Tag: Awareness

What is this?

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A classic practice in the Korean Zen tradition – may help with staying open to our experience today

In the Korean Zen tradition, one generally meditates on the koan, What is this? This question derives from an encounter between the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng (638–713 C.E.), and a young monk, Huaijang. The most important part of the practice is for the question to remain alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening. 

Martine Batchelor, What is this?

In a daze

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.

 David Steindl-Rast

Observing

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The wise person uses the mind as a mirror.

It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing.

It receives but does not keep.

Chuang Tzu, 4th Century BC

Nothing to achieve

Karl Duffy1 Comment

A lot of modern stress comes from the mistaken belief that we should always be working on a better version of ourselves, always looking for greater success. 

In all ten directions of the universe, there is only one truth.

When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.

What can ever be lost? What can be attained?

If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time.

If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.

Ryokan, 1758–1831, Zen Monk and poet

Setting it all down

Karl Duffy6 Comments

Not being tied to our urgent to-do lists:

Consider the lilies of the field…

And you — what of your rushed and

useful life? Imagine setting it all down —

papers, plans, appointments, everything,

leaving only a note: “Gone to the fields

to be lovely. Be back when I’m through

with blooming.

Lynn Ungar, Camas Lilies

Leaving behind

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Same message, different traditions, same time period

If people seek peace in outward things, whether in places or in methods or in people or in deeds … however great or of whatever kind all this may be, this is all in vain and brings them no peace. Those who seek thus seek wrongly; the further they go the less they find what they are seeking. They are like one who has taken a wrong turning: the further he goes, the more he goes astray. But what should he do? In truth, if one gave up a kingdom or the whole world and did not give up self, he or she would have given up nothing. But if one gives up oneself, then whatever one keeps, wealth, honour or whatever it may be, still they have given up everything.  

Meister Eckhart, German theologian, philosopher and mystic, 1260 – 1328

To study the self is to forget the self. 
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things 

Dogen, Buddhist monk and philosopher, founder of the Soto school of Zen, 1200 – 1253,