After much time spent with Dogen, I turned to another zen master, Hakuin. He wrote a "Chant in Praise of Zazen", often chanted at zen monasteries. This is how the chant begins:-
From the very beginning all beings are Buddha.
Like water and ice,
without water no ice,
outside us no Buddhas.
How near the truth
yet how far we seek,
like one in water crying ‘I thirst!’
Like a child of rich birth wandering poor on this earth, we endlessly circle the six worlds.
The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.
From dark path to dark path we’ve wandered in darkness.
How can we be free from birth and death?
We cry "I thirst". Yes, we do. Well, I do.
What to drink is also all around us.
What to drink is also all around us.
Listen to Donald Trump, to anything he says, read the body language, apply just the minimum of intelligence, and we surely must despair that a human being such as he has risen to what might be called "the top". What does it say of our "civilization"?
Look at the current alternative. Is Joe Biden any real "answer"? Where does it leave us?
Look at the current alternative. Is Joe Biden any real "answer"? Where does it leave us?
Sometimes the temptation is to want to wipe the whole slate clean and start again. But I think we have to stay with it.
Anyway, here is Proust, from his "Remembrance of Things Past":-
"A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is....."
"A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is....."
But to return to Hakuin's chant, the second line......
"Like water and ice, without water no ice."
(Best heard or chanted while sipping cappuccinos in Costas)
Commentary by Albert Low:-
We live as though we are frozen. Our personality, what we call “myself,” is knowledge, memory, attitudes, beliefs, and judgments, which have become solid, and so have become like the bars of a cage.
It stands to reason that we live on a solid rock, immobile, the centre of the Cosmos, all things revolving around us.
(Best heard or chanted while sipping cappuccinos in Costas)
Commentary by Albert Low:-
We live as though we are frozen. Our personality, what we call “myself,” is knowledge, memory, attitudes, beliefs, and judgments, which have become solid, and so have become like the bars of a cage.
It stands to reason that we live on a solid rock, immobile, the centre of the Cosmos, all things revolving around us.
The continual stream of verbiage issuing from the mouths of our so called "leaders" makes me dauntless in simply saying whatever I like. I have never felt so alienated from what is called the UK and the direction it appears to be taking.
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