We pray for the big things
and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
photo maxo
Tag: Awareness
Looking directly
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
photo mathias krumbholz
Not running after but staying in the here and now
Zen master Daowu visited the assembly of master Shitou.
Daowu asked, “What is the fundamental meaning of the teachings?”
Shitou said, “Not to attain, not to know”.
Daowu, Zen Master, China, 748 – 807
A special day
But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow,
everything would suddenly become special and precious,
wouldn’t it?
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Not everything is grasped by thinking
After learning from Dogen and the Japanese Zen tradition yesterday, today we can learn from Bodhidharma, (6th Century), the larger-than-life transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, who similarly reminds us that direct knowing is often richer than understanding reality just by thinking.
If you use your (thinking) mind to study reality,
You won’t understand either your mind or reality.
If you study reality without using your mind
You’ll understand both.
photo oxfordian kissuth
A calm mind
In the heart of the night,
The moonlight framing
A small boat drifting,
Tossed not by the waves
Nor swayed by the breeze.
Dogen, 1247, one of the verses he prepared for the Shogun in Kamakura
photo jeff chenqinyi
