Reflections

Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! ~ The Heart Sutra And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time . ~ T S Eliot, Four Quartets We want The Absolute. Whether we call it Truth, Beauty, God or One, it is what we imagine to be beyond our own finitude in the (non)experience of completeness, perfection, nirvana or, as one recovered alcoholic I know calls it in fond memory: oblivion. We seek It in faith like homesick children seeking refuge in Once Upon a Time , oriented toward Its pregnant absence as in a déjà vu, naïvely expecting that, upon remembering It, we will be magically transformed, in a Holy Communion, finding ourselves home at last. But we never do. As long as we pursue the Absolute as a thing that is “out there”, we ground It in a world of objects that, in faith, was the very thing we had wished to transcend. So the more we try to grasp It, the f...

By oneself, indeed, is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself, indeed, is one purified. Purity and impurity depend on oneself. No one purifies another. ~Dhammapada Rinzai zen. A response to the torpor of monks who apparently practiced in cloistered conditions, achieving perhaps a state of samadhi but without satori or kensho , the hallmark of Zen. Koan practice. A formalized version of the quest that is the heart of Buddhist practice, the quest of those who seek deliverance from beyond the comforts and confines of the familiar, of home or God, from beyond the rituals and/or austerities of traditional forms of prayer and other practices, beyond even the morality and righteousness of religion as a bona fide public institution. On this path, nothing and no one frees you, not even God. The quest is a solitary one and deliverance is by oneself alone. But when the practice crystallizes into a belief: Zen. Or into a style of practice: zazen....