If in our daily life we
can smile, if we can be peaceful and
happy, not only we, but everyone will profit
from it. This is the most basic kind
of peace work.
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let the lover be crazy
A certain
young man was asking
around. “I need to find a wise person.
I have a problem.” A bystander said, “There’s
no one with intelligence in our town except that man
over there playing with the children, the one riding
the stick-horse. He has keen, fiery insight and
vast dignity like the night sky, but he
conceals it in the madness of
child’s play.”
The young
seeker approached the
children. “Dear father, you who
have become as a child,
tell me a secret.”
“Go away.
This is not a day for
secrets.” “But please! Ride your
horse this way, just for a minute.” The sheikh
play-galloped over. “Speak quickly. I can’t hold this one
still for long. Whoops. Don’t let him kick you. This is a wild
one!” The young man felt he couldn’t ask his serious
question in the crazy atmosphere, so he
joked, “I need to get married. Is
there someone suitable on
this street?”
“There are
three kinds of women
in the world. Two are griefs, and
one is a treasure in the world. The first,
when you marry her, is all yours. The second
is half-yours, and the third is not yours at all. Now get
out of here, before this horse kicks you in the head!
Easy now!” The sheikh rode off among the
children. The young man shouted,
“Tell me more about
the kinds of
women!”
The sheikh,
on his cane horsey,
came closer, “The virgin of
your first love is all yours. She will
make you feel happy and free. A childless widow
is the second, she will be half yours. The third, who is
nothing to you, is a married woman with a child. By her first
husband she had a child, and all her love goes into that child.
She will have no connection with you. Now watch out.
Back away. I’m going to turn this rascal around!”
He gave a loud whoop and rode back,
calling the children
around him.
“One
more question, Master!”
The sheikh circled, “What is it? Quickly!
That rider over there needs me. I think I’m
in love.” “What is this playing that
you do? Why do you hide
your intelligence
so?”
“The people
here want to put me
in charge. They want me to be
judge, magistrate, and interpreter of all the texts.
The knowing I have doesn’t want that. It wants to enjoy
itself. I am a plantation of sugarcane, and at the same time
I’m eating the sweetness.” Knowledge that is acquired is not like
this. Those who have it worry if audiences like it or not. It’s a
bait for popularity. Disputational knowing wants customers.
It has no soul. Robust and energetic before a responsive
crowd, it slumps when no one is there. The only
real customer is God. Chew quietly your
sweet sugarcane God-love, and stay
playfully childish. Your face will
turn rosy with illumination
like the red bud
flowers.
Let the lover
be disgraceful, crazy,
absent minded. Someone sober
will worry about things going
badly. Let the lover
be.
All day
and night, music,
a quiet, bright reed song.
If it fades, we
fade.
awaken to your own mind
The unenlightened person
does not understand his own true nature,
does not realize the Pure Land in his own body,
and thus petitions all over. The enlightened person
never differs no matter where he is. For this reason
the Buddha says, “Wherever I may be I am always
in comfort and bliss…If only your mind is pure,
your own nature is itself the Pure
Land of the West.”
Being in tremendous turmoil,
the unoriented do not know that their own
mind is Buddha. They search about, outside of themselves,
spending the whole day contemplating the Buddha and paying
homage. But where is the Buddha? Do not entertain any
such false views. Awaken to your own mind:
outside the mind there can
be no Buddha.
the truth of tao is everywhere
Just as
the world can reveal itself
as particles, the Tao can reveal itself
as human beings. Though world and particles
aren’t the same, neither are they different.
Though the cosmic body and your
body aren’t the same, neither
are they different.
Worlds and particles,
bodies and beings, time and space:
all are transient expressions of the Tao.
Unseeable, ungraspable, the Tao is beyond
any attempt to analyze or categorize it.
At the same time, its truth is
everywhere you
turn.
If you
can let go of it
with your mind and
surround it with your
heart, it will live
inside you
forever.
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don’t die
After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
24th Poet Laureate of the United States