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#3752 -
Monday, December 21, 2009 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
by Michael Rawls on Facebook
"The Loneliest Job in the World"
As soon as you begin to ask the question,
Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,
and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,
trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.
It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving
in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,
paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.
by Tony Hoagland from Unincorporated Persons in the Late
Honda Dynasty. © Graywolf Press, 2010 from The Writer's
Almanac
From the album:
"Fine Art Photography" by Craig Royal
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/photo.php?pid=791766&id=1651266169
The true person is
Not anyone in particular;
But, like the deep blue color
Of the limitless sky,
It is everyone, everywhere
In the world.
Dogen
"Profound and tranquil, free from
complexity,
Uncompounded luminous clarity,
Beyond the mind of conceptual ideas;
This is the depth of the mind of the Victorious Ones.
In this there is not a thing to be removed,
Nor is there anything to be added.
It is merely the immaculate
Looking naturally at itself."
- Nyoshuh Khen Rinpoche
From the book, "Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections On
Living And Dying," published by Harper Collins. posted to
Daily Dharma by Anipachen
Excerpt from 'Transmission of Mind' by Huang Po
Anything possessing any signs is illusory. It is by
perceiving that all signs are no signs that you perceive the
Tathagata. “Buddha” and “sentient beings”
are both your own false conceptions. It is because you do
not know real Mind that you delude yourselves with such objective
concepts. If you will conceive of a Buddha, you will be
obstructed by that Buddha! And when you conceive of
sentient beings, you will be obstructed by those beings.
All such dualistic concepts as “ignorant” and “Enlightened,”
“pure” and “impure,” are obstructions.
Question: If our own Mind is the Buddha, how did
Bodhidharma transmit his doctrine when he came from India?
Answer: When he came from India, he transmitted only
Mind-Buddha. He just pointed to the truth that the minds of
all of you have from the very first been identical with the
Buddha, and in no way separate from each other. That is why
we call him our Patriarch. Whoever has an instant of
understanding of this truth suddenly transcends the whole
hierarchy of saints and adepts belonging to any of the Three
Vehicles. You have always been one with the Buddha, so do
not pretend you can attain to this oneness by various practices.
Discuss it as you may, how can you even hope to approach the
truth through words? Nor can it be perceived either
subjectively or objectively. So full understanding can come
to you only through an inexpressible mystery. The approach
to it is called the Gateway of the Stillness Beyond All
Activity. If you wish to understand, know that a sudden
comprehension comes when the mind has been purged of all the
clutter of conceptual and discriminatory thought-activity.
Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only
get further and further away from it.
Were you now to practice keeping your minds motionless at all
times, whether walking, sitting, standing, or lying;
concentrating entirely upon the goal of no thought-creation, no
duality, no reliance on others and no attachments; just allowing
all things to take their course the whole day long, as though you
were too ill to bother; unknown to the world; innocent of any
urge to be known or unknown to others; with your minds like
blocks of stone that mend no holes—then all the Dharmas
would penetrate your understanding through and through. In
a little while you would find yourselves firmly unattached.
Thus, for the first time in your lives, you would discover your
reactions to phenomena decreasing and, ultimately, you would pass
beyond the Triple World; and people would say that a Buddha had
appeared in the world. Pure and passionless knowledge
implies putting an end to the ceaseless flow of thoughts and
images, for in that way you stop creating karma that leads to
rebirth—whether as gods or men or as sufferers in hell.
The Void is fundamentally without spatial dimensions, passions,
activities, delusions or right understanding. You must
clearly understand that in it there are no things, no people and
no Buddhas; for this Void contains not the smallest hairsbreadth
of anything that can be viewed spatially; it depends on nothing
and is attached to nothing. It is all-pervading, spotless
beauty; it is the self-existent and uncreated Absolute. A
perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one,
will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; and by
this understanding will you awake to the truth of Zen.
Excerpted from The Zen Teaching of Huang Po
Trans John Blofeld 1958 http://dailyzen.com/zen/zen_reading0912.asp posted to OpenAwareness by Roy Whenary