Poems

2020-01-24

I Think of My Grandfather

I think of my grandfather, dead 14 years now,
and my mother, now also dead, when she was a child --
how probably at least once
she ran to him when he came home from work,
and he laughed and stooped and took her in his arms
and said, "My Lucy-girl."
This image is
the quickest route I know
to the wellspring of my grief,
the surest way to bring tears to me
and a sniffle to the zendo.

Clatskanie, OR, 2020 Jan

2019-02-06

Verses on Koans XIII

Responses to koans in Gateless Gate -- a.k.a. Wumenguan (Chinese), Mumonkan (Japanese),
Blue Cliff Record -- a.k.a. Biyan Lu (Chinese), Hekiganroku (Japanese), and
Book of Serenity -- a.k.a. Congrong Lu (Chinese), Shoyoroku (Japanese).

Book of Serenity 43
Between urb and sub-
An hour before dawn
A grey monk walks
the empty sidewalk
From her rented room
To the chapel zendo.
She sets out six mats in two rows
Centers a round cushion on each,
And a sutra book.
As the sky begins to lighten, I
On my way to a bagel and coffee,
Look in through a narrow window
See the small grey peak
At the end of a row, alone.
She has always been there
and always will be,
Just as I have stood and will stand
through all past and future
Looking in
One hand on the doorknob.

2019 Jan

Blue Cliff Record 66
How is it when the student wants to take the Master's head with a sharp sword?
Your teacher was asked this question a generation ago;
You were there, or heard about it.
Your teacher answered by stretching out his neck.
The Master's head has fallen, said the student.
Now you are visited by a young man who has traveled
From a city where a warlord with a fabled sword
was lately defeated and killed.
Did you get the sword? you ask.
It's banter, metaphor, and test.
Yes, he says.
You stretch out your neck
Like your teacher did.
Your visitor responds with the
Same words
Your teacher's student spoke.
Ah. So he's heard the story.
You laugh, remembering
Your old dear teacher,
The way he carried his bowls and
retreated to his room.
You laugh, remembering the monks of the hall
all those years ago -- and this fellow here
repeating the earlier one.
You laugh as your head rolls across the floor.

2019 Jan

Gateless Gate 5
Hanging by Your Teeth from a Tree When the Question Comes

It's a question about meaning,
It's a request for direction,
It's a classmate copying your answers.
It's swords or pistols?
It's the plea deal offered,
It's your false teeth slipping,
It's the taste of bark,
It's grieving what's lost,
It's the victory party,
It's how time and being are each other.

It's the absent friend,
It's the hungry carnivore,
It's the telephone.
It's a generous pauper,
It's the weight you don't want,
It's the craving of craving.
It's making a fashion statement,
Or using language,
It's not knowing what you said
Or knowing.
It's a question about meaning.
It's your false teeth slipping,
It's the taste of bark.

2019 Feb

Book of Serenity 97
Dear god of triumph and of wasted days,
Of résumés and of addictions,
I wonder at the worth of me and us,
What price would be our measure?
In such a market, as folktales tell,
The devil is the only buyer.

What we fashion from the years --
Fronts of patina, and backs rough-hewn --
Is only for giving away,
To what takers we find -- not
For the market. Besides, as folktales tell,
The devil is the only buyer.

Dear god of triumph and of dissipation,
Let me leave the market for market things;
Craft by dint of grace and years blindly
The gifts I cannot see yet must bequeath;
And wash off the sticky folktale conceits,
Of worth, and price, and buyer.

2019 Mar

Gateless Gate 12
Always the Master calls --
The voice of the green turtle,
Silence.
Always affirmation answers, yes
In every soundwave, every photon, every particle's
Stillness, the origin of every vibration.
Silence calls. Heed.
Stillness answers. Heed.

2019 Apr

Book of Serenity 41
Do not tell one dying
That mountains never stop walking.
Tending to what can be tended to
Neither affirms nor denies.
When the deathly ill are before you,
There are no dharmas,
Only a puke bucket or bedpan to empty,
A cup to hold up to the lips,
A facial tissue, or a prayer,
To offer.

2019 Oct

Book of Serenity 59
When there is no escape,
When all is irretrievably lost,
The deep grasses of exile
Are your ancestral home.

2019 Oct

Book of Serenity 81
That thing about everything
Depending on everything else?
The thing is, it makes each thing
whole and complete, dependent on nothing.
This is not a point about shunyata.
It's stranger than that.

2019 Oct

Book of Serenity 52
That Nietzsche's abyss would gaze back,
And plumb the measure of me,
Is most of why I looked.

What I see as we peer into each other
Depends on what the abyss sees.

Friend,
The party is not to be peeked at from concealment.
The festivities can only be viewed from amid --
Seeing by being seen; being seen by seeing.

2019 Oct

Ten Verses on Koans XII

KOAN INDEX

2019-01-02

Raven Verses IX

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Essential
Urge and urge and urge . . . To elaborate is no avail. -Whitman

To no avail, yet essential.
Until, one day, not.
The uselessness of explanation
Must be explained, which does not suffice,
But to us afflicted with the rash,
the placebo salve helps us not scratch.

Everything depends upon bullfrog call, raven caw,
(and a red wheel barrow, if you've got one).
The signs may be divined
-- not for meaning, for beauty --
When symbol subdues symbol,
Colonel orders Captain to retreat,
And the battlefield is clear.

2018 Dec

Still Lonesome
On the path,
First comes everything.
Second, everything again.
Third, return to first things.
Ordinal numbers
Mark ordinary time.

2018 Dec

Too Busy
Busy, as a swift brook,
As cirrus clouds, striping the sky,
As glaciers are, melting,
And as they were, before that.
Busy as the owl on her night branch, listening.

Life and history make of me
A bearer of mostly futile love.
Seven generations hence,
Justice will mean something else,
Or maybe nothing much at all.
Perhaps the struggles and projects
Of my fifth-great-grandchildren
Will not invoke justice.
Perhaps, for them, it will be a
Dusty classical virtue, like prudence.

All the strands of the world flow into me
And out again, some a little stronger,
Or weaker, or more refined, or less.
When they arrive at the late 22nd century
With unrecognizable textures and weavings,
Will their time spent weaving me
Be more help or more hindrance
To the aims and needs of that time?
About equal measures of each, I guess.

Busy as a cheetah's tail,
As a cow's four stomachs --
Busy as soil erosion,
As the silent moon and the Sahara dunes.
Busy as Rigel at Orion's knee, so
Busy. Oh,
Too busy.

2018 Dec

Trust
That joke about why the dog:
The punchline, Because he can,
Answers a lot of questions.
To exercise a capacity: reason enough.
Why does one love? Why trust?
Why study and follow a teacher's direction?
Why does one hurt so when any of these goes awry?
Why does one bother with sadness and happiness?
Why read the paper on the commuter train?
Toast the New Year? Sit Zazen?
Why does one grow present to one's life,
Or want to?
If one couldn't, there'd be no reason to.

2018 Dec

The Self
This mouth opens, and out I come:
A draft of air and jetsam.
The air: warm, moist, de-oxygenated.
The jetsam: vocabulary, syntax, accent, tone, and
Voice that could be no one else's,
Tossed from foundering meanings.

This mouth opens, and out I come:
A current of particularity and karmic goo,
Not at all the luminous seaworthy universality,
I dreamed sailing into port.

When I'm not thinking this way,
When dreams of absoluteness are wakened from,
Or the wreckage recognized as their realization,
Then this mouth opens, and out I come, and
Maybe my eddies of debris and yours
Dance.

2019 Jan

The Essence
Compassion is not a quality.
I put it to you,
Didactically, as if it were
A thing you could believe
Or that I could.

Yesterday I did, and tomorrow will again,
Speak of the quality of compassion --
Of a person, or an act --
As if compassion were a moral virtue
That might not have been there,
That could disappear in a mean moment,
That the discovery of ulteriority
could render fraudulent.

Today I tell the truth:
Compassion is ontological, not ethical.
It is the stuff reality is made of.
I say it
As if you should be taking notes,
As if I should apologize.

I say it, and outside is the winter mountain,
Made of rock and soil, trees and snow.
No qualities there either,
I whisper. Or was that you?

2019 Jan

Hearing
Let yourself hear the dove
Let your mouth eat
Let your fingers read my face
Let your feet count the blessings of toes
Let your ribs hold galaxies
Let your tongue perceive the silence
inside its words
Let your fears embrace the frightened
Let your house slide on shifting sand
Let the stones be igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic
and all yours
Let rivers flow through your veins unto the sea
Let yourself smell the sunrise
and taste the sunset
Let yourself love
Let yourself hear the dove

2019 Jan

Unhappy
How happy is the little stone --Emily Dickinson
the trees...give off such hints of gladness --Mary Oliver

Mary's trees, Emily's little stone,
Cheerful stars, a merry brook,
Shy gemstones, humble dirt,
Lugubrious rain, angry thunder,
Cruel frost or oppressive heat
Vengeful flood or punishing drought
Sanguine dawn and pensive dusk --

Ask any of them, "What do you want?"
They have nothing to answer.

2019 Jan

Honesty
The stream occluded or not;
The fox hungry or fed,
The star shining steadily or exploding nova,
See how they never lie?
How they tell nothing but the truth,
Never concerning themselves with honesty?

2019 Jan

Method
I.
Nature's method is none.
Profligacy is not methodical.
Survival of the fittest
Might be a method if nature
Had a measure of fitness
Other than surviving.
Survival of those that survive
Is not a method.

II.
The stars of Orion know about method, and what is evident.
The broad, slow river knows.
Though there are no crannies, and no kernels with which to fill them,
They are always full.

2019 Feb

Previous: Raven Verses VIII ☙ RAVEN INDEX

2018-10-04

Raven Verses VIII

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Not Helping
Upaya: "skillfull means" --
When to step in, or up, or forward?
Or out, or down, or back?
Zazen doesn't answer these questions.
It's possible it helps one
Remember to ask them,
Or approach them less controlled by fears.
It's possible it doesn't.

2018 Sep

Mosquito
The package deal of appetites and incentive --
Hunger-satiation, fear-security,
Lust-orgasm -- arrives as advertised,
Home delivered, and throughout the neighborhood,
Sensations of
Mosquito bites, tea, sky, paper cuts
Thrown in, no extra charge.
The promise of essence, independent and abiding,
is never kept, nor was ever made.
Read again the fine print,
The fine, fine print.

2018 Sep

Follow Your Bliss
What makes a distraction?
The brain doing something,
Then thinking it shouldn't have?
I'm not saying your inner moralizer
Might not have a point,
just that maybe there's
Another angle.
What the brain did,
It did pursuing
its need and bliss.
Distraction isn't following
the wrong thing
But following
At a distance.

2018 Oct

She Doesn't Know
What is the meaning of your
"What is the meaning of...?"?
Say more of what is biting you.
I have various potions in my apothecary;
Tell me about your bug, and I'll select
A bottle for you.
They are all placebos, still
The telling is treatment,
And the rituals of care.

It is a brave physician
Who withholds these ministrations,
Avers there is no cure,
And casts the patient out to
Live with the terrifying condition
Of having no disease.

2018 Oct

Vows
The morning sun behind the branches of black leaves
Promises promises
Long since broken, long since fulfilled.
Nothing is more beautiful,
Nothing less.

2018 Oct

Gossip
Bob fell off the wagon.
Susan lost her job.
Sally's Dan is flunking out.
That Keith is such a slob.

Sympathies and judgment
Served up over tea.
So nice to not have those folks' faults, but
What do they say of me?

So nice to not have faults like those
Except I fear I do.
I share in all those named above
And several others too.

Anxiety is thus sustained,
Throughout the system felt.
Someone, perhaps, must do that job,
But maybe someone else.

2018 Oct

Anger
When Great Bear's grievance commands redress
The autumn wind in the leaves takes notice.
Coyote thinks of somewhere else to go.
Badger pauses from her digging.
Later, rain washing the hillside
Seems to take greater than usual care.

2018 Oct

Giving
The Long and the Short of It

Belongings belengthen.
What I belong to and
What belongs to me,
Fix my placement,
Post grief-tinged desires,
And stretch me long between.

Moon, wind, and crickets
Draw me up short again.

2018 Nov

The Middle Way
The good question, at home with an apt mind,
Brings forth offerings,
Yet is not put to rest.
Lives on and repeats, repeats.

The apt mind, at home with a good question,
Stays the course between destructions
of one side or the other.
To fix an answer breaks the question.

2018 Nov

Reading
I found my name in Plato, for instance,
and in Rorty, Wittgenstein, Nussbaum, Dickens, Austen, Wendell Berry, and Garry Trudeau --
in Hesse, Laozi, Camus, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Arundhati Roy --
in Thurber, Thoreau, Dillard, Vonnegut, Brautigan, and the New York Times, for instance,
and in Hongzhi, Dogen, Dworkin (both Ronald and Andrea), Tom (both Robbins and Wolfe), and Irving (John, not Washington) --
in Woolf and Tolkien and Twain and Chas Addams and James Luther Adams,
For instance.
My name was on every page.
Because I wrote it there myself?
Possibly, but
The handwriting doesn't look like mine.

2018 Nov

Previous: Raven Verses VII ☙ Next: Raven Verses IX ☙ RAVEN INDEX

2018-09-20

Ten Verses on Koans XII

Responses to koans in Gateless Gate -- a.k.a. Wumenguan (Chinese), Mumonkan (Japanese),
Blue Cliff Record -- a.k.a. Biyan Lu (Chinese), Hekiganroku (Japanese), and
Book of Serenity -- a.k.a. Congrong Lu (Chinese), Shoyoroku (Japanese).

Book of Serenity 94
"There is no way to escape having ill health." (Upajjhatthana Sutta: Anguttara Nikaya 5.57)

No escape, Papillon.
Not from this Devil's Island.
All your cleverness, resolve, and luck
Only shuffles your grimy skin
A meter or two within your cell.

No escape: the key to freedom.
The fox feeds on rabbit,
Then the rabbit feeds on fox.

2018 Sep

Blue Cliff Record 19, Book of Serenity 84
A great matter weighing on me,
I traveled a thousand kilometers
to see old Jinhua, get his answer.
It took two months.
I lost 10 kilograms.

I arrive in the morning.
A monk meets me at the gate.
I must see Jinhua.
Wait here.
Before he goes he mentions
The master answers every question
By raising one finger.

I sit down on a stone.
The sun passes its zenith.
Just one finger, for all my troubles?
One finger for my life to make sense?
Which finger?

The index finger?
Pointing? Saying one?
The middle finger?
The thumb?
Up? Down? Out like a hitchhiker?
Could old Jinhua want a ride?
What if he raises his pinky?
Or his fourth finger
to show me a ring
of power and commitment?
What if he grabs my hand and holds up one
of my fingers?
Or what if the old man carries a severed finger in a pouch,
taking it out when asked a question,
even as it decayed and stank and was finally
three phalanges rattling in his cupped hand?

In the cool evening I rise,
Walk back down the mountain.
Perhaps I'll make better time on the way home.

2018 Sep

Gateless Gate 3
Teachers do this,
Cut off parts of their students --
A finger, a toe, a nose,
A vanity, a limiting story, a jaded detachment --
Whatever: the cut hurts.
There's screaming and blood.
Some teachers offer bandages and prosthetic
Replacements that meet a purpose.
Others don't, but only watch
With silent eyes the dripping wound
To see what the excised part
Had been inhibiting,
Teacher and student alike
Surprised at what emerges,
In wonder of what it might be for.

2018 Sep

Blue Cliff Record 79
Everything flawless and perfect --
For all that
No less screwed up, broken, wrong.

Everything a mistake, a punishable offense
For all that
No less elegant, beautiful, exactly right.

Does disrespect present the Buddha's voice?
Does it display the highest principle?
Yes.
As does a cudgel to the solar plexus.

"Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly"
the Roshi Micah said. Hotetsu adds:
and observe the grammar of formal and familiar.
Total liberation from all constraint
Comes with some constraints.

2018 Oct

Blue Cliff Record 35
"When numbers get serious, they leave a mark on your door." --Paul Simon

How many friends have you? How many relations?
How many schoolmates, former or current? Colleagues?
With how many people have you sat, in zendo or church or temple?
By how many passers by have you passed?

How many particles of dirt or sand
Have felt the press of your sole?
How many cubic centimeters of air
Have you expelled in laughing?

How many bird species would be
on your life list? How many mammals?
Reptiles, amphibians, fish?
How many on your current week list?
How many trees can you call by name?
How many call yours?
How many leaves have you seen
Bud? Fall?
How many years are yours?
How many yous belong to the years?

You could tally estimates.
That's not necessary.
By numbers uncounted
The dharma fares
North and South,
East and West.

2018 Oct

Blue Cliff Record 5
I love the units, their countability,
Three seconds.
Five centimeters, squared or cubed.
Two decades.
Seven days.
One parsec.
Three millennia.
Five minutes.
Twenty kilometers.
Fourteen billion years.
So reassuring and practical this, the mind's mirror.
Working or testifying,
The measure must be taken.

I remember, too, that
Huineng was right to scold Shenxiu:
"The mind is no mirror."
It is made for unity as well as units:
For uncountable time with its two names,
Now and Eternity --
For vastness and tininess indistinguishable.
Caverns measureless are its home.

I have only this to suggest:
Gather wise friends.

2018 Oct

Blue Cliff Record 22, Book of Serenity 24
I jumped before I knew
Why, or what.
Neurons out of mind
Sent the slender wriggle
Straight to motor,
Leaving the cerebrum
To mosey to a conclusion
Half a second later: "snake."
Recollection would have it that
I jumped first, and then saw it.

The reptilian god shoots fear right past
the cognizer's models, precious and hapless,
and scrambles time.
Nothing so presents it straight
Like curves.

2018 Oct

Blue Cliff Record 49, Book of Serenity 33
She crawls out of her chrysalis,
Fans her wings, notices
She has wings,
Notices she's hungry and that
Her mandibles are gone.
What do I eat now?
Without knowing she can, or how,
She flies.
Not knowing why,
she alights on a flower,
sticks her tongue into the nectar,
has no more questions.

2018 Nov

Blue Cliff Record 51, Book of Serenity 50
What this is is
I've come to see Xuefeng --
Is he around?
What this is is
What is this?
What this is is
The staff in my hand, the one in yours,
the gate thrust open, our dusty sandals.
What this is is
What is this?
What this is is
Disappointing guests.
What this is is
My hesitancy to ask.
What this is is
My most recent word.
Just this "just this"
Is
What this is.
Which is?
What this is is
What is this?

2018 Dec

Book of Serenity 75
Heraclitus didn't quite say, as we love to quote:
"Change is the only constant" -- which is
Funnier, and truer, than what he did say.

When we've a mind for immutable principle,
Heraclitus must again remind
Everything flows, and nothing stays.

Then, attending to movement,
We miss the constancy to the flow; we don't
See the permanent principle of goneness.

The real, Heraclitus said, is logos -- which is fine
As long as logos isn't reason, seeking assent.
Reality is not an argument. It's a poem.

A poem wants to show itself to you,
Not for you to assent, but to see.
Agreement and disagreement alike misconstrue.

2018 Dec

Ten Verses on Koans XI

Verses on Koans XIII

KOAN INDEX

2018-08-23

Raven Verses VII

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Saving the Many Beings
I tell you my failures lie piled at my feet
And thick to the horizon in all directions,
Thinner in spots, or more transparent.
It is a landscape of lapses.
Were you accessory to some of them? I don't know; it's possible I suppose.
I say each one fulfills the vow.
Each one breaks it.
Each one whispers vigilance.

2018 Jul

Emptiness
One day, to explore widely the surrounding districts, Xuansha leaves the mountain. He stubs his toe on a stone. Bleeding and in great pain, Xuansha reﬂects, “They say this body is not real existence. Where does the pain come from?” --Dogen

A Few Things Real and Unreal

Phlogiston, unicorns, the present king of France;
Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, Celie;
Nations, governments, laws,
Punishment, the stock market, hospitals;
Freedom, unselfish actions, God;
Joy, kindness, wisdom.

Planets and atoms;
Death and love;
The neighbor's dog and Attila the Hun;
This body and me;
Denali and Mt. McKinley.

The hemlock tree in the front yard;
The stone on the ground waiting to meet Xuansha's foot, or Samuel Johnson's;
The pain that followed when it did.

All are real, and real the same way;
All unreal, the same way as real.

2018 Jul

The Stick
A stick is not a stick
When it is just a stick.
In the dawning light --
The call to breakfast.

2018 Jul

Can't Have That
Standing, sitting, lying, walking
Amid the colors, shapes, sounds, smells,
The feels of things,
A kind of Heisenberg Principle
Slips between naming and having.
What is named is ungraspable.
What is grasped is unnameable.
God's dice rolling always
Everywhere.

2018 Jul

How Do You Account For This?
Myriad the mystery that supports and guides
That surrounds like peripheral vision
That smiles from the shadows and sometimes laughs
That writes the truths and publishes
Under pen-names.

2018 Aug

Too Clever By Half
"Some teachers say that Zen is hard. I say that Zen is very easy. But we are saying the same thing." -Seung Sahn

Sun and earth make pine and hyacinth, and
The hummingbird outside the window
Beats her wings 80 times a second --
Without trying.
Even my pushing, willful, effort
Arrives and unfolds effortlessly.

I might say,
It is difficult to know the ease of things --
meaning only,
One settles into such knowledge slowly,
And if the thing is kept at.

2018 Aug

Not Playing Favorites
Reliability
Of, say, things planted growing, usually,
When conditions and seed are right for each other,
Which isn't so hard to arrange,
Surprises, edges me into believing
In consistency, and the possibility of justice:
That there are like cases that may be treated alike.

Then: the shift of pattern,
The randomness of events and outcomes,
The course reversals called inexplicable
because we forget the inexplicability of courses stayed,
Come as a wonderment.

Each surprise sets up the other,
like players of a comedy team.

2018 Aug

The Fun Way
Maybe you go where those others go --
Not because you are paid;
You pay to do it.
Weekly or twice weekly or more,
You arrive there at the appointed times,
You
Be with them, doing and saying.

Maybe this is a loveliness
that makes you tender,
and sometimes you cry.
Maybe there you know yourself
and become real.
Or maybe you hide there,
and slowly harden.
Maybe you become thoughtful --
Or quicker to blame.
Maybe this is the locus of your wisdom --
Or your vehicle of dominance.

Maybe you go where those others go
And find in some form all of the above.
Maybe you stay home.

2018 Aug

Zazen Alone
Sit with the sturgeon, with the stars.
Stand with the aspen, with the yak.
Walk with the brook, with the ocean waves.
Lie with the moss, and the setting sun.
Sit with the lakes, fallen logs, and bunnies.
Stand with the mushrooms, mountains, and salamanders.
Walk with the cows, chickens, and the full moon.
Lie with the bedrock, yellow leaves, and rhesus macaques.
Do this because you can't not,
And because the ten thousand things
Are sitting, standing, walking, lying
With you.

2018 Sep

Perspective
A robin, the lifeless form of,
Lies by the path, her talons
Curve around air.
To say what is missing is not hard:
Her motion, her song, her concerns.

To detect the prevailing presence of same,
In the gray and ruddy feathers:
This, too, is not difficult.
Less often said, maybe.

I bend and take the body up,
Carry it to the covering of underbrush,
Stand over the grave
In wonder of the goneness
And equally of the
undepartability.

2018 Sep

Previous: Raven Verses VI ☙ Next: Raven Verses VIII ☙ RAVEN INDEX

2018-04-26

Raven Verses VI

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven

Dreams
"Look what we found in the park, in the dark. We will take him home. We will call him Clark. He will live at our house. He will grow and grow. Will our mother like this? We don't know." (Dr. Seuss, "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish")

One breath, two breath, angry breath, sad breath.
Old Bodhidharma came from the west.
Why-ever he came, he came.
Whatever its meaning, he came.
Now here we are, we
Who face the wall in Bodhidharma's cave, we
Wall-sitters, wall-sitting.
It seems to make a difference; it
Seems to make no difference at all -- a
"Something, nothing," like Iago's purse.
We took it home.
It grew.
Still no word on Mother's approval.

2018 Apr

Open and Clear
Open and clear
As silence
And the very bottom:
Silence, too.

2018 May

The Mind
Dogen didn't, couldn't, say
His cranial pitcher held
100 billion neurons, more or less,
Sending neurotransmitter signals
to each other across
100 trillion synapses, more or less.
Still he said mind is not just this.
You are more than that.

Dogen spoke of the senses,
Could say a few things
about light and eyes
and sound and ears,
Yet nothing of the optic nerve's
or inner ear's workings,
Little of nerve endings,
and less of ceptions proprio-,
mechanore-, equilibrio-, thermo-, noci-, and intero-.
Add the flow through the senses
to the skullbound glop --
Still he said mind is not just this either.
You are more than that.

Dogen didn't, couldn't, say
Light bounced off the mountain
at 186,000 miles per second,
Still he told us
mind includes seeing,
includes light,
includes the mountain seen,
includes everything that made the mountain.
This signals-triggering-signals
Has nowhere to stop
Is to nowhere confined.

When all reality pours, as it does, into
Every rock, tree, skullbone
And pours unceasing back out again
Mind is nowhere to be found
Unless it is the whole shebang
Like beans.
Like tears on a train.

2018 May

Suffering
I saw a young larch shudder
and looked around to see
if there were some cause
as would bring it fear or hurt.
Seeing none, I said:
"It's some fluke of wind,"
As if suffering were not also a current of air.
I turned then back to the trail,
Each footfall on the dirt
Alike the last,
Mostly.

2018 May

Panic and Fear
Now the red leaves
Now the snow
Now the dogwood blossom
Always now and present
Always now and gone
The old one resting on a park bench
Sips from her cup.

2018 May

The Eightfold Path
"All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change. There is no way to escape being separated from them." (Upajjhatthana Sutta: Anguttara Nikaya 5.57)

To know it is fleeting
To have this in heart-mind
Colors love piquant and precious
Dissipates the fog of eternity
Touches the real.
To know it is fleeting.

2018 May

Right Views
Mayflies live a day --
Or less, if accident or predator befalls.
Not much time.
Enough.
A bristlecone pine in California is 5,067 years old.
A stand of aspen in Utah has a shared root system 80,000 years old.
Not much time.
Enough.
A step is born as a foot lifts from the ground,
A breath as the lungs begin to pull.
A second or so later the step dies back into the earth,
The breath expires.
Not much time.
Enough.

2018 Jun

Right Thinking
Read your thoughts the way you read a novel.
When Aragonese and Castillano
First turned the pages of Europe's first novel,
How did they understand what it was,
What these words were up to?
An epic, only not in verse.
A romance, only longer, and cohesive.
Like a history, then, only intimate.
And not historical.
How did they make sense of it?
Cervantes gave them Sancho Panza,
Illiterate, to show them how to read
the thing:
Not rejecting the master's delusions.
Not sharing them.
Along for the ride.

2018 Jun

Patience
Displayed everywhere.
A frozen pond, a car horn.
Buzzing flies, mountains in the distance.
The grass's breakneck absorption of soil nutrients,
Its headlong photosynthesizing.
A customer's raised volume and pitch to a clerk
Saying "slow" and "unacceptable."
The universe's patience
Is displayed everywhere.

2018 Jun

Delineation
Leavings,
From the many beings' doings and sufferings,
From the universe's physics and chemistry,
We ravens scavenge.

Curious, this noticing, noticing,
Drawing the true lines --
Drawing them with an eraser.

2018 Jun

Previous: Raven Verses V ☙ Next: Raven Verses VII ☙ RAVEN INDEX

2018-02-27

Raven Verses V

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Discouraged
Breath in, breath out.
Blood out arteries, back in veins.
Food in, poop out.
Sun rises, and sets.
Winter to summer to winter.
Births, and deaths.
Mountains rise, wash away.
Did you think all of this was going somewhere?
Did you think there was anywhere for it to go?

2018 Feb

Outside History
The way to be a better person: utterly inscrutable.
But stand under the history that is outside you --
The co-arising with which you are interdependent.
And stand under what is outside of history --
The undying, unborn, unconditioned,
about which even these negations mislead.
See what happens.

2018 Feb

The Dark Side
"All in all, you're just another brick in the wall" (Pink Floyd)

Something doesn't and something does love a wall.
Protecting, preserving, nurturing --
Isolating, trapping --
Defining.
Liberation requires containment.
Your bounds manifest the boundless.
But how can a brick know how it is important
And how it isn't?

2018 Feb

The Good of Practice
The thing, missed --
A tree, a ritual, a song, a shot at love --
Leaves a vacuum
Which the question
Of its good
Fills, or partly.

2018 Feb

The Way

Oh, I drank of that duck-rabbit brew,
Watched the mind, fixed on one picture, flit between two,
Until I turned away, feigning weariness of the silly trick.
Still, a day or a year later, I and a pint of dark and bitter,
Strolling in the yard, crouched to peer
Upon the business at an ant hill.
There again the wild veering betook me:
Now many little organisms before me, now a single one --
Two pictures, and a thing-in-view that is both and neither.
These days, everywhere I look:
Nothing but duck-rabbits, flickering while constant.

2018 Mar

Raven Roshi
In my dreams of trees
Maples and pines
Deny themselves nothing.
The world imposes limitations,
Constrains indulgence,
So they don't have to --
in my dreams of trees.

I, however, self-deny:
Cruel desires, like bacon,
Or the merely self-destructive ones, like doughnuts, sometimes.
It falls to me to weigh competing desires,
To determine which conflicting urge prevails.
Thus I am fraught, as oaks are not,
in my dreams of trees.

I forget that sycamore and birch have stratagems.
The pushing root, the turn of leaf,
the velocity of sap,
are imperfect perfect
responses to circumstance --
exactly as my choosings are,
in my dreams of trees.

2018 Mar

The Way Things Are
Whence a butterfly?
a crowd?
a funk?
a river?

Whence this illusion of single sources?
of causal chains?

Whence a breeze?
a committee meeting?
a joke?
this question?

2018 Mar

Pain During Zazen
A little rub dispels a small itch:
A single push of fingers across the spot, and half-way back.
Substantial itches, though: rub leads to scratch,
And scratch to scratch, increasing the injury.
Here, then, is your life:
Knowing when to rub, to scratch, and when, though difficult, to leave alone --
And, usually, not knowing.

2018 Mar

Zazen in the Forest
Meetings get canceled.
Even when they don't,
Doings and sufferings --
For shelter, food, predator-dodging, etc. --
Fill the hours like sand,
Make me wonder when's enough time to become.
Silly, silly me.

2018 Apr

Ordinary Morality
No nature photographer will capture my image
Trotting with a limp former rabbit hanging from my jaws.
I haven't the predator's skill,
And I do my killing indirectly.
No journalist's expose will limn the contrast between
The misery in my sweatshops
And the opulence surrounding my person,
Though weekly I make payment to some merchant
To sustain oppression and disparity.
It's not that evil and sublime
Interweave, co-depend, mutually define,
Though they do.
It's that every act is both.
It's that this is no excuse.

2018 Apr

Previous: Raven Verses IV ☙ Next: Raven Verses VI ☙ RAVEN INDEX

Raven Verses IV

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Enlightenment
The boundless inhabits, accepts bounds --
Seeps out, becomes boundless.
Love takes to the containment of a heart
So as to beat out its uncontainability.
Thus the thingness of things arrives already gone.

2017 Nov

Death
Bride of Christ, or of Frankenstein, or Groom of Gaia, or something --
We are all someways wedded to a large complexity
to whom our faithfulness will one day expire.
It, or She or He, will then remarry, eventually or soon,
and won't need our permission,
So I give it now, every day,
You may remarry, you may remarry, you may remarry.

2017 Nov

The Holy Spirit
Being as the light is, rising, setting,
Tracelessness is granted -- joy enough.
Two snags, to be avoided if one can, or incorporated:
The ideas of eternal life, and the eternal life of ideas.

2017 Dec

Very Special
There's never been anyone like anyone --
Each of us changing the world,
All day, every day.
I have known a million Red Oak leaves,
And still know nothing of the next one,
Fortunately.

2017 Dec

Metaphysics
Crane references God; Raven not so much.
Still: the mystery, humility, not knowing.
Raven mentions karma; Crane points to grace.
Still: sunshine and air are not earned,
nor our parents' love,
nor that nuthatch in the birch;
and causes have effects.
Choose a language, get a loyalty.
Choose a loyalty, get a language.
Who can name the antecedent?

2017 Dec

First Person Singular
To watch a movie, two pointers
Moviegoers follow effortlessly:
Remember it's an illusion, and
Forget it's an illusion.
Let yourself be taken in, and
Step back out again.
Be in that reality, while
Knowing it isn't real.
To have a self, the same two pointers.

2018 Jan

Veneration and Worship
I worship as an intransitive verb.
I venerate transitively.
Everything is one thing;
Every thing is another.

2018 Jan

Make Sense
Theirs to sing, flash color, beyond all sense.
Ours to plod, grind,
Justify our margins, rationalize our punctuation.
These too are pretty gifts, and we give them
As the finch gives hers.
Even so.
Is not this specialization an affront
To both song and reason?

2018 Jan

The New Discussion Leader
Sometimes, before I forget,
I know I'm going to.
I could write myself a note, I suppose.
Or
Let the trees pick up my slack.

2018 Jan

Guidelines
Your inheritance of joy and compassion,
What estranges you from it?
Every wave does, every ripple.
Your nest of understanding and love,
What gives it away?
Every ripple does, every wave.
The still water becomes clear,
Clear, clear down to the bottom.

2018 Jan

Previous: Raven Verses III ☙ Next: Raven Verses V ☙ RAVEN INDEX

Raven Verses III

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Inspiration
Peekaboo! Where are you?
There you are! Here I am!
The inspiration in your own heart. Where?
From somewhere else. Where?
Peekaboo. There it is.
Parent and child convulsed with giggles.

2017 Sep

Karma
Murder, etc. Before it outs,
It ins. And it's sticky. Atoning
Doesn't always succeed. Not atoning
Lives the lie.

2017 Sep

Propinquity
It's a murmuration of boomerangs
Doing what they are
Going around coming around
Less coordinated than starlings
They frequently bump
Leave marks and nicks
Work themselves pure

2017 Sep

The Purpose of the Practice
The practice is the enlightenment, the doing is the purpose,
The doubting is the faith, the asking is the inkling.
What am I saying? Badgers dig.
On the whole Blue Planet, nothing is missing.

2017 Oct

Brown Bear's Purpose
What do the maples have in mind, their red leaves falling?
What does the moon have in mind, its crescent resting in the branches?
Something, perhaps, though they seem
To have forgotten what it was.

2017 Oct

Buddhist Terms
Save every being, end every delusion.
Do this twice every morning before breakfast, and after.
Gain wisdom from every sensation, embody the entire Buddha way.
Like the rain, like the rain, like the rain.

2017 Oct

Maintenance
Being present to. Becoming the proof of.
These two things only are to be done
With and in this brief and florid stay:
Witness, and bear witness.
Heaven, hell, and a planetful of blue,
Are sitting here, sitting here.

2017 Oct

Buddha
The most basic most eludes definition.
Would you constrain the stream of love poems?
Or otherwise delimit the limitless?
When a single leaf is clear,
what the master is talking about
doesn't much need to be.

2017 Nov

Delusion
Names lie. A cup or tree: infinitely more than
Its cupness or treeness. And less.
Not merely the falseness of categories, this --
For proper names lie as blatantly and remorselessly.
To dress in such lies: a risk.
To step naked into the truth of presence:
Also a risk.

2017 Nov

Mythology
"Everybody needs to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer." (Fear)
The believing's in the doing. The holy
Emerges from the worship. Trees
From sylvics, dendrology, forestry, timbering, carpentry.
On the question of what is really,
The steadfast practice needs not opine.

2017 Nov

Previous: Raven Verses II ☙ Next: Raven Verses IV ☙ RAVEN INDEX

2018-02-26

Ten Verses on Koans XI

2018 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 74
Every day, the same thing.
Every day, it's a fresh, spontaneous,
Gesture of total freedom.
Like a spouse to spouse saying, "I love you":
Deadly.

2018 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 11, Book of Serenity 53
Evening shadows stretch east and
I have passed Today Today.
I think probably you have too. How could we not?
Still, this feeling of having been somewhere else is a
Morning fog that doesn't lift, a delusion
The very nonsense of which encourages its recurrence.
Perhaps I'll swing by the Zen bar on the corner
To hoist a pint of dregs and be thereby intoxicated until
Tomorrow is Today.

2018 Mar

Blue Cliff Record 24, Book of Serenity 60
The sun, low in the western sky, asks, "Have you come?"
I ask back, "Will you go?"
The sun, low in the eastern sky, asks, "Will you go?"
I ask back, "Have you come?"

What strange beauty there is in this:
That the blunt true answer to all four questions,
Is both "Yes, obviously,"
and "Quite impossible."
I dodge so as not to spoil it.

2018 Mar

Book of Serenity 87
"To say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not." (Aristotle, defining True)

Words of being and non
Need a structure
To wrap themselves around,
To bloom purple, and seed.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, say,
Or, what might not be different,
The tree of the delusion of permanent separate essence,
Hosts the pretty parasite,
Supports and feeds its ontological categories.

And if that tree collapses?
Bwahahaha!

2018 Mar

Gateless Gate 1
Dear God, I pray,
For I am sick as a dog, and have no power to heal myself.
It's a dog's life -- "a bitch and then you die" --
And this sad world has been going to the dogs for some time.
The morning paper's dolorous tidings wound like darts.

Yes, I have known beauty and wonder --
Ecstatic shivers and inundations of grace.
Is there not ugliness, too, and tedium?
And, worse, pain? Is there not cruelty?

Some say that loveliness alone is true --
That suffering is delusion, a perceptual distortion.
This will not do, for hurt and wrong are real.
Others proffer that joy and grief are linked somehow,
Co-dependent enablers of each other.
There is something to this, sometimes, maybe,
Though it is not ultimate.

Dear God, I pray,
Sick as a dog and powerless,
I have asked you if there is some light behind every darkness
And been requited in your thunderous, silent No.
In this negative space, this despair,
Where dark is only dark,
May I learn to love unremitting sorrow.
God, show my heart the way to love it
Doggedly.

2018 Jul

Book of Serenity 18
I smile at your joke, or giggle;
Rebuff your criticism, or make penitent resolutions;
Let sadness in the back door,
or anger out the front;
Brush my teeth, scratch an itch,
Respond curtly, become pensive.
In each of these:
Am I expressing absolute liberation?
Or reactive habit?
If there is no difference,
Practice is a waste of time.
If there is no difference,
Practice has born fruit.

2018 Jul

Gateless Gate 7, Book of Serenity 39
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” ― Norman Maclean

Somewhere in that breakfast eating and washing
The extra stopped adding itself.
"Rice" and "bowl"
And "me" and "thee"
And "that" and "this"
Disappeared behind
Quotation marks, which, embarrassed,
Departed after.
Norman said it would eventually happen.
The river wasn't long, though,
Running through, floating me back,
In time for lunch.

2018 Aug

Gateless Gate 31, Book of Serenity 10
There is the going straight on that one may fail to do --
the possibility of erroneous wandering.
There is the going straight on that one can't not do --
the impossibility of deviation from exact straightness,
howsoever winding the path.
Hotetsu advises clarity on the latter
Antecedent to regrets and resolutions
Regarding the former.
How to arrive at this clarity?
(Or is it clarity that you have already arrived at this clarity?
Or clarity that you have already arrived at clarity that you have already...)
A little intention doesn't seem to hurt.
Not too much.

Mount Wutai holds up its finger;
Nothing is concealed.
Straight on through sees Zhaozhou;
Nothing is revealed.

2018 Aug

Book of Serenity 98
What is "intimate with it"?
What is intimate with it?
What is it?
What is intimate?
Always, ubiquitous perfection encounters ceaseless mistake,
Continuously, the call to know it encounters the impossibility of not.
Therefore:
Q: What is intimate with it?
A: What is intimate with it?
When it comes to intention, to prayer,
here's mine:
Let this always and never suffice.

2018 Aug

Ten Verses on Koans X

Ten Verses on Koans XII

KOAN INDEX

Ten Verses on Koans X

2017 Nov

Book of Serenity 56
Dashing rabbit zips past. So swift!
Rabbit-watching uncle stands motionless. So swift!
"Wherever you go, there you are" --
And somewhere else, too. So swift!

2017 Nov

Book of Serenity 89
There is a plot I plant and weed assiduously.
Other areas grow mostly wild:
I support an occasional sapling, cull a little.
Then there are forests I traverse without tending.
I have seen the earth all bare, and see it bare now,
All its growth transparent.

2017 Dec

Book of Serenity 67
Gotama, privilege-born, home-leaver, family-abandoner
Perceived a line, and himself on the bad side:
Not enlightened nor awake, knowing neither truth nor peace,
Possessing neither wisdom nor virtue.
When the morning star saw Gotama,
The illusion of that line lifted.
Each being "possesses the wisdom and virtue of Tathagata,"
He said, "All achieve the way together."
Then Gotama perceived another line,
And himself on the good side.
On the other side:
Beings, because of delusions and attachments,
Not realizing, knowing, seeing their own wisdom, virtue, enlightenment.
"I should teach them," he said.
Suppose next the evening star had seen Gotama,
Had lifted the illusion of his new line.
Doesn't every lifting of an illusory line
Draw another illusory line:
Between the illusion and its lifting?

The path leads nowhere.
I walk it.
Gotama has nothing to teach.
I study.
There is no practice, and I practice.
The lines come and go and come again
And go again.

2017 Dec

Blue Cliff Record 73, Book of Serenity 6
I love this beautiful monk,
Adjudged clueless by a millennium of Zen teachers,
and his beautiful question:
What is this Zen,
when all of us are enlightened from the beginning?
What happens when we sit in that posture we sit in?
How can it be anything? How can it seem to be something?
I love his imperviousness to Nagarjuna's pliers:
Bodhidharma came from the west, didn't come from the west,
Both did and didn't, neither did nor didn't --
and 100 negations of these.
I love that he is undaunted,
The question still carries him,
And he it.
Mazu and and two senior disciples
Have their nice answers:
I can't explain it.
I can't explain it.
I understand nothing about that.
Those are fine pine-tree answers.
And what else could they say? The pine tree
Answers everything.
Yet still my man keeps asking.
I love that about him.
Five patient explanations he receives of the meaning for which he asks:
I'm tired.
Why don't you ask our master?
I have a headache.
I don't understand.
This is white and that is black.
Each is as true as the day is long.
But I love this monk because he doesn't let me forget
That the meaning is
Please tell me directly, Master, the meaning --
Nor that this query is not put to rest
By philosophy or pine trees.
The master and his top students must apprehend
that this beloved novice's persistence
Outshines their shining answers.

2018 Jan

Blue Cliff Record 53
Beloved progenitors, deceased.
Friends, grown estranged.
The hour before that awful mistake.
Youth.
Last summer.
The spring before.
How did it ever fly away?
It was always gone, and is always here.
This cold comfort burns
And burns.

2018 Jan

Book of Serenity 8
A fox:
Just what it must be,
And a constant surprise.
Every moment a fox --
Every action a turning word.

2018 Jan

Gateless Gate 2
The orange five-ball rolling across the green felt
Its vector determined by the angle and magnitude of the force that acted upon it,
So utterly free! So totally liberated!
That monk holding the cue stick, on the other hand:
Another matter.

2018 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 72
"Can you, Master, do such a thing?"
Beloveds, did anyone notice that
Yunyan said this with
His lips and throat closed?

2018 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 37
The mind, being nothing apart from things,
Is found in all the things.
And things?

Wake up and roll out of bed.
Before long, one steps into a desire:
wanting something or wanting it gone.
Pop, pop, pop, desires appear all through the day.
Sometimes, though, a grace:
Attachment/aversion peels away
leaving the bare form of the thing.
If that, too, departs: only an idea or memory of the thing.

Where, then, is there a thing?
Not in the residual no-form imagined thing.
In the form?
It is without essence, without a part distinct or enduring.
Desire, then, which imputes such a thingy feel?
No: the substance of "I want"
makes a delusion, not a thing.
At every level and angle,
All things are nothing things.

The mind, being a nothing mind,
Is found in all the nothing things.

2018 Feb

Ten Verses on Koans IX

Ten Verses on Koans XI

KOAN INDEX

Ten Verses on Koans IX

2017 Sep

Gateless Gate 25, Book of Serenity 90
There I was in Professor Maitreya's class,
Was it the second or the third seat?
Someone in a monk's cowl called on me
Did he bang the gavel first, or not?
Anyway, I took that gavel and banged it.
I had some point to make that seemed important.
Or I'd already made it.
I wanted the class to get it.
Something about propositions and negations and beyond.
Then I woke up and the dream
Began.

2017 Sep

Blue Cliff Record 34
There are peaks and there are valleys
But it is all the peak.
Even so, it is, at the same time,
A big mistake.

2017 Sep

Blue Cliff Record 68
I am the pine trees
For all that
If I bump into one
I say excuse me.

2017 Sep

Book of Serenity 26
The white, whole and beautiful, pure and radiant.
It goes beyond
the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
What goes beyond the white?
The red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
What's all this beyonding?

2017 Oct

Book of Serenity 32
One side of the mystery.
How many sides are there? (None. One. Two. More than the square of the number of all the grains of sand in the world.)
From the mountain peak of faith to the village street of person,
Wherever you are, you're needed at the other.

2017 Oct

Book of Serenity 62
"Second class enlightenment"?
It is the way of my house to speak thus,
Goosing one another to notice conceptualizing
And serve the greens fresh
As befits a house of the homeless.

2017 Oct

Book of Serenity 77
First, the myriad things. Then, the practice.
Third, the empty oneness. Then, guarding the dharma.
Yangshan and company put on a flashy show,
But there's really nothing to it.

2017 Nov

Blue Cliff Record 43
Asking how, answering why.
Asking where, answering when.
No what, no who: suffering cannot arise.
From the beginning, we are dead ones walking.

2017 Nov

Book of Serenity 45
The way the sun's warmth is pleasant before I think "pleasant" --
The way it's just there, abiding.
The way the thought "pleasant" arises before I notice it has --
The way it too is just there.
I can't not dwell in the luminous.

2017 Nov

Ten Verses on Koans VIII

Ten Verses on Koans X

KOAN INDEX

Ten Verses on Koans VIII

2017 May

Blue Cliff Record 32
So the essence of Buddhism is: you get slapped and shoved.
Also: Bowing in gratitude.
In this gentle roughness
Gnawing hunger is itself the food.

2017 Jun

Book of Serenity 13
I think of praying: "dear God, when my time is nigh, let me enter
that good night as Linji did:
teaching with my last breath,
learning with my last awareness."
But never mind.
Linji's dying words granted that prayer long ago
And laid bare our imperishable treasury of the true dharma eye.

2017 Jun

Book of Serenity 38
Right where you are is everywhere-nowhere.
Without rank, position, business, affairs,
The no-rowing rowing of your no-boat boat:
Gentle, merry, carried by the stream.

2017 Jul

Book of Serenity 95
Sell your shout for a whack, or your bow for the same,
Sell all that you've grown, lose your load, lose your name.
Still that trace of the staff is beyond an exchange
'Cause what's given for free is in no one's price range.

2017 Jul

Blue Cliff Record 10
Where did you come from, after all?
Conceived in a shout and birthed from silence,
As was the Universe, Dao, God --
As is each eternal moment coming forth.

2017 Jul

Book of Serenity 22
Common or holy?
No, not in the least.
That's why Yantou
and I bow.

2017 Jul

Gateless Gate 13, Book of Serenity 55
Deshan, deep student of the Diamond (his beginning, his first word)
Burner of all his notes (no further words on that!)
At last becomes himself the Diamond.
In this fleeting world he comes --
an ancient man
bowls in hand
no bell rung
no drum struck
In this phantom dreamland he goes --
an ancient man
bowls in hand
bereft of clue
bereft of luck.

2017 Jul

Book of Serenity 14
"Where have all the past saints gone?"
A finch song, a broken cup
A harsh word, the pang of being judged
The vast sky and the unanswerable green of the fern,
Brooks, roads, subway cars, scents of flowers, of garbage,
All of it, each of it, complete,
Quietly displays all that ever was or will be
Brings our noble ancestors so fully and plainly before my face --
So present --
That for a moment I wonder at their absence.

2017 Aug

Book of Serenity 35
"It's no use walking anywhere unless our walking is our preaching." (St. Francis)
St. Francis never said,
"Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary use words."
At least, he never said it using words.
Perhaps he walked it, tongueless.
Perhaps, when he spoke, he spoke the same way.

2017 Aug

Ten Verses on Koans VII

Ten Verses on Koans IX

KOAN INDEX

Ten Verses on Koans VII

2017 Mar

Blue Cliff Record 58
The old man was 80 before he consented to teach.
By then, decrepit, and so unattached to whether or not he was attached,
He had nothing to left to teach -- nothing more than
a stone, a brook, or a breeze teaches.

2017 Mar

Blue Cliff Record 59
Take it to the end: Give every bit of yourself!
"I only meant this much." He's made his choice and chosen small.
The Great Way, helping people:
Only take it all the way to the end.

2017 Apr

Blue Cliff Record 80
There's a babe inside the adult,
Overlaid with learning, skills, delusions.
There's no going back, and what is going forward?
This, then this, then this . . . Watch and see!
"Not by your will is the house carried through the night."

2017 Apr

Blue Cliff Record 96
Mud clay, gold metal, wood
Every strength depends upon weakness
Your destruction is incorporated into your being, as usual.
"The true Buddha is sitting in the recesses of the house."

2017 Apr

Book of Serenity 57
The nothing returns again to something.
If the nothing returns as something to obtain, have, grasp,
Scrape off that sticky something nothing.
Wash it away.
Otherwise, the nothing returns to mere being, the self-world river.
Float downstream;
Smile softly over the fall.

2017 Apr

Blue Cliff Record 55
Alive or dead? Form or emptiness?
Meaning or no meaning? The body,
beautiful and poignant, presents all that has passed.
For a while it moved; then it stopped.

2017 May

Blue Cliff Record 89, Book of Serenity 54
Compassion, in the darkness, seeing nothing,
acts with unthinking naturalness.
Being awakened is like being asleep --
Nondiscriminating, responding spontaneously.
A patch of violets beside the path --
What could be more awake?
What more could Compassion do?

2017 May

Book of Serenity 21
Working hard is taking it easy.
Taking it easy is working hard.
The moon, for instance: nothing works harder --
Nothing's more at ease.
The river, for instance.
The flower beside the path.

2017 May

Book of Serenity 83
The stars at night: sick or healthy?
The room where Daowu tends a patient: a sick or healthy room?
Perceiving the sickness of health, the health of sickness,
Is a single step down an infinite road --
A sick or healthy step?

2017 May

Ten Verses on Koans VI

Ten Verses on Koans VIII

KOAN INDEX

Ten Verses on Koans VI

Responses to koans in Gateless Gate -- a.k.a. Wumenguan (Chinese), Mumonkan (Japanese),
Blue Cliff Record -- a.k.a. Biyan Lu (Chinese), Hekiganroku (Japanese), and
Book of Serenity -- a.k.a. Congrong Lu (Chinese), Shoyoroku (Japanese).

Blue Cliff Record 36
"Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." (Norman Maclean)
By the river, eternal, flowing,
A gate.
At the gate, the conversation, the meeting:
Master and administrator.
oneness and multiplicity,
going and returning,
rising scents and falling flowers,
spring and autumn.

2016 Dec

Book of Serenity 79
Down from the pole of emptiness.
Then down from the pole of ordinariness.
Stepping to one's death over and over,
Ah, that's the life.

2016 Dec

Gateless Gate 11
Two hermits -- what is the difference?
Their sameness is their difference.
Dissolving the illusion of "sameness" and "difference"
Into just this! just fist! just thist.

2017 Jan

Gateless Gate 37, Book of Serenity 47
Down, down go the roots; out, out go the branches --
In the winter, standing bare; in the spring, clad in fresh leaves:
The reason and meaning of all that you ask.

2017 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 2
Snow in the branches, on the roofs. Geese
In the sky. A gibbous moon.
Choosing is not to be found.
Disliking choosing is not to be found.

2017 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 9
Coming in, or going out, or coming out, or going in,
Sunlit, moonlit, or unlit,
Thou and I are always stepping over the threshold of four gates,
As if our names were "The World."

2017 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 30
Soil and tending and the grace of waters
Make a radish.
Conditions and conditions and the whole universe pouring through them --
Make one large radish.

2017 Feb

Blue Cliff Record 41, Book of Serenity 63
After the ecstasy, the laundry.
What is on the other side of death
Was always here on this side
Waiting, like the daylight and the laundry.

2017 Mar

Blue Cliff Record 45
The touch my lover brings, breeze in the pines,
That email to answer, moon rising over a winter lake,
A bowl of oatmeal, the prick of a pin,
The fluttering fall of a red maple leaf,
My friend's sweater, a moment's fear,
The raising and lowering of the teacher's eyebrows,
Flowers among the grass, playground sounds,
And the riverbank talks of the waters of March --
Everywhere, oneness never stops reducing.

2017 Mar

Blue Cliff Record 52
Clop, clop, clop, crossing the bridge,
All us beasts of burden treading on
Always crossing, never crossed,
Or always already crossed, and still crossing
From things to no-things, no-things to things
One step, one stone, one step, one stone.

2017 Mar

Ten Verses on Koans V

Ten Verses on Koans VII

KOAN INDEX

Ten Verses on Koans V

2016 Aug

Book of Serenity 69
The three phases:
There is a mountain; there is not a mountain; there is a mountain.
Or:
There is knowing;
there is the further knowing that knocks out the former knowing;
there is the sublime not-knowing of the Buddhas of the three worlds.

2016 Sep

Book of Serenity 93
The treasury is your heart wondering what the treasury is.
The treasury is your heart moving on from wondering what the treasury is.
Summer breezes turn to autumn gusts
The budding peach blossom is already the fallen fruit.

2016 Sep

Book of Serenity 23
Face the wall of years, centuries, kalpas.
Face the wall of time and eternity.
When these illusions lift, the wall you face is always right now --
Also without substance.
Facing facing facing.

2016 Sep

Blue Cliff Record 81
Die when it is time to die.
Come alive when it is time to come alive.
Coming alive and not running away,
The great deer is of no concern.

2016 Sep

Book of Serenity 7
Yaoshan gives a dharma talk like the pines do --
And those who are hungry consume it.
With eyes to hear and ears to see --
Nothing is left unsaid.

2016 Sep

Blue Cliff Record 4
The bundle carried, the haughty dismissal, the second try --
The formal clothes, the shout, the departure --
The lonely mountain hermitage, the frost on the snow --
Such profligate generosity! So superfluous, so unnecessary --
And so absolutely essential.

2016 Oct

Book of Serenity 86
What is the great meaning of the Buddha-dharma?
Whack!
Where else did you think the answer lay?
In the moonlight on the birch tree?
Whack!

2016 Oct

Book of Serenity 15
Those old questions:
Where have I come from? What am I? What should I do?
A field, a hoe, and a moving toward those who labor.
What else is needed? What else is possible?

2016 Nov

Book of Serenity 37
Fully manifesting the entire universe of karma right where you are.
Fully manifesting the entire universe of karma right where everything is.
Tossed in interdependent co-origination, caught in webs of causality:
There is no escape. The daffodil blossom does not escape
its stem, nor the stem the earth:
Fully manifesting the entire universe of karma right where it is.

2016 Nov

Ten Verses on Koans IV

Ten Verses on Koans VI

KOAN INDEX