Tag Archives: Zen Brain

Unknown's avatar

no honey but ecstasy

by

….I entered the life of the brown forest,
And the great life of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the
changes in the veins
In the throat of the mountain…and, I was the stream
Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking: and I was the stars
Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one lord of his own summit;
and I was the darkness
Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me.  I was mankind
also, a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone…
…how can I express the excellence I have found,
that has no color but clearness;
No honey but ecstasy …

Robinson Jeffers, The Tower Beyond Tragedy ( quoted in Coming Back to Life: Practices to reconnect our lives, our world by Joanna Macy)

Unknown's avatar

deathless teaching

by

You are not the same as or different from
Conditions on which you depend;
You are neither severed from
Nor forever fused with them –
This is the deathless teaching
Of Buddhas who care for the world.

To have become a person means to have emerged contingently from a matrix of genetic, psychological, social and cultural conditions.  You are neither reducible to one or all of them, nor are you separate from them.  While a person is more than a DNA code, a psychological profile and a social or cultural background, he or she cannot be understood apart from such factors.  You are unique not because you possess an essential metaphysical quality that differs from the essential metaphysical quality of every one else, but because you have emerged from a unique and unrepeatable set of conditions.

From Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime (commentary on Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika) by Stephen Batchelor