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#2472 -
"Best of any
song is bird song in the quiet,
but first you
must have the quiet."
--Wendell Berry
posted to Daily Dharma
Trout Grass
Last week, I saw
a documentary film ostensibly about how bamboo is transformed
into a meticulously crafted split-cane fly rod for trout fishing.
The best bamboo
for this only grows around a certain mountain in southern
there. The making of them at the workshop is also truly an art.
You can see all this
from just a few clips on their website. But this isn't really a
film review. Since it is
unlikely to turn up many places, you'd probably have to buy the
DVD to see it
anyway.
I just want to
share that moment of Zen near the end, when two old guys are
wading into the sparkling clear river in
give one another the gift of their absence. What I remember about
fishing from
my childhood vacations was the beauty of being on a river at dawn
in the quiet, with
water slapping the boat and birdcalls the only sounds. It was
nice to hear that
fishing was not even for getting fish, as most now practice catch
and release. So it
was somewhat expected that the narration would begin to
rhapsodize about
connecting with the life of the river through the spirit of
the bamboo. Then he
said, "The nouns come and go, but the verbs go on forever.
This is about losing
yourself in the river and being timeless."
--Gloria
Alan Larus
photos, http://www.ferryfee.com/bluesky/islands/spring.htm
This is the
Mind-seal of not one thing.
What is “not one thing?”
Mountains fresh and green,
Water clear and flowing.
--Yamaoka Tesshu (1830)
Just Being At the Piano
Just being at the
piano--egoless--is to reach the place where the only thing that
exists is the sound and the moving toward the sound. The music on
the page that
was outside of you is now within you, and moves through you; you
are a channel for
the music, and play from the center of your being. Everything
that you have
consciously learned, all of your knowledge emanates from within
you. There is a
sense of oneness in which the heart of the musician and the heart
of the composer
meet, in which there is no room for self-conscious thought. You
are one with
yourself and the act, and feel as if playing has already happened
and you are
effortlessly releasing it. The music is in your hands, in the
air, in the room, the
music is everywhere, and the whole universe is contained in the
experience of
playing.
--Mildred Chase,
from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran
Meditation will not carry you to
another world, but it will reveal the most profound
and awesome dimensions of the world in which you already live.
Calmly
contemplating these dimensions and bringing them into the service
of compassion
and kindness is the right way to make rapid gains in meditation
as well as in life.
--Hsing Yun
What is of all things most yielding
Can overcome that which is most hard,
Being substanceless, it can enter in
Even where there is no crevice.
That is how I know the value
Of action which is actionless.
But that there can be teaching without words,
Value in action which is actionless
Few indeed can understand.
--Lao Tzu (5th c.)
Buddha Within
Jamgon Kongtrul
The ultimate luminosity of Dharmakaya, absolute truth,
is nothing other than the very nature
of this uncontrived, ordinary mind.
Don't look elsewhere for the Buddha.
It is nothing other than the nature of this present
awareness.
This is the Buddha within.
There are innumerable Dharma teachings.
There are many antidotes
to many different kinds of spiritual diseases.
There are many words
in the Mahamudra and Dzogchen nondual teachings.
But the root, the heart of all practices is included
here,
in simply sustaining the luminous nature of this
present awareness.
If you search elsewhere for something better,
a Buddha superior to this present awareness,
you are deluding yourself.
You are chained,
entangled in the barbed wire of hope and fear.
So give it up!
Simply sustain present wakefulness,
moment after moment."
posted by Jax to Dzogchen Practice
Although you may
understand the explanations, if you are still suffering because
of
problems, you clearly do not understand the true nature of your
mind, your body,
and your senses.
-Lama Zopa
Rinpoche, "Transforming Problems Into Happiness"
The Liar That
Lives in Your Head
By don Miguel
Ruiz with Janet Mills
Adapted from
"The Voice of Knowledge" by don Miguel Ruiz
Before we were
born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The
storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.
First they told us
what we are—a boy or a girl—then they told us who we
are, and who we should or
shouldn't be. They taught us how to be a woman or how to be a
man. They told us to
be a proper woman, a decent woman, a strong man, a brave man.
They gave us a
name, and they told us the role we would play in their story.
They prepared us to
live in the human jungle, to compete with one another, to impose
our will, to fight
against our own kind. They filled us with knowledge, and of
course we believed
them. From the storytellers around us, we learned how to create
our own story.
posted by Viorica
Weissman to The Power of Silence
"To the
as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated
nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life.
I have come down
with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness,
and then a
little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound
poured in.
Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing
they said could
be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and
that was
that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They
said I was in
They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon
detail. They do it still.
You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and
that I am fifty years old. Blah
blah blah..."
--Kurt Vonnegut,
in "Deadeye Dick"
posted by Wayne
Ferguson to The Power of Silence
Everywhere is the treasury of endless capacities of followers of
the way.
Everywhere is not everywhere; it is called everywhere.
-Hui-k'ung From
"The Pocket Zen Reader," edited by Thomas Cleary, 1999