Friday, March 22, 2024

Manzoku-an 1

 Slow moving illness

 provides time to review

things done, not done:

release them all


Sitting in the new hut, Manzoku-an, or Hermitary of Quite Enough, she is running out of needs.

Buddha's great discovery was re-discovered millennia later. It's called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Because dharmas (things or beings) are not, or do not have, states, but are bundles of energy that is arriving and departing, they are ephemeral. All are equal, all equally evanescent. Resting from concern or anguish over that which is as it is, nothing need stop us from enjoying ourselves, as we might an evening of fireflies.



Whether I sit or I lie,
My spirit roams with the origin of things.
Singing alone or rhyming alone,
My joy runs to the edge of the sky.

-- Songs of National Preceptor Wongam (1226–1292) tr. Whitfield, Park
 
 

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

無處 13

無處 13 

 Last day in this hut, she takes in

sun, shadow, familiar walls;

collected things seem to her

reluctant as she to leave


The farm has passed beyond her strength and will, and she turns toward town.



Though we do not preach the doctrine,
Unasked the flowers bloom in spring;
They fall and scatter,
They turn to dust. 

--Ikkyu, tr. R. H. Blyth


無處 12

無處 12

Laptop and altar, face the sangha,

Bow and bow again, repeating words,

Shaving (being shaved), 

Becoming (being remade)

 


It's April 2020, the pandemic is in full swing, and this in-person transition from private to public nun-hood takes place by remote means. Some forty people attend. Shonin's spouse handles the handing over of razor, robes and bowls.


If you have a rule, go by the rule; if you have no rule, go by the example.
-- comment on verse appended to 85th case of the Blue Cliff Record, tr. Cleary


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