the mind unconcerned with name or gain
You
should therefore cease
from practice based on intellectual
understanding, pursuing words and following
after speech, and learn the backward step that turns
your light inwardly to illuminate your self. Body and mind
of themselves will drop away, and your original face
will be manifest. If you want to attain
suchness you should practice
suchness without
delay.
By seeing
all the way through
things we are able to perceive
the perfection of existence. The
foreground of mind is noisy chatter,
but by simply watching that with
discipline and perseverance, we
see it quiet. In its place arises
a vast, silent, illuminated
emptiness.
So
also with life.
The foreground is rife
with suffering and difficulty,
but by doing non-doing and
quietly observing, we
become aware of
its purity.
You
can now buy
Wei wu Wei Ching as part of a
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the cost of one hardcover
book.
die and stay dead and go on living
For those who
are ready, the door to
the deathless state is open.
You that have ears, give up
the conditions that bind
you, and enter in.
It isn’t difficult to
become one with the Way.
How hard was it to be a baby?
But returning to innocence requires
intention. Drop your dark habits, your
ideas, your emotions, and allow an
opening for virtue and wisdom
to return. Do non-doing, and
goodness will inform
all you do.
i ching hexagram 54 ☯️ the marrying maiden
You
can now buy
Wei wu Wei Ching as part of a
five-app bundle of Taoist classics
for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.
stilted koans are all monks have
Ikkyü also had a hermitage in Kyoto which he called Katsuroan (Blind Donkey Hermitage), and often stayed at Daitokuji. But increasingly, to the point of anguish, he became disgusted with worldly carryings on at the main temple, shuddering at the…frantic hustling for donations:
Yoso hangs up ladles baskets useless donations in the temple
my style’s a straw raincoat strolls by rivers and lakes
*
ten fussy days running this temple all red tape
look me up if you want to in the bar whorehouse fish market
In 1471, when seventy-seven, Ikkyü revealed his passion for a blind girl, an attendant at the Shuon’an Temple at Takigi. He wrote poems about their affair, some farcical, some very moving. He was self-conscious at the oddness of an old zen monk falling for a young woman, but they spent years together, Ikkyü’s feeling for her growing in intensity:
I love taking my new girl blind Mori on a spring picnic
I love seeing her exquisite free face its moist sexual heat shine
*
your name Mori means forest like the infinite fresh
green distances of your blindness
*
I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom
now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you
poems translated by stephen berg in crow with no mouth
prose introduction by lucien stryk
