Painted Rice Cakes

"The real way circulates everywhere; how could it require practice or enlightenment? The essential teaching is fully available; how could effort be necessary? Furthermore, the entire mirror is free of dust; why take steps to polish it? Nothing is separate from this very place; why journey away? And yet, if you miss the mark even by a strand of hair, you are as distant as heaven from earth. If the slightest discrimination occurs, you will be lost in confusion. You could be proud of your understanding and have abundant realization, or acquire outstanding wisdom and attain the way by clarifying the mind. Still, if you are wandering about in your head, you may miss the vital path of letting your body leap (907)." The first paragraph of this passage articulates so well the fundamental questions that we have been discussing in regards to Buddhism. It is paradoxical, that the simplest things are the most challenging, that one must re-learn how to coexist with time, and with one'...

“Know that a painted rice cake is your face after your parents were born, your face before your parents were born.” “Painting of a Rice Cake”, 445 “In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.” “The Time Being”, 106 Last Friday, after our final class of the semester, I did something I hadn’t done in months—watch a movie. Indulging, somewhat arbitrarily, an inborn pull towards science fiction, I put on Arrival (2016), and, by the film’s final moments, I had become convinced of several subtle and surprising connections to Dōgen . For those who have already seen it and are skeptical, I’m willing to concede the possibility that whatever resemblances may exist, they are apparent only to a Dōgen -steeped brain such as my own, and that the discrepancies—even major ones—are much more pronounced than the similarities. But for just that reason, I want to recommend it to anyone else who ha...

  Abiquiu, New Mexico Georgia O’Keeffe’s Studio   A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims, there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements… Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish. You can go further. There is practice-enlightenment, which encompasses limited and unlimited life.”  Actualizing the Fundamental Point, p. 32   What is our element? Our medium? That which is life for us, we humans? We walk upon the earth, breathe air, are composed largely of water, and can have fiery emotions, as hot blood courses through our veins. But, we are more than our bodily functions, and we are more than our limbic systems that react to stimuli, the wild fox within us. As we said in class, Mencius might say our medium is relationship, starting with t...

  Toward the end of his life, in the little cottage behind his Lafayette, California house, Bob Birnbaum breathed heavily in his black leather easy chair, his tired eyes closed, as I counted the ways that he had appeared to me during our Wednesday at 4 p.m. blast-offs: Therapist, teacher, surrogate dad, mentor, spiritual master, fellow traveler, bodhisattva, friend, wise leader, beloved, will-bender, pilot. Those are the ones I remember. It was a long list. He shook his head violently at “teacher.” In fact, he scorned all but two – “friend” and “fellow traveler.” When I finished he repeated out loud and nodded vigorously, “That one. Fellow traveler.” Bob (whom I never knew as Swami Prem Amitabh) was raised in the Bronx tenements and projects of the 30s and 40s, so as a Jewish red diaper baby he was applauding the subversive Communist-inspired etymology tucked into the term “fellow traveler.”   We were in on the same spiritual secret cabal, Bob and I! Seven years together, an...

This post grew out of what started as a comment on Mr. Allen's post of Plum Blossom photos (the second time I've started a comment on a post of Mr. Allen's that keeps growing until I realize it might need to be its own post!) The detail of this image... the broad petals of declarative pink. The blossoms look somehow both plump (perhaps because the petals are short and wide, plus the density of many layers of petals) and yet paper-soft and delicate. The dark center is like a navel. A tightly puckered kiss. A warm yellow-brown iris around a pupil. And the spindly-thin, white arms (a feature that I'm sure has an official botanical name) remind me of an insect's cilia.  I have spent a few summers in Vermont at a Master's program where the 200 or so students live in these modest barns and houses about 20 miles outside Middlebury. The campus is very remote, surrounded by obscenely verdant hills and broad meadows, trickling streams. Skys that turn urgent in an instant,...

  Here is one last joust at trying to approach language through Dōgen. I am going to play with words a bit here: on the one hand, we have the idea of ‘turning words’, and on the other, ‘words that turn’. It seems that they are intimately connected, but their function, at least for me here, is different, where they highlight different processes of language and words in human life.  Let’s first address ‘turn’ and ‘turning’. In both cases, we are dealing with a verb, that is an action, so it is something that ones does, is doing or has done. It seems important to notice the spatial sense of this term, where turning seems to require that someone is some-‘where’, and that they are oriented towards something or things, and therefore also, not oriented towards others. Orientation is necessarily a process of both concealment and revelation, and it is in the process of turning (or being turned) that one becomes re-oriented, perhaps  ad infinitum . In other words, despite the ...