The essential requirement

in studying zen is concentrated focus.

You don’t engage in any forced actions: you just keep

to the fundamental. Right where you stand, you must pass

through to freedom. You must see the original face and walk through

the scenery of the fundamental ground. You do not change your

ordinary actions, yet outside and inside are One Suchness.

You act according to the natural flow and do not set

up anything as particularly special —

you are no different from

an ordinary person.

 

This is called

being a wayfarer who is free

and at peace, beyond learning, free

from contrived actions. Being in this stage,

you do not reveal any traces of mind — there

is no road for the gods to offer you flowers,

and no way for demons and outsiders

to spy on you. This at last is

simple unadorned

reality.

 

Yuanwu

 

 

This

is what you

shall do: Love the earth

and sun and the animals, despise riches,

give alms to every one that asks, stand up for

the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor

to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have

patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat

to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,

go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young

and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open

air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you

have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss

whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall

be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only

in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and

face and between the lashes of your eyes

and in every motion and

joint of your

body.

 

Walt Whitman

 

 

The things that

change are not our real life.

Within us there is another body,

another beauty. It belongs to that ray of light

which never changes. We must discover how to mingle

with it and become one with that unchanging thing.

We must realize and understand this treasure

of truth. That is why we have

come to the world.

 

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

hard candy

 

Buddhism

advises you not to implant

feelings that you don’t really have or avoid

feelings that you do have. If you are miserable you

are miserable; that is the reality, that is what is happening,

so confront that. Look it square in the eye without flinching.

When you are having a bad time, examine that experience,

observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn

its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the

trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by

taking the thing apart piece by piece.

The trap can’t trap you if it has

been taken to pieces.

The result is

freedom.

 

Henepola Gunaratana

 

eric schertler

 

Dream broken,

can’t get back to sleep,

so I sit in my hut in the clear

early dawn. On another mountain the

bell has tolled; on a lone tree the first singing

birds. All of my limbs are tuned and limber, and all

of my states are deeply profound. Before I’ve finished

writing a letter, morning light shoots through the forest

branches. Trusting my nature, there’s nothing outside

I seek. Once quiet, ten thousand entanglements

end; why work for people in the dust,

a hundred years of useless

unrest?

 

Wen-siang