butter pill that removes all ills

a brief biography of hakuin ekaku

 

One part of

“the real aspect of things,”

one part each of “the self and all things”

and “the realization that these are false,” three parts

of “the immediate realization of nirvana”, two parts of

“without desires,” two or three parts of “the non-duality of

activity and quietude,” one and a half parts of sponge-gourd skin

and one part of “the discarding of all delusion”. Steep these

ingredients in the juice of patience for one night, dry in

the shade and then mash. Season with a dash of

prajna-paramita, then shape everything

into a ball the size of a duck’s egg

and set it securely on

your head.

 

Hakuin Ekaku

more hakuin

 

welcoming flies at the picnic


mighty joe henry

 

I don’t call

any song finished if I don’t

think that it somehow is vibrating with

the awareness of how we live in spite of the inevitable.

Which is what all spirituality is, is how do we come into being,

how do we live fully in the constant, conscious knowledge

that we won’t always? How do you invest in the idea

of any real commitment in the face of

everything being finite?

 

…We’re sort of

seduced into thinking that here’s life,

and there’s these bad things that can happen,

obstacles that just fall into your road, as if the obstacle

is not the road. You know? We want to think that all things

being equal, we should be content all the time, and would

be, except for these pesky flies that want to ruin

every picnic. As if that isn’t what

the picnic is.

 

Joe Henry

 

❤️

have a listen to

Welcoming Flies at the Picnic,

it will gladden your

💜

 

beginner’s mind, beginner’s heart


 

To achieve

what the zen buddhists

call “beginner’s mind,” you dispense

with all preconceptions and enter

each situation as if seeing it

for the first time.

 

“In the

beginner’s mind there

are many possibilities,” wrote

Shunryu Suzuki in his book Zen Mind,

Beginner’s Mind, “but in the

expert’s there are few.”

 

As much

as I love beginner’s

mind, though, I advocate an

additional discipline: cultivating a

beginner’s heart. That means approaching

every encounter imbued with a freshly

invoked wave of love that is as pure

as if you’re feeling it for

the first time.

 

Rob Brezsny

 

light inside and dark outside

liu i-ming

 
People’s intellect and knowledge are like the light of a lamp. If that light is mistakenly used outside, in a contentious and aggressive manner, aiming for name and gain, scheming and conniving day and night, thinking a thousand thoughts, imagining ten thousand imaginings, chasing artificial objects and losing the original source, light on the outside but dark inside, this will go on until the body is injured and life is lost.

If people give up artificiality and return to the real, dismiss intellectuality and cleverness, consider essential life the one matter of importance, practice inner awareness, refine the self and master the mind, observe all things with detachment so all that exists is empty of absoluteness, are not moved by external things and are not influenced by sensory experiences, being light inside and dark outside, they can thereby aspire to wisdom and become enlightened.

Light that does not dazzle progresses to lofty illumination; therefore a classic says, “The great sage appears ignorant, the great adept seems inept.”
 

Liu I-Ming

awakening to the tao

hard copy