"You talked about the
first principle again, but I still don't know what it is," I
said to Suzuki. "I don't know," he said, "is
the first principle."
--Shunryu Suzuki
"Only in an open, nonjudgmental space
can we acknowledge what we are
feeling. Only in an open space where we're not all caught
up in our
own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others
really
are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them
compassionately."
-- Pema Chodron
When a person has lived properly and acted
generously, he grasps the way things are. He is not dependent on
attachments; he is free from anger and aversions; what he does
becomes perfect action.
The pureness of perfectly balanced action based on seeing the way
things are --this is freedom and the ending of
ignorance.
-Sutta Nipata
From "The Pocket
Buddha Reader," edited by Anne Bancroft
At this moment, is there anything lacking?
Nirvana is right here now before our eyes. This place is the
lotus land. This body now is the Buddha. --Hakuin
You can only understand
what you are not. What you are, you can only be. What you are can
never be an object.
When there is no asking,
there is prayer. When there is no meditator, there is meditation.
When there is no lover, real love is.
The timeless non-state
cannot be achieved because the mind cannot evolve towards it. The
mind can only bring you to the threshold.
Awakening comes
unexpectedly when you do not wait for it, when you live in
not-knowing. Only then are you available. When understanding
dissolves in being, there is sudden awakening.
-- Jean Klein
Mark Scorelle posted to Wisdom-l
Bone
1.
Understand,
I am always trying to figure out
what the soul is,
and where hidden,
and what shape -
and so, last week,
when I found on the beach
the ear bone
of a pilot whale that may have died
hundreds of years ago, I thought
maybe I was close
to discovering something -
for the ear bone
2.
is the
portion that lasts longest
in any of us, man or whale; shaped
like a squat spoon
with a pink scoop where
once, in the lively swimmer's head,
it joined its two sisters
in the house of hearing,
it was only
two inches long -
and thought: the soul
might be like this -
so hard, so necessary -
3.
yet almost
nothing.
Beside me
the gray sea
was opening and shutting its wave-doors,
unfolding over and over
its time-ridiculing roar;
I looked but I couldn't see anything
through its dark-knit glare;
yet don't we all know, the golden sand
is there at the bottom,
though our eyes have never seen it,
nor can our hands ever catch it
4.
lest we
would sift it down
into fractions, and facts -
certainties -
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.
