You want
to learn to catch a mouse?
Don’t try to learn from a pampered cat.
If you want to learn the nature of the world,
don’t study fine bound books. The True Jewel’s
in a coarse bag. Buddha-nature stops at huts. The
whole herd of folks who clutch at the outside
of things never seem to make the
connection.
You should know that
your own aware essence is neither finite
nor eternal, by nature neither defiled nor pure.
It is still and complete; it is the same in ordinary
people and saints, responding effectively
without patterns, apart from mind,
intellect, and discriminating
consciousness.
As for sitting in meditation,
that is something which must include
fits of ecstatic blissful laughter, brayings
that will make you slump to the ground clutching
your belly, and even after that passes and you
struggle to your feet, will make you fall
anew in further contortions of
sidesplitting mirth.
hexagram 43, kuai / breakthrough (resoluteness)
Forget all ideas
of accomplishing something —
in your practice and everywhere
else. Everything is already
accomplished.
If this sounds
like a tricky idea to you,
the flaw is in your understanding
of reality, not in reality
itself.
Allowing nature
to manifest is the way
of the Way. By setting aside
our ambitions and leaving
the Way to the Way,
we perfect the
Way.
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.
now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you
I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake
in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,
the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,
used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,
abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,
gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls
who haven’t quite gone totally wild, river eddies,
leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,
turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages lost in the woods,
the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands
of birds I’ve talked to all of my life, the dogs
that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow
me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,
the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see
from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling
to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.
he met the world in darkness and in light
