When things no longer have the ability to offend you,
they cease to exist in the old way.
Jianzhi Sengcan, died 606, the Third Zen Patriarch
Without distinction
Tag: impermanence
The leaf falls
This sublime poem by Ryōkan, written toward the end of his life, sees all of life in the falling maple leaf. Just like the leaf shows both front and back, life is filled with good times and challenging times, moments of happiness and unhappiness, ups and downs. We can learn from Ryōkan who simply observes the naturalness of what’s happening, without adding “it’s sad the leaf is dying. It’s sad it is falling down.” The existence of the leaf is a series of transformations and it will turn into soil, to support new life.
Showing its front
Showing its back
The maple leaf falls
Ryōkan, 1758 – 1831, Buddhist monk and hermit
What happiness is
I have come to see that our problem is that we don’t know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It’s the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.
Mark Epstein
Go with the flow
Get out of the construction business!
Stop building bridges across the raging waters of samsaric existence, attempting to reach the “far shore,” nirvana.
Better to simply relax, at ease and carefree, in total naturalness, and just go with the primordial flow, however it occurs and happens.
And remember this: whether or not you go with the flow, it always goes with you.
Nyoshül Khenpo Rinpoche, 1932 – 1999 , Tibetan lama
Weather
Very appropriate for Ireland this Autumn as we seem to go from one Atlantic Storm to the next. Also true of the difficulties in our lives.
When I interviewed Maya Angelou she told me to write this sentence on my notepad and to never forget it:
“Every storm runs out of rain”
I still think of that line to this day.
Alex Banayan, American author
The here-and-now
The body only exists in the present moment; it doesn’t wander off into the past or the future. This might seem like an insignificant truism; however, when we start to look at our lives closely, we find that much of our difficulty and distress arises from dwelling on re-creations of the past – either positive or negative – or on hopes and worries about the future.
Despite the fact that, to the thinking mind, the past and the future seem like vast and solid realities…the closer we look at the experience of our life as it actually is, the more we see the past and future as hollow fabrications. They are mere memories and anticipations; it is rather the present that is vast and all-encompassing, and full of useful possibilities…. If we are trying to inhabit an imagined future or a reconstructed past, how can we possibly attune to the orchestra of life in the here-and-now?
Ajahn Amaro, “The Body of Truth” in Michael Stone (ed) Freeing the Body.
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