Tag Archives: 108Buddhas

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yours to discover

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My mind is blank.

I’m not sure if it’s a blown fuse or if I’m in that Big Sky state.  Wait, isn’t that the catch phrase for Montana?  The one for Ontario is “Yours to Discover.”  I would like my mind to be like that too.  Yours to Discover.  But I’m not sure you should wander onto its blue and grey roads because the map is constantly changing.  Any bread crumbs you leave would be eaten by the ever-hungry cowbirds and blue jays and you may never find your way out!

In sangha, we listened to Natalie Goldberg’s talk, Wild Mind, from the Upaya dharma podcasts.  Highly recommended, if only for the joy of hearing her sing Allen Ginsberg’s dharma song, Gospel Noble Truths.  Goldberg asked us to think of the huge sky and then imagine that she climbed a ladder and put a dot on that sky with a black marker.  Our mind, she says, contracts down to that dot, losing the vastness of the sky.  I know that feeling well.  My polka-dotted mind forgets all it has to discover and folds like a drunken universe and that dot – which is really a wormhole – carries me into an alternate universe where everything I do is right, has the outcome I want (the perfect resolution, of course), and I’m once again loved by all who have rejected me (because they see how perfect I really am).

There’s more to Goldberg’s talk.  There are teachings about how sorrow can leak out as creativity and about the French writer Collette and about a rabbi in the concentration camps.  But this dot, this plopped and splattered ink, is glued to my mind sky.  Mine to discover.  I know from practice to go to its edge and sense the feeling there.  The longing to make a difference, to be seen as making a difference, to be joined in being the difference, runs along one ragged side.  Vast undulating calm runs along the other.  I want to get some solvent and rub it off, make it transparent so it doesn’t impede the uniform steadiness that carries it.

Oh.  Did I just say that?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

PS:  Thanks to Barry of Ox Herding for the link to Ginsberg’s awesome rendition of the Gospel Noble Truths!

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spider monkeys

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Odd.  How things come together.  Buddha35 of 108Buddhas was done by inking over a wash of the kanji strokes for the character of Buddha.  (I’m sorry if I’m getting repetitive; it’s just my assumption that most people reading this are arriving here for the first time.)  I like the way the structure turned out – angular but with a softness in the belly.  It also makes a great Rorschach, doesn’t it?  I kept seeing huts and looms until I saw a little creature.

In trying to find a suitable dharma teaching to go with Buddha35, I picked up Thich Nhat Hanh’s little book, The World We Have: a Buddhist approach to peace and ecology.  I’ve skimmed through it occasionally and have had trouble getting into it.  That’s my struggle with Thay’s writings; in the early days of my practice, everything I read of his resonated.  Now… well, it’s hit-and-miss.  That’s just the nature of my impenetrable mind; I think I have to be in deep suffering and torn open by it to really feel the dharma rain.  When life is pinballing along, there tends to be a lot of hubris about my enlightenment as I flash my “do nothing because you’re already there” card.

Anyway, back to TNH’s book.  Actually, back to the Introduction by Alan Weisman.

A few years ago, while researching my book The World Without Us, I visited a tribe in Ecuador whose remaining shred of once bountiful Amazon forest was so depleted that they’d resorted to hunting spider monkeys.  This was especially grim because they believed themselves to be descended from those very primates.  In essence, they’d been reduced to eating their ancestors.

I wanted to go through the chapters of TNH’s book to find something (I was about to type “meaty”) zen-like about my little critter in the painting but, honestly, Weisman’s first paragraph dropped on me like a stone.  Once in a while, a teaching from the past will reach forward and haul me back into the zendo to hear it with cleaned ears.  This was one of those moments.  Thay is fond of the Sutra on the Son’s Flesh – a parable about our greed destroying the future for our children.  It’s a profound teaching on ecology if you can get pass the gruesome imagery of the parents’ eating the son’s flesh to survive their situation.  With Weisman’s real life, real time story, I get it – again.

Spider monkeys and children – killing our past and future.

I have no more words.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju