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#2594 - Sunday, September 24, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
"Try to feel the truth, as well as know it."
--Vernon Howard
My favorite quote is on
a marker at the location this
epiphany happened:
"Yesterday, in Louisville,
at the corner of 4th and
Walnut, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the
realization that I loved all these people, that they
were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to
one another even though we were total strangers. It
was like waking from a dream of separateness, of
spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world
of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole
illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not
that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my
monastic life: but the conception of "separation from
the world" that we have in the monastery too easily
presents itself as a complete illusion....I have the
immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which
God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and
stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me,
now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody
could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There
is no way of telling people that they are all walking
around shining like the sun."
--Thomas Merton posted by Diana to Awakened Awareness
This World Which
Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This
place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear,
hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown
off into emptiness.
These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
~Rumi
from website <http://www.khamush.com/poems.html>
The photographs that accompany The Heart Sutra are by Robert O'Hearn, as posted to Garden Mystics.
THE HEART SUTRA
Here, O
Sariputra,
form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form;
emptiness does not differ from form,
form does not differ from emptiness,
whatever is emptiness, that is form,
the same is true of feelings, perceptions,
impulses, and consciousness.
Here, O Sariputra,
all dharmas are marked with emptiness;
they are not produced or stopped,
not defiled or immaculate,
not deficient or complete.
Therefore,
O Sariputra,
in emptiness there is no form nor feeling,
nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness;
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;
No forms, sounds, smells, tastes,
touchables or objects of mind;
No sight-organ element, and so forth, until we come to:
No mind-consciousness element;
There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance,
and so forth, until we come to:
There is no decay and death,
no extinction of decay and death.
There is no suffering, no origination,
no stopping, no path.
There is no cognition,
no attainment and no non-attainment.
Therefore, O Sariputra,
it is because of his non-attainmentness that a Bodhisattva,
through having relied on the Perfection of Wisdom,
dwells without thought-coverings.
In the absence of thought-coverings
he has not been made to tremble,
he has overcome what can upset,
and in the end he attains to Nirvana.
All those who appear as Buddhas in the three periods of time
fully awake to the utmost, right and perfect Enlightenment
because they have relied on the Perfection of Wisdom.
Therefore one should know the prajnaparamita
as the great spell, the spell of great knowledge,
the utmost spell, the unequalled spell,
allayer of all suffering, in truth -- for what could go wrong?
By the prajnaparamita has this spell been delivered.
It runs
like this:
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
(Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond,
O what an awakening, all-hail ! --)
This completes the Heart of perfect Wisdom.
~ Translated by E. Conze
LoveAlways