Posts Tagged → buddhism

without leaving where you are

sachi cunningham

 

Yongjia said,

“Without leaving where you are,

there is constant clarity.” No words come closer

to the truth than these. If you start seeking, then we

know that you are unable to see. Just cut off any duality

between “wherever you are” and “constant clarity”,

and make yourself peaceful and serene. Avoid

concocting intellectual understanding

and seeking. As soon as you seek,

it is like grasping at

shadows.

 

Yuanwu

zen letters

 

awaken to your own mind

tsukioka yoshitoshi

 

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.”

 

Platform Sutra

 
 

mark gleason

 

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.

 

Bodhidharma

 

the truth of tao is everywhere

dragon aurora over iceland

 

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.

 

from Hua hu Ching, Chapter 33

 

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don’t die

geoff mcfetridge

 

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