Really see

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Picasso

Listen

The sounds of streams
are Buddha’s speech.
The coloured mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.

Night brings eighty-four thousand poems of Buddha.

Listen, someday you may awaken.

Su Shi, 1037 – 1101, Chinese calligrapher, essayist and poet.

Sunday Quote: Ceasing the struggle

Spiritual practice is not about accomplishing anything — not about winning or losing — but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is.

Pema Chodron

Grounded

While sitting on the floor of a room in Japan and looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragon flies hovering in space, I sensed that this small world, almost underfoot, shall I say, had a validity all its own, but must be realized and appreciated from its own level in space.

I suddenly felt I had too long been exclusively above my boots.

Mark George Tobey, 1890 – 1976, American painted, strongly influenced by Asian calligraphy.

Now

There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time….If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for?

Why the hesitation to change?

Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

Not adding more

Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.

Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.

Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental

Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.

The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta