the first thing is, don’t seek

think deeply on this

 
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 entirely 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 if 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

🪷

 

place your esteem on the tao

ryo takemasa

 

He who desires

the admiration of the world

will do well to amass a great fortune

and then give it away. The world will respond

with admiration in proportion to the size

of his treasure. Of course, this

is meaningless.

 

Stop striving after

admiration. Place your esteem on

the tao. Live in accord with it, share with

others the teachings that lead to it,

and you will be immersed in the

blessings  that flow

from it.

 

Hua hu Ching, Chapter 9

 

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those who know don’t talk

orazio fargione

 

Those who

know don’t talk.

Those who talk

don’t know.

 

Close your mouth.

Block the door.

Quiet your senses.

Blunt the sharpness.

Untie the tangles.

Soften the brightness.

Be one with the dust, and

enter the primal

oneness.

 

One who has merged

with Tao in this way

can’t be courted,

can’t be bought,

can’t be harmed,

can’t be honored,

can’t be humiliated.

She is the treasure

of the world.

 

Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,

Chapter 56

 

ebooks & apps of the Tao the Ching, I Ching,

Hua hu Ching, Wei wu Wei Ching,

Art of War for iPad, Phone,

Kindle, Nook, or

Android

 

You

can now buy

Tao te Ching as part of a

five-app bundle of Taoist classics 

for iPhone or iPad for less than

the cost of one hardcover

book.

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the earth too is an ephemerid

 

Mountains,

a moment’s earth-waves

rising and hollowing; the earth

too’s an ephemerid; the stars— short-lived

as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry

in their summer, they spiral blind up space, scattered

black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s

recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf

before birth, and the gulf after death is like dated: to labor eighty

years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome, enormous repose

after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity. Surely you never

have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue

merely to the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is

called life? I fancy that silence is the thing, this noise a found

word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;

stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding

treasure says ‘Ah!’ but the treasure’s the essence;

before the man spoke it was there, and

after he has spoken he gathers it,

inexhaustible treasure.

 

Robinson Jeffers