Tag: Meditation

Just be ordinary

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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

Every moment

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The Great Way has no gate,
A thousand roads enter it.
When one passes through this gateless gate,
They walk in freedom between heaven and earth.

Wu Men Hui-k’ai, 1183 – 1260, Chinese Chan Master

Not getting burnt

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A fire reflected in a lake cannot burn the water. Neither can emotions disturb the mind when you don’t get involved in them. Don’t identify an emotion as your self. The fear or anger is not you, only an impersonal phenomenon.

Mentally pull back from the emotion and turn your awareness around to observe it. When in the grip of negative emotion we tend to believe it will never end. But emotions are no more permanent than thoughts.

Cynthia Thatcher, Just Seeing: Insight Mediation and Sense-Perception

Sunday Quote: Wholeness

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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)

The windblown clouds

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No matter how long you live,
the result is not altered.
Who will not end up as a skeleton?
Cast off the notion that “I exist.”

Entrust yourself to the windblown clouds,
and do not wish to live forever.

Ikkyu, Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet.1394 – 1481

Our chance selves

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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