Tag: Life

Ordinary

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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

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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 

Taking the step

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The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes

because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it

Simone Weil, 1909 -1943, French Philosopher

Restless ambition

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or, in Ireland’s case these days, a lot of rain….

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.

Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?

For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,

I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Mary Oliver, Black Oaks

Stopping

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Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else

is perhaps the most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit

Tara Brach

We preoccupy ourselves

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The thing that blinds us and deafens us is the ceaselessly moving mind, the preoccupation we have with our thoughts. It is the incessant internal dialogue that shuts out everything else. ….All day long we talk to ourselves. We preoccupy ourselves with the past, or we preoccupy ourselves with the future, and while we preoccupy ourselves, we miss the moment and miss our lives. Looking, we do not see. It is as if we were blind. Listening, we do not hear. It is as if we were deaf. Loving, we do not feel. It is as if we were dead. Preoccupied, we do not notice the reality around us. How can we be present? How can we taste and touch our lives?


The answer to these questions is not outside yourself. To see this truth requires the backward step, going very deep into yourself to find the foundation of reality and of your life. To see it is not the same as understanding it or believing it. To see it means to realize it with the whole body and mind.… Know that deep within each and every one of us, under layers of conditioning, there is an enlightened being, alive and well. In order to function, it needs to be discovered.

John Daido Loori, 4, 1931 – 2009, Zen Buddhist rōshi