In all ten
directions of the universe,
there is just one truth. When we see clearly,
all great teachings are the same. What can ever be lost?
What can be gained? If we gain something, it was there from
the beginning of time. If we lose something, it is hiding
somewhere near us. Look: this ball in my pocket:
Can you see how priceless
it is?
If you try to
pour the whole ocean into a pot,
it doesn’t work. You can’t put enough in to
satisfy even one human being for a single day.
The eye of a greedy person is the same: always full,
never satisfied. Only when an oyster becomes
content and stops trying to drink
the whole sea can it settle
down and make a
pearl.
Whoever
is torn by spiritual love
is cleansed of greed – this and every
other weakness. Be happy with this love!
It’s a very good deal – the cure for
all pain, the medicine for our
arrogance, the great
teacher.
Bodies
made of earth ascend
to heaven because of love.
Mountains walk and dance
because of love. Mount Sinai got
drunk with love, and Moses’s
donkey exploded
into light!
Like nay,
the reed flute, I have
stories to tell you. Anyone separated
from the Friend has hundreds of stories, too,
but no tongue to tell them. If you let the flowers wilt
and the garden die, there aren’t any more
songs from bolbol, the
nightingale.
This
whole universe, every
thing and not-thing, is the Beloved.
The lover, just a reflection of that. It’s God’s face
that’s alive, not the mirror! If a person doesn’t have the
courage to love, he’s a bird without wings. No one
can be conscious without the light of the
Friend, but with that love, you can
see truth.
If
your mirror
isn’t reflecting the
Beloved, then
polish it.
translated by Brian Browne Walker, Behzad Ghorbani, & Shahla Ghorbani
The universe
and I are of the same root.
The myriad things and I are
one body. That is
zazen.
Kodo Sawaki Roshi
The verbal teachings of the buddhas and ancestral teachers are just a snare and a trap. They are used as a means of entry into truth. Once you have opened through into clear enlightenment and taken it up, then in the true essence, everything is complete. Then you look upon all the verbal teachings of the buddhas and ancestral teachers as belonging to the realm of shadows and echoes, so you never carry them around in your head.
Many students in recent times do not get to the basis of the fundamental design of the Zen school. They just hold onto the words and phrases, trying to choose among the discussing how close or how far away they are from the truth, and distinguishing gain and loss. They interpret fleeting provisional teachings as real doctrines and boast about how many koans they have been able to sift through and how well they can ask questions about the sayings of the Five Houses of Zen. They are totally sunk in emotional consciousness, and they have lost the true essence in their delusions. This is truly a painful situation.
A genuine Zen teacher would use any means necessary to warn them of their error and enable them to get away from all such wrong knowledge and wrong views. But they would reject this — they would call it contrived mental activity to turn people around and shake them up and refine them. Thus they enter ever more deeply into the forest of thorns of erroneous views.
As the saying goes, “In the end, if you do not meet an adept, as you get older you will just become a fool.”
You must not depend on either the pure or the impure. Having mind and having no mind, having views and having no views — both alternatives vanish like a snowflake put on a red-hot stove. Twenty-four hours a day, from top to bottom, you are free and untrammeled as you wander this road that the thousand sages do not share. Just bring this to complete purity and ripeness and you will naturally become a real person, beyond study and free from contrived activity, a real person whom thousands and tens of thousands of people cannot trap or cage.
I am grateful
for the way my soul is
sometimes drawn to move with
other souls and then separated from them.
I observe here a law of soulmaking
with exciting possibilities for
understanding.
Scenes of how
it operates appear: people
in arctic cold, others in the tropics.
Oceans, high desert canyons, wooded valleys,
all in harmony with “the One who has no partner”.
There is a group that sings and moves in pure joy; another
is quiet in the midst of tremendous grief and carnage.
A tree bristling with thorns: jealousy, meanspirited
revenge. Then the white jasmine flowers
bud, open, and drop the gift
of themselves.
Why are
we shown this?
So we can appreciate
the whole as given. When I am
grieved and without hope, I accept that
as grace, as well as the removal of pain.
A deep knowing comes as we
are shown, receive, and
grow to love
both.