truly awakened people with clear eyes would just laugh. The great masters of India and China only met mind to mind—from the first there was never any “mind” to attain. But if you make a rationale of mindlessness, that is the same as having a certain mentality.

A grand master said, “With uniform equanimity, everything disappears of itself.” Only then do you attain great effectiveness. When you come to the boundary of life and death, you calmly become absolutely still, without any further effort whatsoever. Just being so, like a polar mountain—does that not hit the mark? Zen students in recent times may call themselves seekers, but wherever they take up residence they just keep false ideas in their minds, making contentious disputation a way of life. They are really pitiful. Genuine seekers are not like this. Observe how the ancient sages since time immemorial went from community to company, got to know genuine spiritual friends, and spent ten or twenty years retreating into themselves, like dead ashes and withered trees, carefully finding out what’s at the root and the stem. They had to find reality before they could adapt to conditions while remaining natural and spontaneous, worthy of the name of a Zen student or high-minded pilgrim. If your state of mind is not dear, how can you stop arousing your mind and stirring thoughts twenty-four hours a day, like countless waves lapping all around? How can you dissolve them away? At this point, if you have no penetrating liberation, you are just an ignorant thief stealing the community’s food. When your time is up, all the mechanical knowledge and intellectualism you have acquired in your life will be of no use at all in facing death. Even if you do countless good works all your life, you will have less and less hope of transcending birth and death. You will only get human or heavenly blessings and rewards; when the rewards are finished, as before you have no way out.

In olden times, Ta-sui called on over seventy teachers. Those who had great vision were only one or two; the rest had accurate knowledge and perception. Hsiang-lin associated with Yun-men for eighteen years, working as an attendant; every word, even half a phrase, he would record on his paper robe. By these two extremes we can see how sincere the ancients were about truth. When they reached penetration, they were empowered, transcending beyond all traps, devices, strategies, and emotional and intellectual interpretation. This is what is meant by the saying that the lion king does not roar at random. In recent times, the Zen schools are weak and dilute. What is their problem? The problem lies in individual lack of self-trust. And where does this problem come from? It generally comes from the basis not being correct. As long as the basis is not correct, even if you put yourself in a Zen community, you will see the Zen community as an inn; even if you talk about studying Zen and learning Zen, you will be like geese hearing thunder. From these two extremes we can also see the difference between people of the present and people of olden times. 

If you want to understand readily, just be unminding at all times and all places, and you will naturally harmonize with the path. Once you are in harmony with the path, then inside, outside, and in between are ultimately ungraspable; immediately empty yet solid, you are far beyond dependency. This is what ancient worthies called “each state of mind not touching on things, each step not positioned anywhere.”

To know by thinking is secondary; to know without thinking is tertiary. It is essential for the individual to directly bear responsibility and put down the two extremes of clarity and unclarity from your learning hitherto; when you reach the state of cleanness and nakedness, then you must go on over to the Beyond, where you kill Buddhas when you see Buddhas, kill Zen masters when you see Zen masters. In Zen, this is still the work of servants. Independent people should not seek Zen or Tao or mystery or marvel from the mouths of old monks sitting on the corners of meditation seats and stuff that into stinking skin-bags, considering it the ultimate principle. Isn’t this a mistake?

The verbal teachings of Buddhas and Zen masters that have come down from the past are like bits of tile used to knock on a door; it is a matter of expediency that we use them as entrances into truth. For some years now, students have not been getting to the root of the aim of Zen, instead taking the verbal teachings of Buddhas and Zen masters to be the ultimate rule. That is like ignoring a hundred thousand pure clear oceans and only focusing attention on a single bubble.

The Zen Reader, Shambhala. Kindle Edition. Thomas Cleary

 

Kabir 

The Drop and the Sea

I went looking for Him
And lost myself;
The drop merged with the Sea --
Who can find it now?

Looking and looking for Him
I lost myself;
The Sea merged with the drop --
Who can find it now?

Still the body

Still the body
still the mind
still the voice inside

in silence
feel the stillness move

friends
this feeling
cannot be imagined

Lift the veil

lift the veil
that obscures
the heart

and there
you will find
what you are
looking for

O Slave, liberate yourself

O Slave, liberate yourself.

Where are you, and where's your home,
find it in your lifetime, man.

If you fail to wake up now,
you'll be helpless when the end comes.

Says Kabir, listen, O wise one,
the siege of Death is hard to withstand.

Hiding in this cage

Hiding in this cage of visible matter
is the invisible lifebird

pay attention
to her

she is singing
your song

Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing

Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing:
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,
and it never winds down.

Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.

Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.

My body is flooded

My body is flooded
With the flame of Love.
My soul lives in
A furnace of bliss.

Love's fragrance
Fills my mouth,
And fans through all things
With each outbreath.

O how may I ever express that secret word?

O how may I ever express that secret word?
O how can I say He is not like this, and He is like that?
If I say that He is within me, the universe is ashamed:
If I say that He is without me, it is falsehood.
He makes the inner and the outer worlds to be indivisibly one;
The conscious and the unconscious, both are His footstools.
He is neither manifest nor hidden, He is neither revealed nor unrevealed:
There are no words to tell that which He is.

Hey brother, why do you want me to talk?

Hey brother, why do you want me to talk?
Talk and talk and the real things get lost.

Talk and talk and things get out of hand.
Why not stop talking and think?

If you meet someone good, listen a little, speak;
If you meet someone bad, clench up like a fist.

Talking with a wise man is a great reward.
Talking with a fool? A waste.

Kabir says: A pot makes noise if it's half full,
But fill it to the brim -- no sound.

Do not go to the garden of flowers!

Do not go to the garden of flowers!
O friend! Go not there;
In your body is the garden of flowers.
Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty.

"All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop."

“Be quiet in your mind, quiet in your senses, and also quiet in your body. Then, when all these are quiet, don’t do anything. In that state truth will reveal itself to you.”

https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/K/Kabir/Donotgotothe/index.html

 

     Emily Dickinson -1830 - 1886

     I’m Nobody! Who are you?
     Are you – Nobody – too?
     Then there’s a pair of us!
     Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

     How dreary – to be – Somebody!
     How public – like a Frog –
     To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
     To an admiring Bog!

Shodo Harada Roshi:

"... This clear human character, which is like a mirror, can accept and receive everything, but nothing that is reflected can get stuck to this mirror. It reflects everything exactly as it is, but the mirror itself stays untouched. This mirror-like Mind has no sense of “that’s me” or “that’s him, not me.” It has no dualism; it makes no distinctions like that. At that true base, there actually is no differentiation between self and others. The world that is reflected in—reflected by—that mirror is not one of self and other; it has no such separation, it accepts everything as one unified whole. From the origin there is only one world, with no division into “my” world and “your” world.

In zazen we need to align our body so that our mind, like a great huge mirror the size of the universe, can better reflect the myriad things.

From the beginning we all have a clear nature; we dont gain it because we train, but it may take some time to awaken to it.

Although people have different names and different histories, there is a place within each of us, that is before all that, identical in each of us and uniting all of us; it is that place in each person, that hears the dog barking and sees the red flowers in the same way. The sound, that the buddha hears, is the same sound that we hear. We all have the same mind.... This mind, that every person has from birth, is what we call buddha nature.

When we see in this way, we love everything directly, not because we think we should, but because there is no way to see anything as apart from ourselves. When what is seen and what is seeing are one, that is prajna, and a spontaneous love for all beings is born from there."

Hidden Valley Zen Center, Yuukoku-ji

Pai-chang

Things have never declared themselves empty, nor do they declare themselves form; and they do not declare themselves right, wrong, defiled, or pure. Nor is there a mind that binds and fetters people. It is just because people themselves give rise to vain and arbitrary attachments that they create so many kinds of understanding, produce so many kinds of opinion, and give rise to many various likes and fears. Just understand that things do not originate of themselves. All of them come into existence from your own single mental impulse of imagination mistakenly clinging to appearances. If you know that mind and objects fundamentally do not contact each other, you will be set free on the spot. Everything is in a state of quiescence right where it is; this very place is the site of enlightenment. 

Thomas Cleary, The Zen Reader (p. 55). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 

To Know the Dark

By Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

 

BODHIDHARMA’S EMPTINESS 

Robert Aitken

 

BLUE CLIFF RECORD, CASE 1

Story

EMPEROR WU OF LIANG asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching?” Bodhidharma said, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.” The Emperor asked, “Who stands before me?” Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know.” The Emperor did not understand. Bodhidharma then crossed the Yangtze River and went on to the kingdom of Wei. Later, the Emperor took up this matter with Duke Chih. Chih said, “Your Majesty, do you know who that was?”

The Emperor said, “I don’t know.” Chih said, “That was the Great Personage Kuan-yin, conveying the mind-seal of the Buddha.” The Emperor felt regretful, and wanted to send an emissary to invite Bodhidharma to return. Chih said, “Your Majesty, don’t say you will send someone to bring him back. Even if everyone in the whole country were to go after him, he would not return.”

Personae

Emperor Wu, Liang Wu-ti (Ryu Butei), ruled 502–549 in the Southern Sector of the Six Dynasties (428–588). Bodhidharma, d. 532, is traditionally considered to be the 28th Dharma successor of the Buddha Shakyamuni, and is venerated as the founder of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in China. Duke Chih (Shi), the priest Pao-chih (Hoshi), (417/421–514), was Wu’s religious advisor.

Comment

 At the time of this audience, Buddhism had been established in China for five hundred years. The Emperor Wu of Liang was an especially devout and learned follower. He wrote commentaries on Prajñaparamita literature and on the Nirvana Sutra. During his reign of forty-seven years, he convened a total of sixteen Dharma assemblies, at which he would sometimes don a monk’s robe and explicate a sutra. These were great gatherings, it is said, with as many as fifty thousand people taking part. Era names were changed in honor of these occasions. General amnesty was given to criminals. During the conventions, the Emperor would work as a menial for a while at a Buddhist temple. He gave of his own treasure to Buddhist establishments, and also set up a system of dana, whereby wealthy patrons of Buddhism could deposit their money as endowments for temples and monasteries. He was, we can understand, known as the Imperial Bodhisattva.

Bodhidharma appeared in Southern China after a long career in India as a master of the Buddha Way. His distinguished reputation preceded him, and the Emperor invited him to an audience. It did not go well.

The Emperor asked, “I have endowed hundreds of temples and monasteries, and endorsed the ordination of thousands of monks and nuns; what is my merit?” Bodhidharma replied, “No merit.”

Merit, here, is the compound word kung-te. Both elements of this term mean “merit”; kung refers to an act of benevolence, while te is the authority one accumulates with selfless conduct that is appropriate for the world. It is the te of the Tao-te ching, translated by Arthur Waley as “The Way and Its Power.” With each act of rectitude, your acknowledgment by others and your inner assurance builds a little, like incense-ash building in its receptacle. Among traditional peoples, te by whatever name is the path to the status of elder, and in all cultures the nobility of a Gough Whitlam, a Vaclav Havel, or a Dag Hammarskjold, is widely acknowledged.

The denial of kung-te in the face of universal, timeless experience is, of course, a denial of karma itself, a denial that action leads to consequence. Bodhidharma was making a point beyond points, and the Emperor was astute enough to sense this much. He had the flexibility of an experienced interlocutor. It wasn’t the first time that he had fallen back in a religious encounter.

If there is no merit in saving the many beings, he might be saying, if indeed I have no merit in establishing a dana system of accumulating large donations and dispersing them for the advancement of the Dharma, then let’s look deeper.

He knew from his discussions with Fu Ta-shih and other wise Buddhist teachers of his time that appearance is the conventional and the real is its vacancy. Yet the two, he knew, are one. Form and emptiness are the same. As Yüan-wu implies, this is surely what the Emperor had in mind when he asked, “What is the first principle of the holy teaching?”

Bodhidharma was ready with a response every bit as uncompromising as his first reply. “Vast emptiness,” he said, “nothing holy.” How many people have bowed in reverence at such a holy teaching!—without a speck of irony! Yüan-wu quotes his teacher, Wu-tsu, saying, “If you can just see into ‘Vast emptiness, nothing holy,’ then you can return home and sit in peace.”

Can you do that? It is at this point that you are vulnerable to the scrutiny of the ancients. You are vulnerable to the scrutiny of your spouse and children, your colleagues and superiors, and the lady at the bank. How do you show Bodhidharma’s position?

The Emperor then asked,” Who stands before me?” Some say this was the defense of a veteran colloquist who had reached the end of his seasoned patience. He felt his back was to the wall. He used the imperial “me,” a pronoun reserved for the Son of Heaven. Was he getting on his high horse a little?

No, it seems that the Emperor was not a defensive kind of person. Reading his brief biography in Kenneth Ch’en’s Buddhism in China, I find a man who took his role as emperor seriously, but did not let it master him. I think he was simply making a final effort to grasp Bodhidharma’s meaning. I don’t understand, he was saying. If you say there is no such thing as essential truth, then who are you? Aren’t you a distinguished priest of truth? Who are you to say that the first principle of the holy teaching is empty and not holy?

Bodhidharma loosed his final shaft. “I don’t know.” It was his ultimate endeavor to convey the fundamental fact of facts to the Emperor Wu—the cap to his earlier responses. Patiently, compassionately he had made the same point, first this way, then that. There is no merit, there is no first principle, and there is nothing holy. There is nothing at all. Finally, I can’t say anything even about myself.

“Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”—this was a stock question in T’ang period dialogues. Lin-chi said, “If he had any reason, he could not have saved even himself.” Shih-t’ou Hsi-ch’ien said, “Ask the post standing there.” When the monk said he didn’t understand, Shih-t’ou said, “My ignorance is worse than yours.”

I take a leaf from Wu-tzu. Unless you can acknowledge, “I don’t know” to the very bottom, you can never return home and sit in peace, but you will live your life to the very end in meaningless chatter.

If, however, you come before a true teacher and, with a show of consequence, chant “I don’t know,” you still might be sent away. The words themselves, however emphasized, are not necessarily the message of the old founder. How do you see Bodhidharma here, confronting his Imperial Majesty with the inexpressible verity?

Just as form and emptiness are the basic complementarity of Mahayana Buddhism in its metaphysics, so intimacy with the other and with the unequivocal void are the basic complementarity of Mahayana experience. We perceive forms in our earliest childhood, and experience intimacy with the other in puberty, not only sexually, but also in nature and in the arts. Emptiness is still hidden, however. Bodhidharma and his great successors take students in hand to show how all perceptions are totally vacant. We evolve from what John Keats called the “sole self” to the universal, and from there with rigorous practice to realize vast and fathomless nothingness. Just as the sole self does not work in a relationship, so the universal self must drop off both the universe and the one who perceives. Then the self and forms of the world can be seen as they are, in their colors and sounds and textures, in their beauty and ugliness, but essentially without any substance whatever.

Moreover, it is not that I see that all things are void, but I myself am unknown and unknowable. This is by no means merely an experience of undifferentiated vacuum. It is liberation at last. In the Cheng-tao ke we read:

 

The mind-mirror shines brilliantly, without obstruction;

its light reaching worlds as countless as sands of the Ganges.

The ten-thousand things are all reflected here,

illumined perfectly, neither inside nor outside.

 

Teachers worth their salt will nod patiently while students rhapsodize upon oneness, and will wait until those students can truly show “I don’t know” with a radiant smile and flashing eyes. Then it is prudent to go on to the ten thousand things.

There is, of course, the phenomenon called the “Den of Mara,” the cave of Satan, where one is stuck in emptiness, and nothing matters. There is no distinction between old and young, male and female, virtue and vice. Nothing happens and everyone is paralyzed. Over and over the literature of Zen Buddhism renews the archetype of the Buddha Shakyamuni, arising from his samādhi beneath the Bodhi Tree to seek out his five disciples in Benares. His liberation and ours brings weighty responsibility. You can’t stay under the Bodhi Tree. You can’t go on babbling “Nothing special.”

Nonetheless, it is under that Bodhi Tree that realization arises. Even the interbeing of the plenum as the self remains an incomplete perception, unless it is clear in peak experience that everything is void, empty, vacant. Even the marvelous panorama of the Hua-yen, with its model of the universe as a multidimensional net with each point containing all other points, is just a romantic notion, unless it is realized by the one with no skull and no skin.

But Bodhidharma could not get his message of essential emptiness across. “Your Majesty,” asked the Duke, “Do you know who that was?” “I don’t know,” the Emperor replied. Yüan-wu asks,” Is this ‘I don’t know’ the same as Bodhidharma’s ‘I don’t know?’” Honored friends, what is your opinion?

Bodhidharma put away any thought that he might convert the Emperor from devotion and scholarship to the freedom of a great laugh, and any thought that such enlightenment might trickle down to the masses of the Chinese people. He crossed the Yangtze River and journeyed to the kingdom of Wei in Northwestern China.

There he found a ruined temple and took up residence in a cave behind it, facing a wall in zazen, it is said, for the last nine years of his life. Four disciples gathered, three men and one woman, including the monk we venerate as Hui-k’o (Eka), through whom the Dharma line descended, ultimately in another seven generations to blossom in the efflorescence of Ch’an during the T’ang period.

Several masters in our great tradition became advisors to the emperors of their time—in China, then in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—but the ideal of Zen Buddhism as a rigorous teaching for the few has never been completely lost. Duke Chih, about whom we know very little except that he was a priest the Emperor held in highest regard, intuitively understood Bodhidharma. “He is the Great Personage Kuan-yin,” the Duke said. He is the incarnation of mercy and compassion, conveying the transmission of the Buddha that has been passed from mind to mind for twenty-eight generations. And he won’t come back, ever, ever, ever.

The Emperor felt remorseful at the time, and indeed for the rest of his life. When Bodhidharma died, the Emperor mourned him, and personally wrote an inscription for his monument. It read:

Alas! I saw him without seeing him; I met him without meeting him; I encountered him without encountering him. Now as before, I regret this deeply.

“He wrings his hands and beats his breast, addressing a plea to the sky,” as Yüan-wu says. But the Emperor further eulogized Bodhidharma by saying, “If your mind exists, you are stuck in the mundane for eternity. If it does not exist, you experience wondrous enlightenment instantly.” He gained some insight at last, it seems, but he could not meet again with the old foreigner to have it examined.

Many of us have had the experience of missing the truth on the first round. When I was sixteen or so, my Sunday-evening class at Central Union Church in Honolulu took up non-Christian faiths. We visited the Honpa Hongwanji Mission, the local headquarters of the Jodo Shinshu school of Buddhism, and heard a talk by the Venerable Ernest Hunt, a Theosophist turned Buddhist, who was a priest of that temple. He held forth on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and I thought it was the driest, more boring lecture I had ever heard in my whole life. Yet thirty years later Dr. Hunt and I were fast friends, and we exchanged insights with delight.

If Bodhidharma would not return to the palace, why didn’t the Emperor hitch up his robes and chase after him? He couldn’t. Maybe he could scrub toilets in a monastery for a day or so, but everybody knew this was part of his function as the Imperial Bodhisattva. As Emperor, however, he couldn’t go haring off into somebody else’s kingdom, even in disguise. He probably didn’t even consider it. He was imprisoned by his position.

If, as Wu-men says, the truth is like a racehorse that dashes by your window, and you miss it because you blink, then it is important to place yourself where it can dash by again, and again, until you finally get a glimpse of it.

Do you have a glimpse? How do you see Bodhidharma as he makes his three responses? Please don’t begin your reply with, “Well, I think he is…” That puts the old boy back in Asia in the sixth century. This is not a story about far away and long ago. It is my story and yours—our way to mature humanity.

 

John Daido Loori. Sitting with Koans: Essential Writings on Zen Koan Introspection (p. 299). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.