Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it as the axis on which the world revolves
Thich Nhat Hanh
Zen teaches that our approach to today determines our whole approach to life.
The Japanese call this attitude Ichi-nichi issho:
‘Each day is a lifetime.’
Philip Toshio Sudo, Zen 24/7
If we have little needs and much contentment,
we experience the wealth of the world around us,
and when we experience that wealth
there’s nothing we need to renounce
and nothing we need to add to it.
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel
Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori — a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as ‘openings.’ When I first heard the term … I thought of how, on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, the memory of its light shines on in the mind.
Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe
A similar theme, this time from the Christian tradition:
Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.
Joan Chittister, After Great Pain: Finding a Way Out
Sometimes I’d go to see old religious sites with ancient temple buildings, designed by architects, beautifully built by skilled craftsmen. In some places they would be cracked. Maybe one of my friends would remark, “Such a shame, isn’t it? It’s cracked. ” I’d say: “If that weren’t the case then there’d be no such thing as the Buddha, there’d be no Dharma. It’s cracked like this because it’s perfectly in line with the Buddha’s teaching.
Ajahn Chah
photo sookie
The 9th Century Zen Master Siubi was asked “What is the secret of Zen”
“Come back when there is no-one around and I shall tell you”
The inquirer returned and Siubi took him to a bamboo-grove, pointed to the bamboos and said
“See how long these are. See how short these are”
Suddenly the questioner had a flash of awakening. What did he see? He had a revelation of sheer existence. Where there is revelation, explanation becomes superfluous. Curiosity is dissolved in wonder.
John Welwood: Ordinary magic: Everyday life as Spiritual Path
