Tag: Life

Just be ordinary

Karl Duffy1 Comment

As I see it, there isn’t so much to do.

Just be ordinary — put on your robes, eat your food, and pass the time doing nothing.

Master Linji, [Linji Yixuan, died 866, founder of the Linji school of Chan Buddhism]  Teaching 18

When we learn to stop and be truly alive in the present moment, we are in touch with what’s going on within and around us. We aren’t carried away by the past, the future, our thinking, ideas, emotions, and projects. Often we think that our ideas about things are the reality of that thing….The true person is an active participant, engaged in her environment while remaining unoppressed by it. … She lives in awareness as an ordinary person, whether standing, walking, lying down, or sitting. She doesn’t act a part, 

Thich Nhat Hahn’s commentary on this Teaching

Sunday Quote: Wholeness

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Non est vivere, sed valere vita est

Life is not just a matter of being alive, but living well

Martial, Roman Poet, c 40 – 102 AD, Epigrams Book VI, 70:15)

Our chance selves

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance.

We ride the wave and are
the wave.

And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

William Stafford

The paths we choose

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Thoreau

Ordinary

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Many of the great Zen and Taoist teachers emphasized the ordinary and the dangers of spiritual importance:

Emperor Wu: ‘I have built many temples, copied innumerable Sutras and ordained many monks since becoming Emperor. Therefore, I ask you, what is my merit?’

Bodhidharma: ‘None whatsoever!’

Emperor Wu: ‘Why no merit?’

Bodhidharma: ‘Doing things for merit has an impure motive and will only bear the puny fruit of rebirth.’

Emperor Wu, a little put out: ‘Well, what then is the most important principle of Buddhism?’

Bodhidharma: ‘Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred.’

Emperor Wu, by now bewildered, and not a little indignant: ‘Who is this that stands before me?’

Bodhidharma: ‘I do not know.’

If we can allow ourselves to live an ordinary life while also staying awake to the great void at the center of all that is, then we can be this intermediary place between that intoxicating, mystical bliss of oblivion and the wonder of how the Divine creates and reveals Itself in all the forms of life. Our lives are the expression of this bridge – ordinary and extraordinary, all things in their place, everything free to be as it is, and our consciousness, our heart, free to be used as needed.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Your echo depends on you

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

This world is like a mountain. Your echo depends on you. If you scream good things, the world will give it back. If you scream bad things, the world will give it back. Even if someone says badly about you, speak well about him.

Change your heart to change the world

Shams-i Tabrīzī, 1185 – 1248 Shams-i Tabrīzī, Persian Shafi’ite poet, credited as the spiritual instructor of Rumi