Without Effort

Unattended and without effort,

The Earth spins on,

Endlessly describing its arc

Around a star that never blinks.

Rain, without urging,

Always finds its way

Back to the sea.

The Earth, star, rain, rivers and the sea perform their endless action without intent and without effort. Our bodies function in a similar fashion, cells beyond number live and thrive without premeditation of any sort. Acting in concert, their wet net gives rise to the forms we call ourselves. The natural function of these collective cells gives rise to cognition, but its very easy to get lost in our thoughts. In meditation, we may still the busy mind and restore our perspective. With balanced mind, we are free to enjoy our effortless world once more.

Enjoy!

Today's handsome image comes from a copyright-free archive at:

http://www.123rf.com/photo_6956303_earth-and-sun-space-sunrise.html

The Real Way of All Flesh

All flesh that’s fallen,

It is found,

Lies ever changing

In the ground,

Sustaining empires of

Small hungry creatures.

Beetles, ants and fungi

And bacteria all thrive

On the remains of those who

Were once themselves alive.

Scattered ashes in

Garden soil or sea

Nourish numberless now,

As well as those who

Are still yet to be.

Life circles all,

Both Feed and Fed,

And not even

Those who die

Are dead.

What's all this fuss about life and death? None of us getting out of the chain of life anytime soon, so don't bother running, you can't get away! Just relax and enjoy being fed while you can, your turn to play food will come soon enough. Those salmon were having a pretty great time up until the moment they got caught. And now? Delicious!

Life has been thriving on this mud ball for a long time and will go on thriving for a long time to come. So what if the Empire of the Meat Eating Monkeys slowly passes away or is gone in a flash? Those of us writing and reading this are the part of the process that got to sit up and admire the scenery. Enjoy the view, my friends, that's why you're here. It's a truly rare privilege to be here now, so pay close attention!

The cool customers pictured above made their brief appearance at Seattle's Pikes Place Market earlier this year. How about you?

A Fundamental Truth

What's so fun

About being demented?

Eager office seekers

Claim to be,

Washed in the Blood

Of the Lamb.

But who would trust

Their precious flocks

To the care of

Such hungry wolves?

There are some days that I just shouldn't open the newspaper. I originally included a second, very angry verse here, but after a few moment's calm reflection I decided to redact it from this page. Angry words, like angry deeds, have a way of bouncing around and coming back to one. We could all do well to keep that in mind. I'll keep trying.

Disturbing image is from PhotoshopTalent.com

Zen's Chinese Heritage

"A monk asked, "Why did the First Ancestor come from the west?"

Sansheng said, "Spoiled meat draws flies."

Wait, did he just compare Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, to a rot seeking fly?

Yep!

These irreverent words were the response of Sansheng Huiran, prominent disciple of Linji Yixuan. Sansheng was a well-traveled Zenist, having sharpened his abilities with the likes of Yangshan, Xiangyan, Deshan, Daowu and many other well-known teachers of the Tang Dynasty Chan, or Zen, milieu. The words of all of these illustrious characters and many, many more may be found in the pages of the new revised edition of Andy Ferguson's monumental "Zen's Chinese Heritage".

Americans with only a casual familiarity with it may be forgiven for thinking that Zen is a Japanese creation. The art and architecture, calligraphy, tea ceremonies and the tranquil gardens of the famous Japanese monasteries are all familiar images to Westerners today. It's fair to say the the Japanese culture has deeply absorbed many of the values and perspectives of Zen into its' very core.

Zen was first transmitted to these shores by pioneering Japanese masters, its' foundational texts such as the classic koan collections "The Blue Cliff Record" and the "Gateless Barrier" came to us through Japanese texts, texts that used the traditional Japanese names for the seminal Chinese masters.

But Chinese they were and Ferguson has delved into the pages of the previously untranslated and unavailable Chinese Chan classic Wudeng Huiyuan (Compendium of Five Lamps) as well as several other similar sources to bring to life twenty-five "generations" of Chan masters from the years 480 to 1260 C.E.. Some of these stories are already familiar to serious students in slightly different form from the previously mentioned koan collections and Japanese "Lamp Transmissions", many more will be brand new to all western readers.

The last few days I have been staying home, recuperating from my latest liver biopsy, a yearly event in the transplant world. This, coupled with the long Labor Day holiday has given me a golden opportunity to dive into this marvelous book in an unhurried fashion, getting to know the ancestors of Zen. As the book is chronologically arranged, the reader can trace the development of the vocabulary and traditions of the various schools from master to student down the line.

I've been lying around for hours reading and making notes for myself in the margins. I've been reflecting and pondering and laughing an awful lot, these old Chan johnnies were a hilarious bunch by and large. Here, laughter and enlightenment go hand in hand. Indeed, the soul of humor is the sudden breaking of mental barriers and realization of surprising new perspectives, and what else is Zen after all?

Just as Andy Ferguson has gone straight to the source to bring us this text, you can go straight to the source to purchase a copy. Publisher, Wisdom Publications, has a great on-line deal on the book, 20% off cover price. Click right here for a link to them if you want. (By the way, this is not any sort of paid ad, I just really like this book and I would like to share my pleasure with you, my gentle readers.)

Let me leave with two stories that particularly tickled my fancy.

This one's for my old friend James Ford over at Monkey Mind.

Baoshou asked a monk, "Where did you come from?"

The monk said, "From West Mountain."

Baoshou asked, "Did you see the monkey?"

The monk said, "I saw it."

Baoshou said, "How clever was it?"

The monk said, "I saw that I was not the least bit clever."

Baoshou hit him.

This other is a classic case of an hapless monk asking a damnfool question and having it turned back on himself. The reader can well imagine the sudden sweat and look of terror on the face of the poor fellow!

A monk asked, "What is the talk that is beyond the buddhas and ancestors?"

Qianfeng said, "I ask you."

The monk said, "Master, please don't ask me."

Qianfeng said, "If I ask you, it doesn't make any difference. So I ask you, what is the talk that is beyond the buddhas and ancestors?"

Black Crows at Dawn

Were I to engage in recriminations,

I would have only myself to berate,

Wasting all those years in

Coming and going,

All that time spent on this and that.

Dear readers, list while I sing,

Sit Zazen while you are still young!

Now grown old and quirky,

My seated body squawks and complains,

Like the cranky black crows

That gather at my window,

Daily with the dawn.

"Caw! Caw!"


Every Monday morning I arise at 5 AM to take a bone density medicine that requires I have an empty stomach and that I must remain upright for at least a half hour after taking. I find it to be a good opportunity to do a little pre-dawn meditation. Meditating with a mind that has not yet been engaged in performing tasks or conversations can be a very powerful practice.

But, if undisturbed by thought, my early morning mind seems to be more closely connected to my aging body's aches and pains, especially if the night has been a cool one. At such times I sometimes wish I had practiced seated meditation more regularly when I was young and in better shape, perhaps I wouldn't find the discomfort quite so distracting if I had. Perhaps such thoughts are just black crows themselves, reflexive complaints that come as predictably as the dawn.

After I've been sitting in my darkened room awhile, "rosy fingered dawn" begins to make her appearance through the curtains, and with her come her raucous heralds, a flock of crows that make their home in the trees surrounding our Lone Oak manse. Bela Lugosi's Dracula famously observes of his baying wolves "Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!" Let me tell you, Dracula's night children have nothing on our "children of the dawn"! Their song is hard to ignore.

I wish to thank Jiyu Jake Gage, Sensei, for the inclusion of the actual song of the crows as the last line here. I often present first draft poems aloud to him at the Vista Zen Center first thing in the morning. "Caw! Caw!" was his immediate response and a good one, I think. It adds a touch of the real and the immediate moment, bringing the lines up to the "now".


Today's image is from an unattributed fine art print I found through Google Images, "Black Crows Gathering"

The Nameless Ones

The tales are true,

I can show you the scars,

The twisted cables

And the broken spars.

They don't care about shutters,

They're not stopped by bars,

The Nameless Ones

Filtered down from the stars.


Three poisons drive Man,

Hate, Delusion and Lust,

But the Nameless Ones

Simply feed when they must.

Some men are from Venus,

Some women from Mars,

But the Nameless Ones

Filtered down from the stars!


This weird little poem owes a great deal to the writings of the great American master, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the virtual father of the genre of cosmic horror. Central to Lovecraft's take on our place in Space and Time is the view that vast forces and intelligences are at play across the vastness of existence and that these "nameless ones" care not one whit for the concerns of the hapless hairless apes dwelling on this little planet.

In one of his finest stories, At The Mountains of Madness, he describes the discovery of the remains of an ancient space-faring race who settled on Earth millions of years ago. Along the way, we learn that all life on Earth is the accidental by-product of their bio-engineering projects. In classic Lovecraft fashion, the protagonists find themselves in a mind-blowing encounter with these elder beings and find all of their previous views and opinions of reality and their place in it blasted away forever in an instant of terrible realization!

I confess that I have been a dedicated fan of Lovecraft since shortly before I began shaving, 43 years or so ago. The dark grandeur of H.P.L.'s vision fascinates me. Over the years I've come to find in it a good deal of the scope and reach of Mahayana Buddhism, sort of a Dharma seen through a glass darkly. This may be just a crazy stretch on my part, but I think Lovecraft might have found the star-spanning wonder of the Avatamsaka Sutra highly interesting. But unlike the Flower-Garland Sutra, Lovecraft's dark dharma holds no hope of liberation, only a blind idiot god howling away at the center of all existence. Any jeweled net Lovecraft would have imagined would turn out to be some sort of horrible trap!

Although disturbing, we should not be alarmed by all this, Lovecraft's dark dharma was created to entertain. Written for his own amusement and for that of his large circle of like-minded friends, the highly rationalistic Lovecraft wrote his scary stories to tease the rational mind. He gives us a close brush with the vast unknown from the safe distance of our armchair.

My little exercise in "dark dharma" came about at the end of a very intense morning of sitting Zazen. It began with the appearance in my mind of a phrase of H.P.L.'s, "filtered down from the stars". The Nameless Ones and the Three Poisons came rushing in close behind and the poem was finished before lunchtime. Phew!

If you have the slightest interest in Lovecraft and his writings, you must check out the outstanding H.P.Lovecraft Literary Podcast!! Hosts Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer have been doing an absolutely fantastic job, working their way through the Master's works in chronological order, discussing each story in depth and having a heck of a lot of fun along the way. I listen to each new episode in my car going to work and they totally make my entire day!

Today's image is a NASA image from the Hubble telescope of the Swan Nebula, a small section of M17, a "hotbed of star formation". Check it out on the blog where I found it, Ecodigerati.

Attachment, Impermanence & Suffering

That day that you told me

That you loved me,

I didn't realize

That you

Were

Talking to

My hair.

I've asked Hakuin's Daruma to be our poster boy for impermanence today. Tradition does not tell us what his hair looked like when he had it, other than to tell us that his beard was red. What ever it looked like, I'm guessing it looked pretty good when he was young and that he probably didn't spend a lot of time brooding about its' loss when he shaved it off. Would that all of us could face the changes wrought by the passage of time so well.

This poem really isn't about hair loss, it is about the pain caused by attachment, lost love, false perceptions, foolish attractions, impermanence and most importantly, realization. This poor person has just had a moment of clarity, lucky devil!

That's a lot of heavy lifting for such a little poem!

I'll leave you with a quote from the ever quotable Dogen Zenji, from Thomas Cleary's translation of Genjokoan.

"Because the Buddha Way originally sprang forth from abundance and paucity, there is birth and death, delusion and enlightenment, sentient beings and Buddhas. Moreover, though this is so, flowers fall when we cling to them, and weeds only grow when we dislike them."

Today's image is a photo taken at the Hakuin exhibition at the LACMA, currently on display. If you live in California, you should make it a point to go see this, the largest such display ever assembled. For information, go to:

http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/sound-one-hand-paintings-and-calligraphy-zen-master-hakuin

The Dogen quote is taken from The Zensite's Dogen section, a wonderful font of all things Dogen, see:

http://www.thezensite.com/MainPages/Dogen_teachings.html