To Shine One Corner of the World
A clinical
psychiatrist questioned
Suzuki Roshi about
consciousness.
“I don’t know
anything about consciousness,”
Suzuki said. “I just try to teach
my students how to hear
the birds sing.”
Posts Tagged → shunryu suzuki
where can the dust alight?
The Fifth Ancestor
Daimin Konin wanted to find
his successor. He asked the monks to write
a poem to express their understanding. Jinshu,
the headmonk, wrote the following poem
on the wall in the middle
of the night:
Our body is the bodhi tree,
our mind a mirror bright.
Carefully wipe then hour by hour,
and let no dust alight.
When Eno saw this
next day, he said to the monk
standing next to him, “I too have a poem.
Since I am illiterate, would you
write it down for me?”
There is no bodhi tree,
nor stand of a mirror bright.
Since all is void,
where can the dust alight?
When Konin saw this, he
knew the author had the understanding
he was looking for, and he recognized Eno as
his dharma heir and hence the
Sixth Ancestor.
branching streams flow in the darkness
what I meant is things as it is
One day while
editing a transcription of
Suzuki Roshi’s first lecture on the Sandokai,
I came upon the phrase “things as it is.” I asked him
if perhaps he had not meant to say “things
as they are,” which I thought to be
proper syntax.
“No,” he said,
“what I meant is ‘things
as it is.'”
To Shine One Corner of the World
great robe of liberation
To Shine One Corner of the World
Great robe of liberation
Field far beyond form and emptiness
Wearing Buddha’s teaching
Saving all beings
always in the center of the world
When we become
truly ourselves, we just become
a swinging door, and we are purely independent
of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.
Without air, we cannot breathe. Each one of us is
in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in
the center of the world always,
moment after moment.