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#2608 - Monday, October 9, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The light which shines Beyond all this heaven ..
Verily, that is the same As the Light ..
Which is here Within a person..
Chandogya 3.13.7
Hard Rain
After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.
You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to
the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time—
and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.
Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are
covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed,
America.
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "Hard Rain" by Tony
Hoagland from Hard Rain: A Chapbook. © Hollyridge
Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
The dream world, the true freedom of the imagination,
does not open to self-conscious manipulation.
--Sister Wendy Beckett
posted by n.m. rai to truevision
"A Bodhisattva Looks at All Beings
with the Eyes of Compassion."
"Peace and compassion go hand in hand with understanding and
non-
discrimination. We choose one thing over another when we
discriminate. With the eyes of compassion, we can look at
all of
living reality at once. A compassionate person sees himself
or
herself in every being. With the ability to view reality
from many
viewpoints, we can overcome all viewpoints and act
compassionately
in each situation. This is the highest meaning of the
word `reconciliation.'"
--Thich Nhat Hanh
From the book, "The Sun My Heart," published by
Parallax Press
posted to Daily Dharma
Knowing What To Do I like that the point of
convergence of liberation theology, Islamic mysticism, and
engaged Buddhism is the sense of love that leads to commitment
and involvement with the world, and not a turning-away from the
world. A form of wisdom that I strive for is the ability to know
what is needed at a given moment in time. When do I need to
reside in that location of stillness and contemplation, and when
do I need to get up off my ass and do whatever is needed to be
done in terms of physical work, or engagement with others, or
confrontation with others? I'm not interested in ranking one type
of action over the other.
--bell hooks, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Fall 1992
From a Tricycle blog
| Oct. 4, 2006 | Dispatches from Buddhist Asia #10: Choshoin, Kyoto, Japan |
| Sadly, it
isn't possible to eat your way to enlightenment. But that
doesn't mean you can't enjoy enlightened eating. One
example is Shojin Ryori, Buddhist vegetarian food that is
often associated with Rinzai Zen temples in Kyoto. Few
Buddhists in Japan are vegetarian, but in the past it was
traditional for monks to eat vegetarian food at least
part of the time, and a delicious and unique cuisine grew
up around this habit. One of the main forms is yudofu,
the specialty of a small Rinzai temple name Choshoin next
to the giant Zen complex of Nanzenji. The restaurant within Choshoin is known as Okutan, and includes both inside and outside dining areas. While outside dining can be unpleasant at some times of the year, it is usually worth the sacrifice. Though exposed to the heat, you can enjoy the tasteful gardens, which combine sand, stone, water, bushes, and trees. This style is often erroneously called "Zen gardening" in the West, though in fact it neither originates from Zen nor is confined to specifically Zen temples. But there's no denying that many Zen temples have produced amazing gardens, and the opportunity to savor one should never be missed. continued at: http://www.tricycle.com/blog/jeff_wilson/3617-1.html Note: If the food descriptions do not interest you, the photos are worth viewing as art. |
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