Monday, March 18, 2024

無處11

無處11

Second Rohatsu in the hut, she feels

cycles of living/not living,

fallen leaves and fallen foxes

fallen snowflakes, falling rain





Sesshin, kinhin, walking meditation, twenty people shuffling gently on the laptop screen behind her; she picks up her cup in passing and pauses to count starlings. When did they begin to stay all winter?


The cries of crickets are already scarce and far between. 
The trees and grass have lost their proud summer colors. 
The long night often requires a new filling of my censer. 
Chill on my skin forces upon me a pile of thick garments. 
Let us use our diligence while we may, my gentle friends, 
Time flies like an arrow and lingers not a moment for us. 

--Ryokan, tr. Nobuyuki Yuasa, Zen Poems of Ryokan, 75



Sunday, March 17, 2024

無處 10

無處 10

A plague strikes; she moves to the hut

for ten days. Wheezing Heart Sutra

is hard, so just think the words

and pretend it is not thinking 


 

 

In the first week of March, 2020, the farm's gate is closed on advice of the government. It turns out she has already inhaled something. Things seem a little crazy in the hospitals out there, so she elects to sit it out alone, visiting the family through the laptop's video camera. She treks to the hut with baskets of food and sets up cough-keeping. Not sufficiently aware of her precarity to be frightened, she lives slowly, cooks small meals, drinks homely teas, wonders how the little dog is doing.


Without hindrance, the mind has no fear.
--Heart Sutra


Saturday, March 16, 2024

無處 9

無處 9

Bright windows prove helpful

as old eyes look for needle's next

plunge. Where will it come out?

Every time, surprise


  

Her teacher tells her she is a nun. She begins sewing a black robe. It's too hot in here for that, so she pokes a hole in the wall, to run a fan. For a break, she sits in the shade of the cottonwoods, sipping switchel. Quail run across her legs, one by one.


Let go of emptiness and come back to the brambly forest.
Riding backward on the ox, drunken and singing;
Who could dislike the misty rain
pattering on your bamboo raincoat and hat?
In empty space you cannot stick a needle.
-- attr. Dongshan Liangje, The Five Ranks tr. Leighton in
Cultivating the Empty Field, 77



Friday, March 15, 2024

無處 8

 無處 8

The old woman adopts 

technology in the hermitary

and prepares to sit zazen

with people from everywhere



This image is from 2019, with no pandemic in sight. She discovers an online sangha and becomes involved, supplementing her local participation and broadening her considerably limited experience.


Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization for this and for that. This is not only practised while sitting, it is like a hammer striking emptiness; before and after, its ringing pervades everywhere. How can it be limited to a place? 

-- Dogen, Bendowa tr. Hoshin and Dainen

Thursday, March 14, 2024

無處 7

 無處 7

She chases light with her cot and desk

in winter, looking south,

in summer, looking north.

in the morning, sun. At night, stars


 

With the large windows, which she had retrieved from a salvage pile, she finds company in sunbeams, songbirds, even a passing fox. At night, lying on her cot, she discovers the Milky Way entangled in bare twigs and branches. What is there to discuss about koans that is not like arguing over the color of the sky?


Out of the way, I don’t seek the carriages of the eminent.
At dawn pear-blossom rain splashes my secluded window,
At dusk I borrow fragments of stars to mend the broken tiles.

-- Wang Duanshu (1621–ca. 1680), tr. Zong-Qi Cai