A meditation on the Hsin Hsin Ming

A meditation on the Hsin Hsin Ming

(Better left unsaid, aye?
but I was always one to poke at stuff, yeesh.)

My way now lacks boredom.
It helps to have a veranda.
Our daughter left us hers,
so there you go: grief and ease,

A horrible fact, but one eats,
one sleeps. Things are not
apart, so when we judge we miss.
For? Against? A rock sits

where it is put, so teaches wisdom
without bothering to be wise.
As knowledge has no anchor,
sitting like a rock is available.

Hands can hold as much as we need,
sometimes more than we need,
so our reaching for more smacks of
not understanding reality.

Even trying to grasp this doggerel's
implications as I write shows me
there is no approaching a horizon;
Fatigue is what ends any endeavor.

If I suspend an effort, there is
effort in suspension; If I strive
there is rest in going. Sitting still
in knowing this neither goes nor stays.

My friend has spoken for years
of the circle of discourse
as if it were a sack he wished to escape;
whereas I like a goldfish circle, smiling;

both will end the same. We have both
said so, then sat together, each
contented in the mistaken thought
we have said it better. The not

saying more was the actual prize,
if there were one. Lack a thought about
any entity, and the entity remains
as like a fact as it ever will.

Lack a sight, or hearing, or any sensation
of any event, and it will be
all it needed to be, just as it is.
Most Zen, I'm told, sits at the bottom

of breath, like the moment
after dying. It is then a receding
horizon seems close. Even that
is illusory, but self examination

right then might yield insight. That's nice,
but chuck the insight aside for now,
and, without "holding" the breath,
undo doing without even un-"doing."

It's like not reaching for a beach pebble,
and the pebble is in hand, or like
not looking it over, and knowing its color.
No: beachless until we must inhale,

a taste of endless moment ending life.
"Thusness" cannot be divided into "is"
and "is not," other than as mistaken intellectual
exercise, and saying so is also mistaken.

We do live to eat, though, so take up
the knife without thinking "knife"
and cut the vegetable without thinking "vegetable."
Move through, then eat, then come to rest.

Same with washing the bowl, same with
the bending trees beyond the rain-streaked
window. It's privilege to reach for such
silence while having use of knife and window,

but an animal is neither rich nor poor. We
are already where we are, so must begin here.
Here has only memory for a past and anticipation
for a future, and only while we breathe.

Set the bowl on its shelf and the knife
in its place. So thoughts arose? That's not failure,
even if it was greed for life. Those are
bubbles, like bubbles in the sink.

Let them dissipate on their own.
What's left is still what is: hands drying
on a towel, perhaps. Trees continuing
to bend in autumnal storm.

Sitting is the same as eating or doing dishes.
It's a tree bending, letting old leaves go.
It's hands drying, fingers uncurling
on their own, resting on thighs.

On the power line outside, swaying slightly,
a crow preens, looks about, chuckles,
relieves itself, launches into rain —
taking no account of horizons —

does it even know it was ever an egg?
Does it consider what may happen in winter,
stretched on snow, losing form?
It is all of itself in the now, and is all things.