a most essential shortcut

emily fikkert

 
If you want to attain Intimacy, the first thing is, don’t seek it. If you attain through seeking, you have already fallen into interpretive understanding.

This is especially true because this great treasury extends through all times, clearly evident, empty and bright. Since time without beginning it has been your own basic root: you depend on its power in all your actions.

You will only pass through to freedom when you cease and desist to the point that not even a single thought is born. Then you penetrate through without falling into sense and matter and without dwelling in conceptualizations and mental images.

When you absolutely transcend these, then the whole world does not hide it. Everywhere everything becomes its Great Function, and every single thing flows forth from your own breast. The ancients called this bringing out the family treasure. Once this is attained, it is attained forever. How could it ever be used up?

Just be wary that your investigation does not rest on a firm footing, and that you will not be able to penetrate through to realization. You must bravely cut off all entanglements, so there is not the slightest dependence or reliance. Relinquish your body and give up your life and directly accept the suchness that faces you; there is no other. 

Then even if the thousand sages came forth it wouldn’t change you at all. Leaving it to the flow at all times, eating food and wearing clothes, you nurture the embryo of sagehood to maturity, not keeping to intellectual understanding. Isn’t this an especially excellent teaching and a most essential shortcut?
 

Yuanwu

zen letters

🪷

 

all the myriad things make one whole

it’s gonna be okay honey bunny

 

All the myriad things

are neither opposed to nor contrary

to your true self. Directly pass through to

freedom and they make one whole.

It has been this way from time

without beginning.

 

The only problem

is when people put themselves

in opposition to it and spurn it and impose

orientations of grasping or rejecting, creating a

concern where there is none. This is

precisely why they are not

joyfully alive.

 

Yuanwu

zen letters

 

gradual cultivation

lori andrews

 

You must keep this

mind balanced and equanimous,

without deluded ideas of self and others,

without arbitrary loves and hates, without grasping

or rejecting, without notions of gain and loss.

Go on gradually nurturing this for

a long time, perhaps twenty

or thirty years.

 

Whether you encounter

favorable or adverse conditions,

do not retreat or regress — then when you

come to the juncture between life and death,

you will naturally be set free and be not afraid.

As the saying goes, “Truth requires sudden

awakening, but the phenomenal

level calls for gradual

cultivation.”

 

Yuanwu

zen letters

 

freedom and quietude

just be still

 

The fun of roaming free

is endless, hard to exhaust. When tired

I sit on a mossy bank, unaware of the cold sun falling

in my love for the cool of the breeze in the pines. Deer descend

to drink of the valley streams; monkeys arrive to pick of

the mountain fruits. What I originally valued were

freedom and quietude; why should

I require that people

know of me?

 

Wen-siang