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NO MIND, NO BUDDHA 無門關 三十三
Baso knows well only the ox truly understands the yoke but if you offer it the ox will not accept. Why would you seek to become the ox? It would be better to burn the yoke. A reflection on Case 33 of The Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate)
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TIPPING POINT
The hardest thing is knowing that this precise moment, this precise place is the tipping point, and things could go either way from here, although the Buddha would suggest that there are ten directions in which everything always can go. You cannot pause and reflect on this, for this precise moment, this precise place…
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LOST, AGAIN
It would help, she said, if you would stop thinking of yourself as Sisyphus and all of life as the rock, you might actually, one day, begin to enjoy what you do. It would help, he said, if I could be like a great blue heron, grow wings and take to a summer sky leaving…
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BODHI VILLANELLE
Sitting beneath the Bodhi tree I wrestle with passing thoughts in an unending struggle with me. The true face of the pain I see results from what I have wrought sitting beneath the Bodhi tree. I grow tired, wish to flee– above all, to avoid being caught in an unending struggle with me for a…
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RELATIVITY
I can no more imagine a lack of freedom then they can imagine the freedom I assume. It is always like that imaginings are real until you try to make them corporeal, then the evanescence is all that is real. It is easy to ask how can they live in such poverty, and had they…
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TEN DIRECTIONS
It would help, she said, if you would stop thinking of yourself as Sisyphus and all of life as the rock. You might actually, one day, begin to enjoy what you do. It would help, he said, if I could be like a great blue heron, grow wings and take to a summer sky leaving…
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ASHES TO DUST
The dolphin is born of the water, the man born of the fire and of the earth. The dolphin swims unrestrained, the man chooses to live in the city of Afterlife, focussed on impending rebirth. The dolphin stares up in wonder at the amassing clouds, the man curses the sky shielding him from heaven. The dolphin…
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ENDLESS FLIGHT
Painfully jammed into the middle seat of five three hours into the fourteen hour flight SFO to Tokyo Narita, it is easy to imagine myself a sheet of origami paper carefully and precisely folded into a crane wings bound in anticipation of taking to the air.
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QUESTIONS
If the night sky contains no moon has the sun gone out? It is like a garden within a fence, do the flowers dream of freedom or are we the prisoners kept out from the world within their golden petals? A strong wind carries off the answers.
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DHAMMAPADA
A foolish man sits at the edge of the pond, his feet perfectly still in the water. He stares into the mirrored surface and sees a fool, smiles as a ginkgo leaf floats like a sail on a morning breeze onto the pool, ripples radiate out, touching his toes and he smiles, and the fool…
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an old writer and his words 