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#2663 - Wednesday, December 6, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee


The Nondual Highlights    

Most of us spend our lives as if we have another one in the bank.

-Ben Irwin


  Famous Last Words
for Dana Gioia
   

"It has all been very interesting!"
          declared Lady Mary Wortley Montague.
Examining his sickroom, Oscar Wilde railed,
          "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
Told the angels were waiting for him,
          Ethan Allen quipped, "Let 'em wait."
"I am so very happy," Gerard Manley Hopkins cooed.
          Goethe pleaded for "More light, more light."
 

Madame de Pompadour cried out to God,
          "Wait a minute!" rouged her cheeks red.
"I suppose I am turning into a god?"
          The dying Emperor Vespasian said.
Henry James, succumbing to a massive stroke,
          "So it has come ... The Distinguished Thing."
Pancho Villa pleaded, "Don't let it end
          like this. Tell 'em I said something."
 

Gertrude to Alice B.: "What is the answer?"
          [Silence] "In that case, what is the question?"
"If this is dying, I don't think much of it,"
          Muttered Lytton Strachey. When undone,
Julius Caesar managed, "Et tu, Brute?"
          Edmund Kean: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
Chekhov: "It's been so long since I've had champagne."
          Goethe: "More light, more light," then departed.
     

Robert Phillips, from Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems  


    "In Western societies, the distinction between pride and firmness of
mind is often confused.
A lack of pride is construed to be a weakness. Pride is a built-up
and concentrated form of ego grasping.
So in this respect, it is a weakness.

A person can have great strength of character, and a strong resolve
to achieve a goal, such as enlightenment, for example, without pride
ever manifesting.

We need to dissociate pride -- the affirmation of our own supremacy
over others which suggests a certain blindness -- from firmness of
mind that is a quality free of all the negative aspects of pride.

In the same way we often have a distorted view which equates humility
with a weakness of character.
What we really need is courage and strength of character, without
developing pride."
                        
                 -Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche


From the website
http://www.shamarpa.org/teachings/medit-love-comp.php
Daily Dharma  


    Ordinarily, we spend all our time comparing and 
discriminating between this and that, always looking 
around for something good to happen to us. And 
because of that we become restless and anxious  about
everything. As long as we are able to imagine  something
better than what we have or who we are,  it follows
naturally that there could also be something  worse. We
are constantly pursued by misgivings  that something
bad will happen. In other words, as  long as we live by
distinguishing between the better  way and the worse
way, we can never find absolute  peace such that
whatever happens is all right. When  we let go of our
thoughts that distinguish better from  worse and instead
see everything in terms of the  Universal Self, we are
able to settle upon a different  attitude toward life--the
attitude of magnanimous  mind that whatever happens,
we are living out Self  which is only Self. Here a truly
peaceful life unfolds.   

-Kosho Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought 
   


John Daido Loori, Roshi

 

John Daido Loori, Roshi, author, artist, Zen Master is the founder and abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York. Trained in koan Zen as well as in the subtle school of Master Dogen's Zen, he is a dharma heir of Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi. He has received transmission in both the Rinzai as well as Soto lines of Zen Buddhism. Abbot Loori lives at the Monastery year round and is very active in its day-to-day activities, making him highly accessible to students. Devoted to maintaining authentic Zen training, he has developed a distinctive style, called the Eight Gates of Zen, based on the Eightfold Path, involving both monastic and lay practitioners in a program of study that embraces every aspect of daily life. Zazen and a strong teacher-student relationship form the core of the training, supported by art practice and other areas of study, as was traditional during the Golden Ages of Chinese and Japanese Zen.

Daido Loori is also an award winning photographer and videographer, with dozens of exhibitions to his credit and a successful career in both commercial and art photography. He has had over 30 one-person shows, and his work has been exhibited in over 50 group shows both in the United States and abroad. His photographs have been published in leading photography magazines, including Aperture and Time Life.

 

Jinzu is a term from the teachings of Zen Buddhism that is translated here as "mystical power." This is a loose translation for a standard term in East Asian Buddhism that means higher knowledge. It refers to a variety of mystical powers held to be accessible to advanced spiritual adepts. It implies a knowledge of and mastery over matters of the spirit or the ability to pass through, reach, and communicate with the mystical.

This exhibition is entitled Jinzu because its intention is to explore the hidden universe of the natural world and the insentient in an attempt to go beyond appearances and see things for what else they are. This is a characteristic of the Zen aesthetic, which is more concerned with communicating the spirit of a subject rather than its form. Indeed, in Zen art, the artist tries to convey the inherent nature of the subject itself.

Listen to a sample from one of Daido Roshi's Dharma Discourses 


A lot of Daido Loori's photos are from nature, some of which can be viewed here:
 
http://www.dharma.net/johndaidoloori/   in both exhibits and portfolio.


 by Bob O'Hearn on Garden Mystics

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