an old writer and his words

  • RINZAI’S ENLIGHTENMENT 正法眼蔵 二十七

      If you ask your question you will find an answer but ask another and the stick will respond each time. If you seek another teacher will you change the question or the answer, and does it matter. Take up the stick, who will you strike, your teacher or yourself, and is there any real…

    Lou Faber

  • NOTA BENE

    Sometime this week you will get a note. You will not know who it is from, and you won’t be at all certain just what it is supposed to mean, but you will carefully fold it, place it in your pocket and later put it in a safe place along with all the other notes…

    Lou Faber

  • UMMON’S TWO SICKNESSES

      If you truly believe that you will soon enough meet your teacher you must gather together all of your questions concerning the Dharma. Carry them with you at all times in a satchel thrown over your shoulder, for you will be allowed only a single meeting with the master. When you meet the master,…

    Lou Faber

  • MOMENT(US) ARRIVAL

    Sooner or later the moment arrives when there is no option left and you have to decide. There are never facts enough, or time – uncertainty is a most unwelcome companion. In this moment indecision is not an allowed outcome and every selection is at once right and wrong.

    Lou Faber

  • KANNON’S STATUE 鐵笛倒吹 語十八

    If you meet the Bodhisattva, you don’t ask someone to carve the image from your mind. To the carver, she weighs but an ounce and can be carried on his fingertip but try to lift her and you will not be able to move her from her place. All Buddhas are one Buddha but his…

    Lou Faber

  • MIND THE GAP

      Tomorrow none of this will matter. Yesterday it was only a promise, unfulfilled. Today slipped by and I failed to notice it. It is how things go in life, living in the gaps.

    Lou Faber

  • EVENT UALLY

    A week from this Thursday something will happen that no one could have ever foreseen. This is the beauty and the horror, at once, of our limited vision, afraid to see the present although it is all that is clearly within our visual field. Instead we look back into the shadows where memory substitutes for…

    Lou Faber

  • AD INFINITUM

    When all is said and done and everything that can be written has been, when the questions have all been answered or forgotten, when you grow tired of answers, ask yourself this:  

    Lou Faber

  • JOSHU’S DOG (SHOBOGENZO 114)

    Joshu’s dog and Schrödinger’s cat- are they one and the same. Leave the lid on the box of the mind. What is the half-life of a thought?

    Lou Faber

  • BLOWING OUT THE CANDLE無門關 二十八

      Ryukan and Tokusan, one an old fool one a young fool. Burn your notes, set fire to them both, enlightenment can be found in the ashes, where words and thought are carried off on the winds. A reflection on Case 28 of the Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate)

    Lou Faber