Filling Seven Senses

There is a cactus by my doorstep,

I call it eloquent.

Blooming only once a year,

Saying all it has to say

In just one day.

While men may speak

In shouts and whispers,

And mountains hold forth

With thunder and falling rain,

This cactus catches the world

With petals of pure white,

And a piercing perfume

That fills seven senses,

All at once.


"All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out 
what it was trying to tell me." 
- Laurie Anderson

Today's image is an original photograph. 

Lakavatara Sutra - A Poem

At Buddha's Deli Meats

The Tathagata is behind the counter,

The Dharma loaf is in the slicer.

The World-Honored One cuts it Lanka style,

Each slice thinner

Than the one before,

So thin that at last,

You'd swear it was non-existent!

In the end, he'll tell you

Not to eat meat at all.

Earlier this year, tipped off by Wild Fox Zen's Dosho Port, I was pleased to get a release day copy of Red Pine's new translation of The Lankavatra Sutra. This Buddhist text played an important role in the foundation and development of the Ch'an/Zen tradition in China, having been taught by the First Patriarch Bodhidharma and passed on by him to his first successor, Hui-k'o.

Previously available in English only in a dense and immensely difficult translation by Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki, Red Pine (Bill Porter) has done the Western Zen world an immense service by providing a clearly written text with generous and illuminating facing-page notes on many terms and ideas that might otherwise be difficult for all but a scholar.

I see that a number of on-line Buddhist bloggers and reviewers have covered the book's publication, discussing its' history and significance and what each writer felt were its' merits and shortcomings. Not being a scholar, but instead a lazy poet and given only to short outbursts, I have confined my commentary to the poem above, a poem which it is largely necessary for one to have already read the book to understand. How useful is that?

I found the Lankavatra to be a total gem! It is filled with pithy explications of the mind-only view and the fundamental underpinnings of Zen thought, like the following;

"Assertions and denials

don't exist where there is only mind

as for the body, the world and possessions

unable to see these are mind

and bereft of any wisdom

fools assert and deny."

~ Mahamati's Questions, XXV

"4. In truth nothing arises from causes

nor does anything cease

regard conditioned things

like flowers in the sky

let go deluded views

the grasping and the grasped

5. Nothing has arisen or ever will

nor do causes or conditions exist

nothing exists at all

and these are nothing but words."

~ Mahamati's Questions, XXXI

************************************

The above poem and text was written several months ago, but not posted at the time and left unfinished due to illness. I'm undergoing a treatment that has a number of debilitating side-effects which have largely caused me to lose the energy for blogging. Rather than further developing these thoughts, I'm posting what I have written here now. I'm doing so mostly because I want to recommend this exciting text and translation to anyone who is interested in Zen and its' intellectual, scriptural roots.

For more information or to order a copy of the Lankavatara Sutra, go to  http://www.counterpointpress.com/

A Fool Again

Writing poems again?

Old fool!

Catching thoughts in words

Is like collecting butterflies

Made of smoke.

When I'm in the act of writing, it seems like the work at hand is the greatest thing ever written. When I'm done, the act of of reading what I've written can be terribly humbling! Those flighty thoughts just don't let themselves be pinned down on the paper. Before the ink is dry (actually, I write first-draft with a mechanical pencil) the sense of the thing has flown, leaving only dry husks fixed on the page.

Ah well, we do what we can...

I've been going through a rather demanding medical therapy these last couple of months and it has been a bit of a struggle. I'm way behind posting to this blog, among other things. I have not been idle, however, and I have quite a few new or recent poems to share. I hope to get some up here over the next couple of weeks, but I have learned through experience not to make promises when medical issues are involved.

Smoke butterfly image from:

http://slickzine.com/art/25-pictures-of-awe-inspiring-smoke-art/

Don't Be Deceived!

Don't be deceived by the world around you,

Don't be deceived by yourself.

When you look out the window just now,

Don't confuse the curtains for a landscape.

Don't mistake a pane of glass for

Blue sky and white clouds.

Todays image is a key scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail.

The Broken Bowl

His hands still marked

By scar and callus,

His kingdom now

A shattered palace,

We drink his cup,

No fear, no malice,

This broken bowl,

His sacred chalice.

Just whose hands are scared and callused? What kingdom is it that now is shattered? Whose cup is it at our lips? Why must we drink? Why no fear or malice? What is broken about the bowl? What makes this chalice sacred? Where does "sacred" live?

I wrote this poem yesterday, at noon, at work, in the middle of a very busy holiday retail workday. I'm not sure why the words came to me, but the poem formed itself pretty completely in just a few minutes and I had to stop and write it down on the back of some scratch paper. Several hours later I read it to a friend who dropped by the shop. After I did, her eyes widened and she told me she had just come from witnessing the death of a close friend of her husband.

He had died just a couple of hours earlier, in fact at noon. He died bitter with regrets over his perceived failure to express his love to friends, his failure to get together with friends from the past, the failure to appreciate the good times he had had with others and most of all his failure to help others whom he knew were in need when he could have.

I had been thinking of my poem in terms of this world that we live in as a shattered palace, once lovely now degraded by war, overpopulation, pollution and such, degraded by our own disappointments and false views. I had been thinking of ourselves as the suffering Christ and our own scared hands. The cup as the life that we live, drinking perpetually this less than perfect, wounded moment. This moment, this life itself, as the sacred chalice. If life is not sacred, then what could be? If "sacred" lives at all, surely it is living no other place than in our own hearts and minds. It is our knowing and living itself that gives life to the sacred. How could anything be sacred if tainted with fear or rancor?

But my friend's story forced home a more specific view. Here is one small life, one man, his life now ended. His body a shattered palace, certainly, but his dreams and cares, his feelings of love and friendship lie shattered too, now at an end and shattered by his own inaction. Up to the end, the bitter cup he was forced to drink was of his own making.

Lets us take heart and courage from the knowledge that we are the sacred chalice, we carry the light of life within us all. Lets us all, my friends and loved ones, take warning from the sorrow of another. Let us keep this cup we drink sweet with love, let us share the love we feel with others and when we depart, let us do so with a glad heart.

Use care as you prepare

The cup before you,

Sweet wine or gaul,

Remember,

It is you who

Will drink it.

The lovely broken chalice above is the work of craftsman Ron Chamberlain. It and more can be seen on his website: http://www.rdchamberlin.com/Home.html

Lines on Viewing the Full Lunar Eclipse

Dawn's early light,

The full moon itself,

Drawing veil,

Eclipsing.

Face full masked,

She drops,

Glowing crimson,

Behind distant trees,

Now gone,

And morning fresh delivered.

- 12/10/11

Image from: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/lunar-eclipse-photos/

Dreaming of an Old Friend

In the silent early hours,

When moonlight reveals

Those things that daylight misses,

The shades of memory

Are quite free to come and go.

Thus a visit from an old friend,

Dead now twenty years and more,

With a smile as warm as ever,

But a hand as ungraspable

As mind itself.

In June of 2008 I had a life-saving operation, a liver transplant. After regaining consciousness, I lay immobilized in intensive care for a few days and nights. One night, the nurse who usually hovered nearby, was called away to help deal with another patient in the next room who was dying. All of the staff became so focused on this man that I was left alone for a rather long time.

Lying there alone, I felt suddenly felt a great need to have someone there with me. I was dependent on an oxygen line and uncertain that I could keep breathing if I lost consciousness. Focused powerfully on my breathing, and powerless to move an inch, I turned to my own mind for help. I began to visualize an old friend of mine who had passed away a few years before.

Gene had suffered greatly in his life, surviving both tuberculosis in his youth and lung cancer as an adult. In the years we were friends, he walked with painful deliberation and struggled constantly for air. But he had such a powerful spirit, he never let his difficulties get in the way of his passion for the things he loved, art, music, history, literature and an appreciation for the beauty of women. Gene taught all that knew him by example how to face pain and adversity with courage, good humor and a relentless zest for life.

He was just the sort of friend I needed at that moment and so I conjured him up. I felt his presence and I could almost see him standing by my bedside. Gene was a fierce atheist, a product of an Irish upbringing that forever soured him on anything that smacked of God or an afterlife. I apologized to him for dragging him back from non-existence, for giving him a life of sorts again, if only for a short while, to help me in my moment of need. He seemed to understand and we had a great conversation about memory, existence and where it is that life actually lives. We agreed that it lives in the mind, where the past, the present and the future all have their existence, and where we were in fact having our conversation. It is also where we are at this moment, writing and reading this blog.

When the crisis in the other cubicle reached its' natural conclusion my nurse returned. I bid Gene farewell and allowed him to return to his beloved non-existence, thanking him for allowing me to use him in the way I had.

Now that three years have passed, I am once more undergoing another medical ordeal, this time it's interferon treatment to clear my system of the virus that has caused all the problems in the first place. It will go on for a year and it can be very demanding physically. I admit to feeling some anxiety about doing it, as it is not without serious risks. But a few nights ago, in the early hours when moonlight reveals those things that daylight misses, I had a dream visitor, my old friend Gene. He didn't say anything, he didn't have to. Although I could not grasp his hand, his smile told me all I need to know.

Thanks, Gene.

"The past is ungraspable, the present is ungraspable,

the future is ungraspable."

~ The Diamond Sutra

Our photo today is of the eery beauty of a night-blooming cactus, photographed hours before the dawn.