www.richarddiedrichs.com

Dogen

Coming, going, the waterbirds
don't leave a trace,
don't follow a path.

In midnight waters,

Waveless, windless,

The old boat’s swamped

With moonlight.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. 
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. 
Although its light is wide and great, 
The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. 
The whole moon and the entire sky 
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

 Basho

A single leaf -
Just a single leaf has fallen,
And was swept away breathless
By a gust of wild wind.

The bee emerging 
from deep within the peony 
departs reluctantly

The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Splash! 

 Ryokan

How can I possibly sleep 
This moonlit evening? 
Come, my friends, 
Let’s sing and dance 
All night long. 

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

The wind has settled, the blossoms have fallen; 
Birds sing, the mountains grow dark -- 
This is the wondrous power of Buddhism.

I watch people in the world 
Throw away their lives lusting after things, 
Never able to satisfy their desires, 
Falling into deeper despair 
And torturing themselves. 
Even if they get what they want 
How long will they be able to enjoy it? 
For one heavenly pleasure 
They suffer ten torments of hell, 
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone. 
Such people are like monkeys 
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water 
And then falling into a whirlpool. 
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer. 
Despite myself, I fret over them all night 
And cannot stop my flow of tears.

Ikkyu

I'd love to give you something

but what would help? 

Watching my four-year-old daughter dance
I cannot break free of her. 

Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self.

only one koan matters
you

Lots of arms, just like Kannon the Goddess; 
Sacrificed for me, garnished with citron, I revere it so! 
The taste of the sea, just divine! 
Sorry, Buddha, this is another precept I just cannot keep.

Look at the cherry blossoms!
Their color and scent fall with them,
Are gone forever,
Yet mindless
The spring comes again. 

[A recent Tweet I saw on Twitter]: 

“For anyone who has lost weight to live, you have my respect. After dropping 60 lbs., I can’t do it anymore. I can’t be this hungry every hour of every day. I truly appreciate the compliments, but I appreciate food even more. I can tolerate the fat insults better than the hunger."

I don’t know this person’s experience and I am not minimizing it but reading this declaration/confession made me realize that anything worth achieving involves discomfort, little or large.  Given the nature of life and of human nature, much of our life is discomfort.  What do we do with that?  How do we cope?  How much discomfort can we stand or even put up with?  Do we make it positive or negative?  Do we indulge ourselves to make the discomfort go away?  What does that lead to?

 I have been dieting to lose weight, not to live but for vanity and for better health.  The tweeter is correct:  I feel hungry most of the time.  Again I am not judging or comparing our experiences but I turn toward the discomfort.  I enter it.  I experience it - the sensation and my reaction to it.   

In meditation practice, we sit with our discomfort.  We need to know our pain before we can transform it.  Then, we can move on and try to be of benefit to others.

As Senior Editor of Adventure Travel Magazine, I might have been destined to spend time with James Dickey.  Dickey wrote the adventure epic, Deliverance.  The novel, Dickey’s first, told the story of four guys from the city who canoe a river in the Georgia wilderness, endure some horrific hillbilly hospitality, and emerge changed, or dead. 

I interviewed Dickey, with other Adventure Travel’s editors, at the home of our publisher in Seattle.  Dickey had a huge personality.  He exuded Southern charm and joyous exuberance.  He was a brilliant storyteller.

I would have been interested in meeting the author of Deliverance, but James Dickey also was a major American writer.  He published two other novels, twenty-eight volumes of poetry, non-fiction, literary criticism, and screenplays.  He won the National Book Award for Poetry, for Buckdancer’s Choice, recited his poem, “The Strength of Fields,” at President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, and served as the U.S. Poet Laureate.

Jimbo, as he asked us to call him, talked about hunting with a bow and arrow, which brought a degree of fairness to hunting.  He described feeling invincible when he wrote, fueled by whiskey.  He talked about playing guitar.  He said he had decided to stick with it for ten years.  You stay with anything for ten years and you become pretty good.  His advice stuck with me.  I took piano lessons when I was in my mid-fifties.  I stuck with it beyond ten years and enjoy it as a passion.  Jimbo told how he sold his soul and worked for a while as a copyrighter at ad agencies.  He told us that he came up with the famous slogan for Coke, “It’s the real thing.”

I had James Dickey’s company for one evening.  He filled the room with bonhomie.  He was a complicated human being and we had a rather shallow encounter, but I felt impressed and inspired.  It has stayed with me.

A few years after my evening with James Dickey, I had a freelance magazine assignment to write an article profiling Poetry Northwest Magazine.  I got the phone number of Joyce Carol Oates who had published early in PNM and called her.  She wouldn’t talk to me.  Her assistant said she was busy getting ready to leave on a trip.  I framed the article around interviewing her and begged the assistant.  Ms. Oates would not take the time.  I was left hanging.  I remembered that Jimbo had told us to call him any time.  So, I phoned James Dickey, who also had published early in Poetry Northwest.  He was friendly and accommodating.  He filled in the history of his involvement with Poetry Northwest and provided context of the magazine in the world of poetry publishing.  James Dickey saved my backside and I have been forever grateful.

The Strength of Fields

BY JAMES L. DICKEY

James Dickey talked about his process for writing the novel, Deliverance.  Dickey worked as a master practitioner of poetry.  He specialized in narrative poetry, tracking a story line in his poems.  He won a prize with a long narrative poem about the mountains and rivers of North Georgia.  An agent contacted him, asking if he had considered writing a novel with the same setting as the poem.  He responded that he had not, but the thought persisted.  Did he know enough about North Georgia and its people to write about it?  If he took “a determined stand” to write a novel about it, what would he write about?  Nothing came to mind.  Then, something took hold of him.  He thought, “What about the time?”  He knew the whole story in five minutes.  He knew who the characters were.  He knew the sequence of events.  He knew where it took place, the “rivers under the rapids.”  He knew the equipment the characters used.  And he knew how it came out.  He knew everything about the story in five minutes.  The novel, Deliverance, was published twelve years later.

Dickey said that for years the Deliverance manuscript was something lying around in a drawer.  He wrote seven or eight books while working on the novel.  He would “give it another kick” when he got around to it.  Once it began to look like he could finish it, Dickey started pushing and got to the end.  He said he never did know anything about writing novels (even though he wrote two more after Deliverance).

Deliverance is a novel about violence and man’s response in the thick of it and in its aftermath.  All the aspects of the novel that dealt with bloodshed, murder and stalking Dickey devised through conjecture.  As a novelist, he said, he had to think like a murderer.

The hardest part of the novel to write was getting the main protagonist to try to think like one of the antagonists, to outguess him and be one step ahead of him, while always filled with doubt, residing in the unknown.

Dickey said the transition to writing prose was not easy.  He had to learn to work without the poetic line.  He had relied in his poetry on the line, the way the human eye moves to the next line, what happens when you read a line of verse and the way it goes into the next line.  He had to learn the conventions of working with the sentence and paragraph.

Originally, Dickey wrote heavily charged prose.  But, he said, it was “too juicy.”  It detracted from the narrative thrust, which is the force of the story.  He spent two or three drafts excising that quality in the writing.  He said he wanted “unobtrusively remarkable observation that didn’t call attention to itself.”

While Dickey took scenes, events, and circumstances from his previous poems and incorporated them into the narrative of Deliverance, he didn’t feel he reduced them by changing them from poetry to prose.   He reconceived them in a new medium.

After Deliverance, Dickey wrote his two other novels, Alnilam and To the White Sea.  He always felt, though, that writing poetry was “the center of his creative wheel.”

“…In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse…”

 --Horatio, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1

 I have one regret that haunts my literary soul.  I had George Plimpton all to myself one evening and I ghosted him.

"The most interesting man in the world” on television for a while was a New York actor named Jonathan Goldsmith: “Stay thirsty, my friends.”  That was a hoax, a ruse, a commercial. 

At the time I iced him, George Plimpton might well have actually been the most interesting man in the world.  Some perspective.  George Plimpton founded the Paris Review and edited the journal for fifty years.  In its first five years, the Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, William Styron, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Genet, and Robert Bly. The list goes on, to include the most accomplished and significant writers over the past six and a half decades.

The Paris Review did interviews with hundreds of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, E.M. Forster, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov.  A literary critic called this series of interviews, “one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world." 

George Plimpton gained fame and literary success by leaping into the world of professional sports as a participant and reporting his experiences as an amateur. He wrote more than thirty books and basically invented participatory journalism.

He pitched at Yankee Stadium, boxed with Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson, quarterbacked for the Detroit Lions and Baltimore Colts, played goalie for the Boston Bruins, golfed on the PGA tour, played tournament bridge, and performed on the circus high wire.  Plimpton even tried his hand at standup comedy at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

The reporting of his experiences in professional sports produced seven books, including Paper Lion, which was made into a movie starring Alan Alda.

George Plimpton acted in twenty-eight movies himself, including Lawrence of Arabia, Nixon, and Good Will Hunting, and appeared on television twelve times, including on The Simpsons.

Plimpton drove a tank in Italy during the war and was an explosives expert.  He set off fireworks at home, including the seven-hundred-pound Roman candle, called “The Fat Man,” which caused a thirty-five-foot wide by ten-foot-deep crater at one spot and blew out seven hundred windows at another.  Plimpton competed in a fireworks festival at Monte Carlo and was the first American to win.

Plimpton wrote an article in Sports Illustrated as an April Fool’s joke.  The article profiled a New York Mets rookie pitcher by the name of Siddhartha Finch.  Sidd Finch could throw a one-hundred-and-sixty-mile-per-hour fastball, wore a heavy boot on one foot, and was a practicing Buddhist.  So many magazine readers believed the prank in the magazine that Plimpton wore a book about Sidd Finch.

Plimpton came from an old American family.  He attended Phillips Exeter, Harvard and Cambridge.  He even got thrown out of Phillips Exeter!

I watched a video of Plimpton telling a story about touring with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Leonard Bernstein, playing the triangle.  He was charming, funny, and articulate.

I had this man alone and I ignored him.  He came to L.A. to a book convention.  He was signing his recently released book, Mad Ducks and Bears.  Walden Books sponsored his visit.  I was the assistant manager of the Walden Books in Northridge, California.  I was assigned to help out George Plimpton at the booth.  I opened boxes and supplied him with books to sign.  I made sure he was comfortable, had water to drink.  I was twenty-seven-years-old; he was forty-six. 

When I came to the booth that evening, I was anxious.  My manager had made a big deal over this famous celebrity.  I was afraid.  I was intent on not showing how impressed, or intimated, I felt, so I gave him the silent treatment, the cold shoulder.  He was cordial, but quiet.  Not that many autograph seekers came over to our booth, so Plimpton and I sat at opposite ends, minding our own business.  I did not have the wherewithal to introduce myself and ask him questions about his spectacular career and life.  He met Hemingway and Faulkner, and all those brilliant writers.  He had done remarkable things, was a remarkable man.  I was a scared man/boy who distanced myself out of fear. 

These are the obstacles.  They are the moments from which we learn.  They help us to come out of our fear and become the people we want to be.

From My Notes on Mary Shelley and the e-Book, The Woman Who Created a Monster

Mary Shelley traveled the Rhine River in Germany when she was 17.  She stopped in the town of Gernsheim, in the vicinity of Frankenstein Castle.  Frankenstein means “stone of the Franks.”  The castle was built before 1250, in the Oldenwald mountain range.  The landscape of dark forests and narrow valleys gave rise to mystery and legend.  The culture and traditions of the area are imbued with folk tales and myths centered around Frankenstein Castle. 

An alchemist, Johann Dippel, was born and lived in Frankenstein Castle in the late seventeenth-early eighteenth centuries.  Dippel taught the famous Swedish theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg.  Breaking with Dippel, Swedenborg called his former teacher “most vile,” and accused him of “attempting wicked things.”  Dippel was, Swedenborg alleged, “"bound to no principles, but was in general opposed to all, whoever they may be, of whatever principle or faith ... becoming angry with any one for contradicting him.” 

It was rumored that Dippel exhumed and performed experiments on human bodies.  A local clergyman notified his parish that Dippel created a monster and brought it to life with a bolt of lightning.  Supposedly, this rumor was communicated to Mary Shelley’s stepmother by ethnologists, the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm.  None of these claims are proven, nor is there reliable evidence showing that Mary Shelley modeled her famous fictional scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, after Dippel.  However, the conjecture is strong.

Two years after her visit to Gernsheim, when Mary Shelley was challenged by Lord Byron in Geneva, to write a horror story, she dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made.

Frankenstein, the novel, was published on New Year’s Day, 1818.  While it has Gothic and Romantic elements, it is considered by some as the first science fiction novel.  It has generated its own genre of horror stories, movies, and plays.

Shelley first wrote a short story and with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s encouragement, expanded it into a novel.  She wrote the first four chapters after the suicide of her half-sister, Fanny.  She was nursing her second child (her first died in infancy) during the writing of the novel.  By the time of publication, that child, too, was dead.

The manuscripts for the novel now reside in the Bodelian Library at Oxford University.

Shelley published the book anonymously, with a preface written by her later-to-be husband, Percy.  It came out in an edition of five hundred copies in three volumes, the standard format for 19th-century first editions.  Mary Shelley put her name on the two-volume second edition four years later.  In 1831, Shelley published a one-volume “popular edition,” heavily revised by the author.  In 2008, a new edition of the novel was published under the title, The Original Frankenstein.

Reviews of the first 1818 edition called the novel, “very bold fiction.”  The author, unrevealed at the time, was described having the power of both conception and language.  Sir Walter Scott praised “the author’s original genius and happy power of expression.”

Oscar-winning film director, Guillermo del Toro called Frankenstein the quintessential teenage book:  "You don't belong. You were brought to this world by people that don't care for you and you are thrown into a world of pain and suffering, and tears and hunger. It's an amazing book written by a teenage girl. It's mind-blowing."

List of 55 films featuring Frankenstein’s monster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_Frankenstein%27s_monster

Everyone from Boris Karloff to Lon Chaney, Jr. to Fred Gwynne to Benedict Cumberbatch have played the monster on the screen and stage since 1823.

Is there a monster creation that has more heavily influenced Western culture over the past two hundred years than Frankenstein?  Well done, Mary Shelley!

What more can be said about Richard Feynman?  He was a brilliant, complicated human being.  His work in theoretical physics, including quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, garnered him the Nobel Prize. 

When I saw the above quote by Feynman on Twitter, under @ProfFeynman (with nearly 1,400 tweets and 620,000 followers), I wondered about the source of Feynman's words.  Did Feynman have a spiritual practice that promoted kindness and compassion?  The closest I found to a cosmic perspective was in his PhD thesis at Princeton:  

“We are then led to the possibility that the spontaneous radiation of an atom in quantum mechanics also, may not be spontaneous at all, but induced by the interaction with other atoms, and that all of the apparent quantum properties of light and the existence of photons may be nothing more than the result of matter interacting with matter directly, and according to quantum mechanical laws.”

Nothing in the research I did revealed a spiritual practice (outside of theoretical physics), but it did portray Feynman as a person with a great sense of humility, humor and playfulness.  He had a deep sense of intuition. 

Feynman was a teacher.  His connection to his students was paramount to him.  Many of the quotes tweeted on @ProfFeynman might come from his interaction with students, and from his books and lectures.  Whatever the source, Feynman's words at @ProfFeynman are worth exploring on a regular basis:  

https://twitter.com/ProfFeynman

If you are interested in the particulars of Richard Feynman's work in theoretical physics, click here to read his Nobel Lecture.

I came up in the House of Rinzai.  What I mean is that when I started practicing Zen meditation in Seattle in the mid-1970s, I was sent to see a Zen teacher at the University of Washington.  Asian Art History Professor, Dr. Glenn Webb, is an ordained Rinzai Zen Priest.  He led a weekly meditation group at the University’s Art Department Building.  Webb Sensei offered me a taste of Rinzai Zen.

 I next practiced with a Rinzai Zen monk from Japan, Genki Takabayashi Roshi.  I trained with Genki Roshi for twelve years.  I was ordained a Rinzai Zen Priest, initially (novitiate-ly) in 1984, with final vows in 1990.

 The ninth-century originator of the Rinzai School of Zen in eastern China, Linji Yixuan (Rinzai Gigen Zenji in Japanese) trained as a Zen monk and led his own temple. 

 Rinzai Zenji’s collected teachings are available online.  In my research, I copied lines from the publication, The Record of Linji 

Here are teachings from Rinzai Zenji:

 Discourses

 What I want to make clear to you is that you must not accept the deluded views of others. If you want to act, then act. Don’t hesitate.

 Lack of faith in yourself is what ails you. If you lack faith in yourself, you’ll keep on tumbling along, following in bewilderment after all kinds of circumstances and being taken by them through transformation after transformation without ever attaining freedom.

 Bring to rest the thoughts of the ceaselessly seeking mind.

 Because you students lack faith in yourselves, you run around seeking something outside. Even if, through your seeking, you did find something, that Something would be nothing more than fancy descriptions in written words.

 …person who has nothing further to seek.

 …then just do not look for anything outside.

 …the one here before your very eyes, brilliantly clear and shining without any form

 Ceaselessly she is right here, conspicuously present.

 There is nothing that is not profound, nothing that is not deliverance.

 There are none who are not of the utmost profundity, none who aren’t emancipated

 Conforming with circumstances as they are, [he] exhausts his past karma; accepting things as they are, he puts on his clothes; when he wants to walk, he walks, when he wants to sit, he sits; he never has a single thought of seeking Buddhahood.

 Just be ordinary. Don’t put on airs.

 [She who has] nothing to do is the noble one. Simply don’t strive — just be ordinary

 ‘Dharma’ is the dharma of mind. Mind is without form; it pervades the ten directions and is manifesting its activity right before your very eyes.

 Grasp and use, but never name — this is called the ‘mysterious principle’

 As to buddhadharma (the Buddha Way), no effort is necessary. You have only to be ordinary, with nothing to do — defecating, urinating, wearing clothes, eating food, and lying down when tired.

 If you realize that the ten thousand dharmas never come into being, that mind is like a phantom, that not a speck of dust nor a single thing exists, that there is no place that is not clean and pure — this is Buddha.

 In my view there is no Buddha, no sentient beings, no past, no present. Anything attained was already attained—no time is needed. There is nothing to practice, nothing to realize, nothing to gain, nothing to lose. Throughout all time, there is no other dharma than this. If one claims there’s a dharma surpassing this, I say that it’s like a dream, like a phantasm. This is all I have to teach.

 Awaken to non-dependence, then there is no Buddha to be obtained. Insight such as this is true insight.

Everywhere is pure, light illumines the ten directions, and all dharmas are a single suchness.

 If you want to be free to live or to die, to go or to stay, as you would put on or take off clothes, then right now recognize the one listening to my discourse, the one who has no form, no characteristics, no root, no source, no dwelling place, and yet is bright and vigorous.

 Of all his various responsive activities, none leaves any traces. Thus, the more you chase him, the farther away he goes, and the more you seek him, the more he turns away; this is called the ‘Mystery.’

 Value every second.

The you who right now is listening to my discourse is not the four elements; this you makes use of the four elements.

 Your activity right now, never changing, nowhere faltering—this is the living Mañjuśrī (Bodhisattva of Wisdom). Your single thought’s non-differentiating light — this indeed is the true Samantabhadra (Bodhisattva of Practice and Meditation). Your single thought that frees itself from bondage and brings emancipation everywhere — this is the Avalokiteśvara (Bodhisattva of Compassion) samādhi. Since these three alternately take the position of master and attendants, when they appear, they appear at one and the same time, one in three, three in one.

 Just desist from thinking, and never seek outside. If something should come, illumine it. Have faith in your activity revealed now — there isn’t a thing to do.

 Buddhas and patriarchs are people with nothing to do. Therefore, for them, activity and the defiling passions and also non-activity and “passionlessness” are ‘pure’ karma.

 What is lacking in your present activity? What still needs to be patched up?

 Ordinary mind is the Way.

 If you engage in any seeking, it will all be pain. Much better to do nothing.

 All dharmas are empty forms — when transformation takes place, they are existent, when transformation does not take place, they are nonexistent. The three realms are mind-only, the ten thousand dharmas are consciousness-only. Hence, illusory dreams, flowers in the sky. Why trouble to grasp at them?!

 There are no dharmas to be disliked.

 If you want insight into dharma as it is, just don’t be taken in by the deluded views of others. Whatever you encounter, either within or without, slay it at once. On meeting a buddha slay the buddha, on meeting a patriarch slay the patriarch, on meeting an arhat slay the arhat, on meeting your parents, slay your parents, on meeting your kinsman, slay your kinsman, and you attain emancipation. By not cleaving to things, you freely pass through.

 I haven’t a single dharma to give to people. All I can do is to cure illnesses and untie bonds.  Try coming before me without being dependent upon things. I would confer with you.

 There is no buddha, no dharma, nothing to practice, nothing to enlighten to. Just what are you seeking in the highways and byways?

 What do you yourselves lack?  Your own present activities do not differ from those of the Buddhas. You just don’t believe this and keep on seeking outside. Make no mistake! Outside there is no dharma; inside, there is nothing to be obtained. Better than grasp at the words from my mouth, take it easy and do nothing. Don’t continue thoughts that have already arisen and don’t let those that haven’t yet arisen be aroused. Just this will be worth far more to you than a ten years’ pilgrimage.

 There isn’t so much to do. Just be ordinary — put on your clothes, eat your food, and pass the time doing nothing. You who come from here and there all have a mind to seek Buddha, to seek Dharma, to seek emancipation, to seek escape from the three realms.

 Do you want to know the three realms? They are not separate from the mind-ground of you who right now are listening to my discourse. Your single covetous thought is the realm of desire; your single angry thought is the realm of form; your single delusive thought is the realm of formlessness. These are the furnishings within your own house.  Right now, vividly illumining all things and taking the measure of the world, you give the names to the three realms.

 The place where your one thought comes to rest is called the bodhi tree; the place where your one thought cannot come to rest is called the avidyā tree. Avidyā has no dwelling place; avidyā has no beginning and no end. If your successive thoughts cannot come to rest, you go up the avidyā tree; you enter the six paths of existence and the four modes of birth, wear fur on your body and horns on your head. If your successive thoughts can come to rest, then this very body is the pure body

 When not a single thought arises in your mind, then you go up the bodhi tree: you supernaturally transform yourself in the three realms and change your bodily form at will. You rejoice in the Dharma and delight in samādhi, and the radiance of your body shines forth of itself.

 Grasp and use, but never name — this is called the ‘mysterious principle.’

 The view of the Chan (Zen) school is that the sequence of death and life is orderly. The student of Chan must examine this most carefully.

 Motion and motionlessness both are without self-nature. If you try to seize it within motion, it takes a position within motionlessness. If you try to seize it within motionlessness, it takes a position within motion - Like a fish hidden in a pool, smacking the waves as it leaps from the water.

 For the [person] who understands, it’s always right here before his/her eyes.

 With respect to my own activity today — true creation and destruction — I play with miraculous transformations, enter into all kinds of circumstances, yet nowhere have I anything to do. Circumstances cannot change me.

 Because of mental activities, thoughts arise, but these are all just robes.

 Much better, do nothing.

 What are you seeking as you go around hither and yon, walking until the soles of your feet are flat? There is no Buddha to seek, no Way to complete, no Dharma to attain. If you seek outside for a Buddha having form, you won’t find him to resemble you; If you know your own original mind, it’s neither united with, nor apart from, him.

 With the true person of the Way, from moment-to-moment, mind is not interrupted

 When at these words, you turn your own light in upon yourselves and never seek elsewhere, then you’ll know that your body and mind are not different from those of the Buddhas, and on the instant, have nothing to do—this is called ‘obtaining the Dharma.’

 It is better to have nothing to do, better to be plain and simple.

 The person of the Way who is now listening to my discourse leaves no trace of her activity.

 The master said, "The Buddha of Supreme Penetration and Surpassing Wisdom sat for ten kalpas in a place of practice, but the buddhadharma did not manifest itself to him.  And he did not attain the Buddha-way."

 “I don’t understand the meaning of this," the student said.  "Would the master kindly explain?”

 The master said, “‘Supreme Penetration’ means that one personally penetrates everywhere into the 'naturelessness' and formlessness of the ten thousand Dharmas. ‘Surpassing Wisdom’ means to have no doubts anywhere and to not obtain a single Dharma. ‘Buddha’ means pureness of the mind whose radiance pervades the entire Dharma realm. ‘Sat for ten kalpas in a place of practice’ refers to the practice of the ten pāramitās .  'The Buddhadharma did not manifest’ means that Buddha is in essence birthless and Dharma in essence unextinguished. Why should it manifest itself?  ‘He did not attain the Buddha-way’ - a Buddha can’t become a Buddha again."  

A man of old said, "Buddha is always present in the world, but is not stained by worldly Dharmas." If you want to become a Buddha, don’t go along with the ten thousand things. When mind arises, all kinds of Dharmas arise; When mind is extinguished, all kinds of Dharmas are extinguished.

 All Dharmas are only empty forms, and thus have no attachment anywhere.

 When in the midst of the pure Dharma realm, you haven’t in your mind a single reasoning thought, and thus pitch blackness pervades everywhere.

 When a single thought in your mind truly realizes that the bonds and enticements of the passions are like space with nothing upon which to depend…

 When you see that causal relations are empty, that mind is empty, and that Dharmas are empty, and thus your single thought is decisively cut off and, transcendent, you’ve nothing to do.

 A single thought in your mind is doing nothing but conceiving an empty fist or a pointing finger to be real; senselessly conjuring up apparitions from among the Dharmas of the sense-fields.

 It is not that I understood from the moment I was born of my mother, but after exhaustive investigation and grinding practice, in one instant, I knew for myself.

Historical Background

 In place of scriptural study, Chan (Zen) Buddhism emphasized the integration of dhyana (meditation) and the moment-to-moment activities of everyday life.

 …To which Linji responded with a roaring shout, which from that time on, was associated with his name and style of Chan. After this, he resumed his place in [his teacher] Huangbo’s assembly. 

 [Linji possessed] a compassionate urgency to convince his listeners of the necessity of their finding within themselves the “true man of no rank.”

After training for 12 years with a Japanese Rinzai Zen monk, I spent the next 9 years with an American woman Rinzai-Obaku Zen roshi (https://www.dianerizzetto.com/).

Before I could begin training with Diane, I had to bring in a list of my three top core beliefs.  Topping my list was “I will be abandoned.”   We began our Zen work together with that revelation.

Aligned with that intimate and healing awareness work, and with 20 years of Zen practice in the interim, I now find social worker/researcher/storyteller Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, courage, shame, and empathy to be essential practice, not only for a fulfilled, happy and beneficial life, but also for the continued well-being of life on our planet. 

 My heart cracks open when I listen to Brené’s TED talks: The Power of Vulnerability and Listening to Shame.  (The two presentations have garnered nearly 70 million combined views.)

 In the spirit of compassion and wisdom, I offer the YouTube videos of The Power of Vulnerability and Listening to Shame.  They are about 20 minutes each.

 For the loving sake of everything we care about, please consider giving them your attention.