Little Blue Book Zen Peter Jalesh

I think not, therefore I am am!
Buddha Dharma everywhere
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The little blue book on
Zen
of the Fundamental realm
- Advanced Zen -
The little blue book on Zen
Other books authored ___________________

Temple of the Origin, Small Press, New York, 1991 A Portrait of the Artist as an Anthropomorphic GeniusMachine, Novatrix Library, New York, 2002 Zen Handbook, Novatrix Library, 2004
On sale at Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.com and selected book stores
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The little blue book on
Zen
of the Fundamental Realm
1234 notes, aphorisms, capping phrases, koans.
Advanced Zen
By Peter Jalesh
Novatrix Library 101 W. 55th Street Suite 7D New York, NY 10019, USA
Published by Novatrix Library 101 W 55th Street, Suite 7D New York, NY 10019, U.S.A Phone: 212-247-6808; Fax: 212-582-6535 Copyright by Boris Musteata, 2004 All rights reserved By the same author: Temple of the origin, a phantasmagoric novel A portrait of the artist as an anthropomorphic genius-machine, a novel Zen Handbook Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Musteata, Boris The little blue book on Zen of the Fundamental Writers Guild of America, East WGAE AFL-CIO Musteata, Boris The little blue book on Zen of the Fundamental Reg. No. R17160 on 11/02/2004 ISBN 0-9717487-3-X 1. The little blue book on Zen
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This book is dedicated to all Zen monks living within present universes.
If a Zen monk is the archer, a koan is the bow and capping phrases are the arrows available for use or for trade... True nature is like true
truth: redundant. Fundamentally there is not one thing. Fundamentally there is One thing. Fundamentally a flight lies within a bird. Fundamentally, a bird lies within a flight. Fundamentally there is no shadow if there is One thing. Fundamentally a true thing has no shadow. Fundamentally the wind from the north makes vibrate the bamboo stems from the south. Fundamentally the sun from the east lights the mountains from the West. Fundamentally things that there are are as they are. Fundamentally things that there are not are as they are. Fundamentally things that go come; fundamentally things that come go. Fundamentally what is emerging is withdrawing! Fundamentally love, hate, happiness, suffering, understanding and compassion belong to bodhy: everything you like or dislike lies there, including the centered I. As you get rid of I try to keep your integrity intact and be righteous to all beings, high or low; hold in the highest regard equally - the ordinary sentient beings and the Celestial Beings of the Infinite Light. The stone man meets the wooden man: Hi! Buddha smiles
CONTENTS _________________________ Preface

Essays
1 5 8 11 15 19
1. The Koan 2. The capping phrases 3. The Koan and the Capping phrases makeup 4. Realization 5. To the reader Notes, aphorisms, capping phrases 21-271
Prolegomena to Zen of the Realization Realm
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Preface ______
The enlightenment through a Zen practice had been approached on a variety of ways, some involving an intellectual pursuit (such as reading Sutras and illuminating texts and doing lengthy meditations), other concerning koan resolution combined with Zen meditation (Zazen). To a beginner all these systems of Zen thinking are obscured by the intuitive element immersed in their rituals. Usually a Zen monk chooses one way of Zen training or the other based on some affinity with the methodology used by a particular school and its implied promise to offer an unquestionable and verifiable enlightenment. Most of the monks undertake an intimate look at the schools methodology trying to find some constructive elements used in training, be it meditation of all sorts (including Zazen), Sutra reading or koan resolution. Such constructive elements differ from a school to another. Among the fundamentals that all the schools have in common there are those private meetings between a monk and his Zen Master in which the monk has to produce
sanzen meanings drawn out of his training. Those meanings have a religious or philosophical color for a Sutra reading or the color of an epiphany for a koan practice. Most of the Zen schools that use koans in their practice, including those that follow the very same methodology in training (such as Rinzai schools engaged in a thorough koan teaching) differ in the positions that they take towards rationalization, towards meanings that could be intellectually infered out of a koan. Stricto sensu no qualified speculations on a Sutra sacre text or a koan could be accepted as trustfully valid. The only exceptions are the so called revelations in which the anonymous intuition seems to speak out with no interference from the normal mind that we use for reasoning. Intuition gets involved usually to resolve a stalemate between mind and whatever proves to be the unknown to reasoning. In case of a koan this unknown is the emptiness. At the first sight it seems that all Zen schools are dogmatically involved in a futile attempt to move beyond language using language, and beyond mind using mind. In this respect schools based on Sutra readings are less rigorous so that production of revelatory poems full of hyperbolic incantations of the divine and sublime metaphors for the Heavenly living is a common accepted outcome for the graduate. As an alternative, Koan practice produces capping phrases (jakudo), mental fulgurations that the awakened could craft to provide a glimpse into his ultimate experince. It
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may sound paradoxical that a Zen school based on koan practice considers the mind unfit to witness and the language imperfect to express anything relevant to awakening, although it uses the imperfection of language in order to put forward the indefinable insight that comes with the resolution of a koan. Of course, the mental struggle that a koan resolution implies is not present when a capping phrase is created so that the monk could at his best create a hypothetical insight. Once the mind is freely involved in the process of this hypothetical insight the truth of it could be hindered and displaced because of the inadequacy of the rational mind to apprehend the ineffable experience of emptiness. Furthermore, a capping phrase cannot be taken and should not be taken in any way as the unequivocal solution to a koan. The insightful penetration of a capping phrase depends utterly on the imagination of the awakened that authored it. If one tried to use the seriousness of a scientific research and so scrutinize a capping phrase using a rich intellectual base one may call into question capping phrase relevance to a koan in particular. Zen doctrine refutes such an approach as being inadequate to its very nature. For a Zen adept though such a reasoned connection is not important. What is really important is that a capping phrase might well serve to summon his intuition to work so that it could render the koan
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in a new light and so feed the subconscious tensions involved in its resolution. Capping phrases should function as emptiness-testingdevices. They should be used in the creation of some meaning and yet work towards what meaning is not. Sense is reduced to pure sensedust subtly emerged by mind in the inanimate world of the emptiness that emanates with each moment of its manifestation phenomena, life and spirit. The emptiness
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Note: I practiced Zen from 1978. My Eastern Philosophy based experiences originate in 1975 with Hata Yoga, followed by Raja Yoga and Bakhti Yoga that evolved by the end of 1977 into Zen. I began writing about various Zen subjects in order to feed or to register my own Zen experiences. My only Zen achievements occurred in 1982: a Samadhi incidence that, two days later, was followed by an even more powerful event. Both events lasted less than a couple of minutes. None of those experiences repeated since. I kept having various moments of elation that resembled Samadhi, others that I could call revelations, though none of them were as powerful as the 1982 events. There is well known that Samadhi is one of the most elusive events. What it gives to those who experience it, is an overwhelming illusion of mind merging with the whole universe, of a bodymind getting dissolved in the universal emptiness. The other side of the token is that - in real life one might understand the essence and the invariance of the whole universe through every days life and practice.
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Bio: PETER JALESH, born Boris Musteata in Romania. In 1960 he graduated from the School of Cinematography. In 1965 he received a MS degree in Nuclear Physics from the Polytechnic Institute, Bucharest, followed by two MA degrees: in Linguistics in 1970 and in Philosophy in 1974, both from University of Bucharest. He began his writing career in 1958. He published several volumes of poetry: Menuet (1968), Poema (1970), Poemele Marii (1975), Cintul Etern and Poema Dacica (1977), Luminile de dimineata (1978, a novel - Vinzatorul de memorii (1978), a volume of modern poetry translated from Russian, other translations from universal symbolist poetry. From 1970 to 1979 he wrote scenarios for animation and documentary features, commentaries for radio and television shows. In 1978 he translated B. Malinovsky's Cultural Anthropology. In 1972 he became a political dissident and spent the next years under the surveillance of the Communist Secret Police (Securitate). Before escaping to U.S. he was subjected to numerous coercive interrogatories and tortures. In 1979 he asked for political asylum. He became an American citizen in 1988. Since emigration he published seven books on subjects related to IBM computer software, two novels, Temple of the Origin and A portrait of the Artist as
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an Anthropomorphic Genius Machine and a book on Zen: Zen Handbook. Major one-man art exhibitions: Quasi Still Life Series, 56 abstract paintings and drawings, Deep Space Gallery, 11/1996, New York, Abstract Endings on Large Canvases, abstract paintings on oversize (11 ft. to 25 ft.) canvases, Pearl Gallery, 02/2000, New York, A Retrospective of Quasi-Action Painting, 82 old and new abstract paintings, Mercedes-Benz Showroom Gallery, 02/2003, New York, New Abstract Paintings, 26 abstract paintings 60X48, Mercedes-Benz Showroom Gallery, 12/2004-02/2005, New York.
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The koan
What is a koan? One may find two different definitions, each of them prescribing its own rules and producing different results. The first one defines a koan as a religious device employed by monks to get enlightened. The koans upshot is a religious awakening a state of realization that allows a monk to see the disparity between the human nature and the eternal world (the natureless world) where the ultimate truth of all Buddhas dwells. Such an awakening generates selfless compassion towards the whole universe and could be the source of magnanimous acts of devotion and sacrifice towards the living. This definition accounts for the old religious model of Zen which was borrowed from Buddhism and in some aspects preserved values and judgments from its source. Although such a definition has a moral background that sounds seductive its outcome could be questioned under the current state of affairs that govern the worlds Zen temples.
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The second definition of a koan sounds like and IQ test for a candidate to awakening. The koan becomes a riddle, a puzzle, a masterly written story in which logic and reason are peripheral so that any attempt to interpret it falls short of a solution. In fact the solution is not on the table. Then what is the use of a koan? There is this idea that by exploring the koan a mind can produce no-meaning and so convey a higher truth: the search for such truth creates an overwhelming mental crisis in which learned logics meant to shelter one from judgmental errors dont make sense anymore. The desirable result is a complete rewiring of ones brain: this change allows one to be more and more able to merge his self with the unmediated emptiness. The awakening facilitates the ultimate truth to come into sight as a super-coherent image that fuses the awakened and the whole universe in its manifestation into One. In any koan case the process of transformation between the inception point when one approaches a koan and the awakening, goes through various stages where one can feel without a doubt very subtle changes, fleeting states of mind lying in some space beyond reach. The mind alteration is felt sometimes as a pleasant high other times as a threat. What is essential in the koan practice of laic people is to withdraw if one can whenever one feels that ones mind becomes amorphous or possessed by unidentifiable forces. For a monk such things are
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okay and also desirable, since theyre part of the progress a monk makes on becoming one with his koan. Also a monk has a Zen master (roshi) to approach when in doubt and entertains dialogs (sassho) with him that direct, correct, redirect ones mind towards a result that it doesnt throw ones mind in a delusional world. The rule to follow is that the transformation that koan practice would bring forth should be clear and the whole experience should give one the feeling that one is able to scrutinize any aspect of it. It is not clear even to psychologists that commented on Zen what is the effect of a koan to ones mind. The point is that the profound insight of a koan (that, at the beginning, seemed nonsensical, ineffable, incoherent, delusional, ambiguous but also intrusive, etc.) might result at a fortuitous moment (that seems to resolve all the contradictory routines of the koan) into a state of mind of infinite resonance and bliss. To get there monks are using sometimes capping phrases which phrases are parsed out of a koan or a comment on a koan, though most of the time theyre independent reflections that have to be researched by intuition for any hidden content that could find that what-visibly-lacks-a-connection-to-koan is yet a consequential mode to see it through.
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The capping phrases
Just as it happens to a child while learning the alphabet (a, b, c, d) and seeing the alphabet harboring knowledge, so it is with capping phrases. If the previous statement sounds like a metaphor one cannot go any further than that with capping phrases. In what sense and context such capping phrases could help a Zen practitioner (monk or not) clarify and then subvert a koan into submission? And then, what this submission means? It depends! Most of the practitioners would get enriched at some intellectual level (if not on an even higher level) by the transcendental view that an illogical, poetical or paradoxical statement could open wide. A few would become one with their koan and suffer a profound change that might result in enlightenment. What capping phrases tend ultimately to do is to disable and alienate your mind from strict reasoning while the koan acts as the ultimate executioner of reasoning. The few capping phrases that assembles in a koan act as a counter point acts in music, bringing different voices together to create harmony out of dichotomy and chaos, which in the case of a koan is nothing else but the harmony of the chaos or emptiness in its manifestation. The main appeal of
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a capping phrase comes from its detached and indifferent way of questioning, asserting or negating something of an essence while trying to entertain the ineffable, the inexpressible, and the vague aura of a hypothetical thought. The words are saying things, yet when youre reading them theyre directing you towards something that is missing. It is really something missing or whatever is missing is conditioned by the form in which things are expressed? A metaphor for instance - if defined as something that is expressed in such way that it suggests a resemblance while pointing to things that cannot be part of a comparison - introduces such a hole into the thinking process. Normally, the thinking process works by building logic through known concepts, comparisons, analogies, words found usually in pertinent contexts, contexts that can be recognized as part of reality or common knowledge. On the contrary, the metaphor is sort of a negative image in the sense that it puts together things from different realities in images that would never get resolved even if the images are developed ad infinitum. Well, Zen resorts rarely to metaphor. Is it because a metaphor is difficult to master? Or it is just because a Zen expression should be as direct as an arrow flying unobstructed towards a target and so a metaphor - with its convoluted meaning - would be ineffective as suggestion? Whatever the reason, the capping phrases are not
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far from metaphor and poetry and they supply the true literary ground to the koan realm. They also support, supplement and enhance the superb illusion of having an instrument at handy that one might use to solve a koan by means of reasonable processes, step by step, getting closer and closer with every capping phrase that gets absorbed. With capping phrases at handy the unbridgeable gap between a koan and its solution seems getting narrower and the final leap comes into view. The more intently one focuses on the capping phrases the closer the solution to the koan appears. Fortunately, the process is dual, as any other process that involves ones mind: a part of the process is conscious and depends on reason; the other part is intuitive and unconditioned by reasoning rules such as logic (inference) or physics (cause-effect determination law). If reasoning is an inference, the intuitive process is alienation and withdrawal. If reasoning interprets logically a context and engages in a mediating course between ones knowledge and the context of the capping phrase, the intuition on the contrary acts as a hidden, passive but also immediate reflex-interpreter of an essential truth that any faulty or faultless phrase might contain. Although these capping phrases dont have capacity to enlighten they may improve undoubtedly through a reasoning effect the other comprehension, the intuitive one.
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The Koan and the capping phrases makeup
Between a koan and a capping phrase there is an enormous distance. Also there is no definite way to connect a capping phrase to a koan and so shorten this distance. Even in situations when a capping phrase clones parts of the koan text the connection is neither distinctive nor is it simple. If one reads carefully all capping phrases that historically belong to a koan one may find out that logically theyre not in sync with the koan and that sometimes they oppose each other. For that matter a koan and its capping phrases could not be used neatly as a scaffold would be used to help ones mind reconstruct the koan floor by floor following an imaginary blue print. This illogic, paradoxical and unpragmatic approach to a koan helps one in his/her belief that there is some transcendental law that underwrites the koans work to completeness, whatever that completeness might be. Sometimes what seems illogical acquires an infra-logic quality that induces the mind to discover a sense behind what looks as a simple distortion of logic. The semblance of the koan story with a possible interpretation that could be known is less and less
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important when one engages obsessively to resolve the koans riddle. What is the secret behind the freedom that ones mind acquires during this mental exercise? And, if any, what is the transcendental aspect of such realization? And if such transformation is conveyed by words what is the fabric of those words that make them so powerful in Zen? Most of the time a koan - and its capping phrases - are just allegories. Although, even in the case when a capping phrase can be assessed independently its meaning has a value that can be fleetingly sensed as an insubstantial element linked to a well perceived literary meaning. One way to look at Zen allegories is by sorting them based on the moods that they try to project: that mood could be evocative (viewed, heard), inferential (logical, illogical), absorbent (self), indifferent (external), delusional (by intent) or miracle-like, etc. with all equivocation inherent to analogies. Besides what is obvious allegorical there is a very rich Zen jargon developed for centuries - and kept secret - in which any word representing a common thing has a Zen reading attached to it. Thats why a Zen allegory has multiple strata of meaning which asks for certain techniques in order to be interpreted. As you read this text Im on the process of writing such a dictionary of Keywords and allegories in Zen literature based mainly on Blue Cliff Records books. Some examples of symbols used in a Zen jargon could be dragon=>initiate, snake=>nave, claws {and fangs of the cave of Dharma}=>
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koans, clarity=>enlightenment, etc. Although due to all these stylish ins and outs it could be difficult for most of us to create a new koan, a capping phrase can be grasped easily and through an immediate and intuitive process recreated on a mental plan that could be similar but also dissimilar to the original one. Since capping phrases are not prone to analysis, critique or a logical objection it makes it easier to an author to include in such collection almost everything plausible that could be sold as implausible, such as proverbs, clichd sayings, metaphors, paradoxes, illogical clauses-provisions-causesamendments-consequences-effects. One should be warned though that capping phrases are not to be taken as reasonable uttering. On the contrary, one has to create a distinction between common reasoning and revelatory (intuitive) reasoning, between common knowledge and mystical knowledge, between reason and non-reason, and ultimately between reality and illusion. Those that attained awakening know that the post awakening period is difficult especially on matters that involve mental activity, including simple judgments, and, to the extreme, logical and philosophical utterances. On this regard language is felt as being an alien instrument to the awakened so that whatever is expressed sounds imperfect or incomplete, as if in need to be forced to fit into a meaning; even simple exchanges, such
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as greetings, sound false and erroneous. It is as if after the world of permanence is seen by the awakened, neither the words nor the lives in general with their infinite forms of manifestation are matters of any interest. Gradually, as the mind is brought back into compliance with reality, this malaise fades and the mind regains some capacity to construct eloquent phrases about the world from beyond, which is the delusional world of the awakened. These utterances are sometimes taken as revelations per se, when in reality there are neither more nor less than inspired sayings created by a mind that lived through and survived the unusual circumstances of the awakening. Regardless of the form of expression that a capping phrase takes the important thing is the capacity of such phrase to be suggestive, to go some way towards engaging ones mind with empty thinking. The empty thinking doesnt uncover a meaning. It is easy to understand it if one thinks that what a capping phrase is trying to do is to create a strategy for the mind so that the mind could find a meaning that is lacking within the meaning that is given. For instance a capping phrase like A thousand eyes open at once could point to an awakening situation, or to that perception that overwhelms the awakened, or to the feeling of omnipresence that accompanies the merge of the awakened with the whole One, the universe in its manifestation. Would a phrase like A thousand doors open at once do the trick?
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Obviously so! But the suggestion would be less felt, less personal, less individualized, and less illuminating.
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Realization
Realization (kensho, kensho-godo, kensho jobutsu, satory, enlightenment) is the most important concept in Zen. Its meanings include: seeing directly the nature of things, seeing ones true nature, seeing into ones own true nature, penetration into ones own nature, looking directly into ones nature. How and in what circumstances will such a seeing occur? Normal knowledge (perception, representation, thought) consists of a duality subject-object, seer-seen so that what a seer is seeing as thing (object, self) is always the other. Seeing into ones true nature is an experience where the duality subject-object, seer-seen recedes so that it (the experience) offers to ones mind the pure inner vision of nature itself. In ordinary circumstances one assumes that things are true when they truly respond to what a practical experience and reasoning would expect as response. This approach has a natural and legitimate foundation for the living beings with regard to the separation between self (body, mind) and the other, whatever the other is. Realization transcends the ordinary experience by fusing, blending, merging, integrating, absorbing the ones self into (with) the other (world of objects, nature). At the instant when such a fortuitous moment gets produced one gets the illusion of
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seeing the true nature (the whole) while being the whole, the it. Reason cannot be invoked in this realm in order to stamp such happening with certitude. The paradox that is presented as the casual meaning of post-realization is that both reason and transcendental insight are truthful to what nature is. Why then one would have such a need to pursue Zen to see in ones true nature? Such a need originates in ones doubts that what is seen as reality is the only truth that exists. To get an answer to such doubts one would inevitably have to inquire into the origin of all that there is seen and unseen, (to see beyond senses, representation and ideas), to transcend matter and soul that mark any living being with impermanence, to go beyond the limits that mortality imposes on ones body and mind. This reasoning consists of elusive tendencies that humankind nourished from the beginning of time and sustains all religions. Each of these religions is offering its own metaphysics (language, grammar, texts) and methodology (practice) to be used by an adept to get to see the ultimate truth, that unequivocal truth of the origin that persists in eternity, beyond bodily and mental impermanence. * Koans and their capping phrases play an important role in Zen religious schools and monasteries. They function as seeds to meditation.
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Every koan is a mode to reveal emptiness though the key to such revelation cannot be found by indulging ones mind into interpreting the koans common sense. A koan cannot be deciphered (penetrated) before its logical and conceptual meanings are transcended by the mind. Each monk that begins Zen gets an initial koan to work on during Zazen. Innumerable mental states can arise from within ones efforts to solve the koans puzzle, most of them delusions coming from the limits that a koan puts on conscious interpretation until the koan is sensed as living on its own at the center of all things and carrying with it the very self of the monk. Capping phrases are sometimes seen as obscure and unrelated to the koan itself and at the very beginning, it is difficult to recognize the relevance of a capping phrase in relationship to a koan. It is also arguable that regardless of the mode in which a koans ultimate sense gets broken (passing through gate, penetrating the barrier) it provides a unique solution. Proof of the contrary are the various capping phrases accompanying various stages of koan insight (kensho). Anyone familiar with various collections of capping phrases understands that a capping phrase is a potential suggestion of what an insight is while nevertheless it cant be used as a substitute to a koan with some exceptions when the koan consists for instance of only one line in which the koan is resolved (wato) such as the sound of one hand, the original face, the great matter, etc.
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In monasteries where koans play an important role in awakening the practice involves two players a monk and his Zen Master (roshi) caught up in two games a koan game that takes place during meditation, (an activity considered as being fundamental in sustaining the awakening effort) and a checking questions game (sessho) in which Zen Master checks the monks level of insight and guides him towards production of the final solution to his koan. Once a koan is resolved the monk receives another koan so that his mind could continue to live in that quasi inauthentic reality of his mind which gradually becomes the only reality he knows anything about. With this kind of a living through meditation on koans a monk becomes more and more detached from the objective world and grows to be a sort of human creature living mostly in a purely mental state. Everymans consciousness is different and involves real actions in a world that demands from one a permanent focusing on the objective reality; mental and bodily activities in the real world are inherent to the living experience so that there is not too much space left void in the brain for koan resolution. To that everymans consciousness a capping phrases book could be a source of poetry and paradox that may slip away spontaneously into ones own territory of revelations founded on understanding, with the thought that such
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utterances come into being from a monks mind that happens to live in a higher state of mind elsewhere.
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To the reader
This collection of notes, aphorisms and capping phrases is the result of a thorough selection from manuscripts I have written between 1985 and 1998. What these writings show is that a post-awakening life remains viable and creative despite the experience of the ultimate merge with the universe and also that matters-of-life and of the living lingers at the heart of ones thinking after awakening. An inflexible Zen individual might say that such thinking breaks out of the traditional Zen circle and so it looses a true Zen identity, becoming a philosophical, ordinary way of thinking. Im not going to set out to demonstrate that Zens position on this regard brings forth emptiness instead of being an aspect that bothers me a lot and that by doing so it creates out of existence an improper (and absurd) subject of thought. What Id emphasize is that in any natural situation living humans are dealing with words and utterances that try to penetrate the truth beyond appearances. And this always works like that while humans talk. Though even when one is using common language there are special utterances, which are using convoluted logic, paradoxes, negative thinking, and
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metaphors to help one penetrate a reality that is uncertain or only partially knowable. These forms add to such utterances the mysterious aura of something that is inscrutable in what we know that is real. By creating a koan culture Zen is more ambitious than that, which this book tries to show evidence of. On all accounts though, this book should be viewed only as an intellectual contribution to Zen in general for there is no ordering of the notes or capping phrases and no specific links could be drawn between them in order to bridge a possible koan and give one that sudden confidence that the enlightenment is around the corner. The word Fundamental from the book title should be taken as a metaphor, though nevertheless my own experience with koan and koan training passed that Fundamental stage that gives one the raw sense that there is an ultimate truth coming with realization. Furthermore, in my case, I considered worthy of interest any other truths relevant to what we call - in our normal states of mind reality, truths that deserve to be lived and expressed at ones free will. Forewarning Clause: The notes present in this book followed my extensive meditation on koans. Koans solving and other koan work outs will be the subject of the next book titled: The little Orange book on Zen of the Realization Realm. A few koan resolutions present in this book should be taken as an introduction to the subject.
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Notes, aphorisms, capping phrases
1.
What the sutra says is that there is nothing in front and nothing behind except the One itself, although the One is empty. Spring when blooming starts spring when blooming leaves: time well spent brings resemblance. Look how ducks cross the moonlit lake: the moonlight stays unsoiled and the water erases the traces of the blue threads. In doubt the one thousand eyes stop moving. Notes: The laughs one utters after a cry; still inventing words to name the unnamed; round after round of nothingness; when the unknown flares up; we, the leaves of the forest;
2.
3.
4.
5.
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the emptiness with all the words inbetween; no word will take you there; a few breezes away, one wind nearer; death will soon take you there; million drums one sound; covered with sand uncovered by the wind; a breath of emptiness no address left for beggars; one guard fit to guard, no entry beyond life; point to it and youll see it gone; where all arrows converge; a spinning coin keeps its head/tail meaning intact; the creatures of the emptiness; looking for words in an universe that hands out phenomena; all phenomena are herded by words; voluntary surrendering; trying to attain enlightenment with no seeking in mind; you could see the sun in the cemetery, moving from a stone to the next; when the snow blossoms and the unseen moon becomes an intellectual pursuit; thoughts used to erect Zen pillars; not born yet, not dead yet; the weeds grew into lianas; eating, peeing, shitting words that will forever spread onto the brain; did any small creatures witnessed your awakening? Awaiting dawn with your feet deepen in ice; white doves flying across the snowy valley; wrestling with a tiger for a meager meal of dear
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meat; in a dead village those left behind are still living; a wave that left behind signs of those who sailed away; drawing water crushing ice; words chained on a mouth that once was alive.
6.
To have a fine sense of what emptiness is and still dissect phenomena to unveil the mystery. Future is measured in seconds; past is measured in centuries Organizing a kitchen to host orderly guests: one stream of water for each grain of rice Notes: Things seen all at once seem unbounded; the deep waters keep their doors closed; (neither getting in, nor going out; what is it?); When ten empty directions lead to ten empty targets; if the same moon comes again to shine on the same lake, things stay; When elephants climb up trees and weightless clouds are sold as pillows A mind in exile inherits innocent phenomena.
7. 8.
9.
10.

11.
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The mountain of sounds sinks in a sea of silence. Reality says: I gave you a mind as a natural Way to know me! Zen says: Ill give you a direct Way to know reality by knowing what mind is! When moon passes through clouds and evergreen trees which Way should one use to know it? If mind intrudes upon moon passes through clouds and evergreen trees, as mind says. If mind does not intrude upon moon passes through clouds and evergreen trees. Learning and interpreting what moon, clouds and evergreen trees are makes the evergreen look green. Not learning but just reflecting makes the evergreen look evergreen. The dweller of a burning furnace Notes: Nameless things; the last comes first; in the order of their leaving; terra-cote Buddha; a knee to knee on; one bone one marrow; song of the dead composed in silence; one lamp no moon in sight; time bears nothing; an icebox with
12.
13. 14.
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water inside; doubts that forever would have a meaning; an original face encompasses all; I recall, I recall; to make it happen then undo yourself; silent and soundless; blind and faceless; the sense of smell; one pearl per shell; maternal bloom; same snow two hills; cold glance icy maze; timeless equality; a drum played by a spirit in the essence of the mind; the inexhaustible rain just stopped; emptiness remembered; it is because they were empty; the mind is inherently cold; your denture fell in your stool; many more will die before youd be reborn; a message from Buddha: where your breath; glacial hypothesis.
15.
16.
What is measured - blossoms, what is rushed - doesnt bare fruit If you seek youll not get there in time. If you dont seek you may not get there by all means. In this case also, later is better than never. The patience of lake water waiting for moonlight
17.

18.
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Finding that the dream was reality and vice-versa. Now I can look at what is - even if it is not. Clamoring awakening? Despite what it is it needs neither clamor nor moan; Awakening stares in ones eye as ones eye stares at the awakening private stare infinite communication A dead eye cant see it, a living eye cant rinse out its image of illusion Phenomena are like the whirlwinds swarming a river. Emptiness is the most revealed creator: when crows fly low at night there is always wither chaos involved in its play or Buddhas unsoiled sutra being recited elsewhere. Why it is so is because what chaos can do Buddha cannot undo. Though, why Buddha would get involved when what comes-goes, and both stay? Frozen and searching when a breeze comes by: the blossoming spirit is asleep within.
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40 r Jalesh
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Pete
Thrusting your teeth here and hearing the cry there Between root and leaves no words to be exchanged Neither the sense of small nor a manifesting fragrance. In winter times as you see a naked bare tree you have the chance to encounter your original face. As the tree blossoms your original face goes away. To be less chain-bound you have to have less to see. White sandy waters reflecting white clouds is a better example. Although, remember, seeing while there is nothing to be seen is the best occurrence for dazing the awakening. A black crow flying through a pitch dark night Throwing black coins into black water Hate or love death as you like, both feelings mean attachment. It could be true that in order for the universe to survive us, we all must die. The only way to cheat this law is to close your mind and to retreat in a place where no-mind can show you how magnificent this impermanence is:
24.
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moments evaporating, how wonderful, history in ruins, one million years old archaeopteryx feathers still able to fly, two billion years old plum flowers, sixteen billion years old bosons, wonderfully preserved with jaws, claws and eye patches immaculate and intact 27. 28. On a one thousand miles high peak, a frozen stool If were asked to disperse, we disperse; if were asked to flock, we flock. Those who disperse flock, those who flock disperse. Behind close doors no words unfurl Buddhas statue in the meditation hall: cold steel eyes, cold marble skin, frosty nostrils, snow buried ears, pearls of dust from yesterdays sprinkle on his gold plated hands: the quiet clouds are full of hidden thunders Already there though the calls for help were not answered Questions could be asked if you promise not to imitate the answers
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30. 31.
42 r Jalesh 32.
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Images enveloping my eyes, sounds enveloping my ears: nothing allowed to get in, nothing left to get out. Emptiness stares at me: Be what you are! There is nothing else you can be Lying on such a transparent fabric that it depicted it breaks. Trying to get a sense out of it ignites fire flakes Although the endless fog of ignorance cant go through the eyeless tiger can. So do the phenomena heading back to the essence. Yesterdays phenomena lay in state Mind named them names before knowing them so the names became clouds that cover their clarity. Now that the names have been banished from speech and writing would the silence succeed to mingle with things and let them do the saying? The lake might say: Clear down to the bottom The rain might say: Bound to fall and become as inglorious as a puddle is. Every
33.
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voice-thing returning a favor to what the words used to name 37. A worm crawling away under a birds watchful eye One day you do Zazen and feel the immeasurable sky as it draws near and the bird songs fill the air and youd like to converse with Buddha and ask him about the Way you should choose to get there; and you get no answer. And as you awake from meditation the whole universe is roaming around, and you understand that the Way is there, in the buzzing street, in every aspect of life that goes on around you. And Zen becomes a simple matter, easy to handle doing your everyday chores. So many words have been spent to make Zen a cult. They rented a Buddhas statue, a piece of plaster as old as ones shoes, they peeked into some easy way to figure out what koans are saying and under controlled circumstances they produced mini awakenings, mini Buddhas, enlightened flies fleeing the Way without knowing that the Way was here.
38.
44 r Jalesh 39.
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What draws near shines afar; the five oclock dew is younger than the six oclock dew; wordless talk; one(1) and 2(two) paired together; will still be visible; emptiness-loving thoughts; when the bottom touches the ceiling; pain of the distance; thoughts being misused; down here mirroring down there; census: whos living, whos dying; sentences mothering words; original face in ones resemblance; no dreams while awaken, no thoughts while asleep; the gates of death; hidden into It like an untouched virtue; one inch apart, an eon into the making; who had ever heard it would die for it; seeds that sprout even in death; find your trace by smelling the wind; under the weight of ones foot the road becomes void; the reality killed him; savoring illusion; peering backward at pain; awakening the silence with a silent word; infinite fires before the end; seeing the map but not the roads; youre still a free spirit if you want to become a messenger. The eternal side of a bird in flight.
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The rise and fall of anger is like drunkenness stirred by heavier drinking When the thoughts cease to spin understanding and the weightless layers of emptiness break out at once: phenomena running for cover Pursuing form, chasing illusion; seeking self, chasing understanding; experiencing no-mind, apprehending nothing. A stationary flight. To transcend subject and object is like reaching the world where world-isnot with a mind-that-is-not. A thought lost in a mind would eventually find its way out. What is more truthful than what is true? Forget the logic: wisdom eats dinner at the fools table. Notes: Seeking outside or externals is as counterproductive as seeking inside and internals. The greatest delusion would be to think that
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outside and inside have nothing in common to be sought. Chasing form and sound outside, chasing form and sound inside! As far as mind goes both ways cover the same territory. One seeks the true perception, representation, understanding, knowledge of phenomena, the other seeks the true intuition, the essence, the eidos, the reality beyond senses and therefore beyond a birth and death reality. Is this beyond birth and death reality of any relevance to the living? Whatever is beyond a lifetime is eternal anyway. One cant drop history to be present at the beginning of the world, and one cant drop the future to be the witness of the world demise. While seizing with its claws your mind and holding it prisoner the reality says: thats me! And what the mind says? The world wherein I wander and ponder is what it is: thats me! Both views are impermanent. Isnt it pity that in those two impermanent worlds of a lifetime the most impermanent moment is the awakening?
49.
A tree bows, Buddha picks a fruit

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Clouds clinging on the mountains chasm? It is not enough to contemplate the original face and it is not enough to enter the illusion of seeing it as long as when this happens you still posses your intact senses. One thing that is external to mind makes such a seeing an impure outcome. When in a fortuitous moment mind places the mind amidst no thing worlds Following the image behind a mirror as it flows lower and lower. The infinite reflection that belongs to each element in the universe belongs also to humans. Thoughts come and go Are they home-coming? Are they home-going? The stream flow of thoughts, each rising and falling, falling and rising, with no return, with no echo Living thoughts let to go in still contemplation of thought let to go Donkeys dont sweat as they see a heavy load.
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48 r Jalesh
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In a restless world sleep comes with a snore. The errors (non-truths) or the truths have the same order number in the hierarchy of things that smell. When senses are cut and nothing stays on the way to either error or truth, is there anything besides order to consider? If there is no telling the error is shut out. If there is telling the truth is shut out. As youre hardly trying to nail the question using Zen logic you get nowhere. The story of the monk who inadvertently fathomed the ultimate answer while stumbling on a bamboo stick, what does it says? Though, the legitimate question on this respect is: If the ear is capable of tiptoeing, why the nose is not? Try it: tiptoe with your nose behind a smell, and be the smeller and the smellee, both at the same time. While you do that remember: no senses are allowed to be used through Seeking Buddha, getting pain that extends beyond ones body
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The little blue book on Zen 58.
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Notes: If things dont have a beginning the receding waters would not recede, the tidal waves would not rise. Mocking a fundamental principle? For, if there is no beginning of things there is no beginning of mind. Why then this Zen obsession with removing the thinking from the awakening process? Does the universe begin when thinking begins? If this would be true it would mean that the mind of all beginnings is the fundamental mind. On the other hand if this is not a true statement why mind would be seen as ordinary on one hand and as fundamental on the other hand? And also, if there is what we call essence or fundamental ground, isnt this essence common to all things including mind? One that knows the essence of things knows implicitly the essence of mind. But to know the essence of things one has to gaze at things, to listen to things and learn whats truthful and what is not. Isnt it that the delusion of knowledge is similar to the delusion of Zen? A correct answer is that the two delusions are completely different. The delusion arriving from thoughts, concepts and knowledge doesnt
50 r Jalesh
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promise an eternal life, although it hopes to find out how to get there. The delusion arriving from Zen promises to cut the roots of birth and death and therefore it offers to the awakened an eternal life, though the hope and everything else has to be left aside in order to avoid getting caught in attachments and seeking.
59. 60.
A bone to a dog but a living sparrow to a kitten What is beginning-less is endless: no barrier wherever it turns; silent clarity in an empty realm The tide borrows water for a short showing. You can learn what the tide says without hearing the lesson. When tides begin to emerge, their forms are wrought by the wind, and their bodies are made out of water. As they reach the mind, they cant enter the mind. As mind reaches the tides, the ultimate truth comes into view as the wind withdraws. Beneath the mirrors circle
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To give birth to a new mind in the same body: looking everlastingly, cleansing the seen of seeing. To force a mute to talk and a deaf to listen Do in this life what you did in the previous life, just do it a little bit better. If you could live both lives at once youd know how to proceed. Even what you dont do would then have some meaning to you. Since this aint going to happen try to do good as much as you can. Not to linger over good or evil concerns the judgments that you apply to other. Good should inspire and determine you to deny to yourself the right to do evil. Seeing good as being godly stuff, seeing evil as not being humane A flawless color shattered by a wrong sight. Phenomena that defy the emptiness: there is sand in every cement block. Notes: An immortal awakening has to deal again and again with a mortal
64. 65.
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awareness. In a moment of awareness the differentiations and discriminations vanish. Then ordinary moments of conventional perceptions rise and fall emptying the awareness of timeless light and Buddhahood until a new moment of awareness comes and turns the conventional perception off. Awareness and conventional perceptions are sitting at the same negotiating table: doubts cant lock up one to benefit the other. Self confidence cant influence the awareness drifting into conventional perception except for those moments when conventional perception ascends to moments of awareness. Thats whats like dwelling in both worlds the fundamental and the ordinary.
69. 70. 71.
When reality was still in its infant years. For Ill not think to act before they bow Making a point about Zen and the Land of Overwhelming Gratitude: those who didnt make it get a ride
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around the blue lake where, they say, a dragon cries for every unenlightened man. 72. 73. The sun leaves the scene when moon appears. Dying from desiring to die? Cut off your desires and youll live forever. Thousand Buddhas are waiting to see your life arriving in Heaven so that they could convert it into elements. The catch a mosquito lost in an ear passage without shutting off its buzz. All the lights lighted at once, all the swords blades cutting the same one piece of reality. Negative ad for Zen: So much bull shit, so much cow shit, so much horse shit. Youre invited to see how the shit is made: plop! Then another plop! It isnt finished yet, oh, it will never ever be finished! Plop! Be a bull shit, be a horse shit! Be Zen. Horse shit holds more truth than the ultimate truth.
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54 r Jalesh
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The toads are croaking so you can hear It. When he was a small child Buddha used to have lots of tantrums. What is the significance of such behavior when knowing what Buddha became? That a tantrum is locked in the knowing and that illumination has nothing to do with it. The eyes of a stone arc are buried deeper than the eyes of a mirror. If the truth of the awakened is beyond what is true (real) and what untrue (unreal) is, it is then beyond this statement also be it true or untrue. Although, if we say that the truth of the awakened is not within comprehension were revisiting religion and metaphysics. Getting there were not talking about the truth itself, but about the truth that reminisce what mind left out as being neither true nor untrue. To talk about the truth of the awakened one has to master what no-mind can teach, neither having any means to arise the emptiness from its sleep nor the
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words to dribble with when the emptiness awakens. Isnt it strange that the truth of the awakened puts the awakened back into defending what if true doesnt need to be defended?
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82. 83.
The fundamental stone shines when wet with fundamental water. Suspending a dry shit on a balance to measure the weight of a pearl. Like sheep jumping in void from Mount Summeru cliff: that awakening was rather a wolfs than Buddhas. A heron wrapped in cotton fog: white shadows that cant be undone. Fragrance that you can stare at when blossoms snow. The fallen leaves are turning into mud. How the beetle is going to sharpen its teeth now? For those that bring upon themselves seasonal transformations one mirror is saying a differing thing than the other. Does a mirror have any knowledge of the other mirror? Mirror in itself is reflection. Reflection in itself is
84. 85.
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mirroring. For a mirror to have knowledge of another mirror would ask for a reflection to have knowledge of another reflection. That is, a reflection should be knowledgeable of any other reflection that exists. Trapped in Heaven: Four walls with eight windows but no door to get in or out.
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Sitting is a deceiving thing. Coming and going is even more deceiving. Although, when sun is setting the moon comes into view The presumption that the moon would strike one day the temple bell could be proven to be true. Though, this blossoming would never see the fall coming The moral is that happenings beyond time and space are free and within a mind touch. While happenings within time and space are like the wooden horns on a stone head: they can touch each other only if they crack. The mystery of seeing is like clarity visiting a pine tree: once, just once The breeze says what is it The
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leaves and the flowers quiver as they pick up gently the sound- bits
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Before your eyes the sky unfolds: it is just so! The low grass is weaving: it is just so! If you abolished the mind or if you raised it in front of your eyes the world wouldnt change: it is just so! Buddha sitting in contemplation may exclaim: Does the voidness really care about what is mundane versus supra-mundane? The emptiness in action: knowing neither idling nor haste. No backtracking, no spilling water to wash the traces. To make any progress youd have to leap into the air, one leap at a time. This is the edge of the cliff where some perished, other got enlightened. The essence never decays; nonexistent never dies. the
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93. 94.
The reed flowers are snowing: neither as white as the plum flowers nor as black as a coal smoke; a goose is busily hissing Flower to feather are like mist to cloud
58 r Jalesh
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When a form becomes formless? Or a sound becomes soundless? How the discrimination surpasses this change? Form and non-form are not divided. Non-form and non-sound are not distinguishable. You cant discover what the secret of a blossom is by uprooting a tree. The essence is formless, without name and without witnesses. Bathed in the body of inexhaustible phenomena and trying to find the essence in vain. What it wields is just s teasing evidence, sort of an objectivity of the deceit. No way to think of what it is, though you know that it is just so! Ice denting the water In the inward view nothing to be seen. In the outward view just a sense of seeing. Holding a bowl to get a measured potion of boiled rice. Eat slowly so you could learn what starving is.
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Butterflies are too ephemeral to survive a long Zazen. Thats why those who meditate on butterflies tend to overlook the oxen plowing in front of the window. As it draws things in, it does not preserve anything. As it manifests them anew it handles them with a carrying poise. All you need to know is that you should not hold onto anything. Drums get silenced; the ploughed field has no traces to follow. Finding the place where things lie awaiting their turn to flee Leaning on your own bones, letting the mind get through In the Virgin Islands flowers bloom throughout the year. Zen looses the privilege to call spring flowers or the winter snow on its behalf. Although the permanence of flowers helps continuously the mind to tackle the emptiness on the presumption that one day the permanence will vanish. Dualism hidden under monotheism
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60 r Jalesh 106.
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To loose the sense of seeing and to get it back with a remembrance: was it, the moons silver neck surveying the blossom as it got carried away or was it not? The ignorance of the one who asked is lower than that of the one who answers. That swim-is-inseparable-fromwater explains why the swimmer doesnt actually move since the water doesnt move either. Waves can be parted only on a drawing board, one wave knocking the tip of the other wave, some waves as small as a musical note on a score, other even smaller, and invisible, like sheep seen from a mountain peak in the valley. Emptiness emerging as phenomena is not just an emblematic Zen game in which the whole mystery of the universe is laid out; it is also what an inner mind is seeing as thus. The mystery of what is not seen is the unspoken guide to the living. The living is though the spoken side of the unspoken. While one is outer and while one is inner is relative to who is
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looking and who is the seen. If the absolute is perfect and not relative it cant be spoken. If the absolute is perfect and also relative it is spoken. To understand it subtly, imagine a perfect drop of water touching the surface of a lake.
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Whose is that blossoming? Like a pearl that fades in a slit open shell.. The milestone to North was covered by beach send; the milestone to South was covered by waters. The only aspect of the world that is not Zen is the attachment to what one loves: that shows how much one live as opposed to how much one gets enlightened. Though, after enlightenment - love follows Phenomena can pass through an iron gate unscathed In the universe, spirit rolls inward; understanding rolls outward. Speech though carries both within, like a river reaching its source and its ending at any single time. When speech is complete there is nothing to be
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112. 113.
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spoken. When speech is defective it has to communicate, although nothing concrete, just something about the state of reality like: I see it! I see it!
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On one hand discrimination, dichotomy, differentiation! On the other hand, emptiness, the multitude of facets and dimensions unified as One! A wife being married to two husbands should be faithful to one while cheating on the other. Be faithful to reality, cheat on emptiness! Then exchange partners. Water foams when soap attends the washing. Notes: Sailing, sailing: a wall of water! A drum that fell silent! Washing a mirror of dust; utterly within; the Way - impossible to tell apart from death; Gods are indifferent to rank; the pit covered by a shell; beyond East and West, but not far away from them; reason abolished, reality neither known through words nor dented by senses; a clean stool but a stinking smell; cannons to fulfill a bows broken dream; a shade of a
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tree is worth an echo of a fallen leaf; in a long Zazen a mind will grow cobwebs; timeless emptiness value less than an ephemeral fly; waiting for the moon to rise from the water; if the universe will become ashes the knowledge will become a gapknowledge; seeking Buddhahood, meeting the inscrutable; blind walls, nameless stories; leaning on a hidden doubt; neither arbitrary talk, nor arbitrary silence; the silence of a lightning from afar; even if you stitched eternity to ones tongue hell have a flys fate if he says a word; tea evaporating, awakening squashed; talking during Zazen is like eating in sleep; what youre talking about, what youre devouring? If there is beyond the beyond it must be also within the within and also lacking the lacking and all-the-way-through through, etc. The advice to Zenists is: Just follow the steps of what common living persons call vocabulary and youll be understood.
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The embarrassment from judging right from wrong
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The realm of the solitary Buddha No senses whatsoever Beyond birth and death the bitterness of the lifeless emissaries: saying what? Saying no thing! Thousand calls for an answer and no response. And then the awakening - offering no alternative to the living from birth to demise One ardent prayer still echoes inside The inner ears are silent Never speak with rage or act with anger; bless their flesh, bless their bones So much donkey shit had been spent on making Zen a respectable cult! Some teachers resorted to renting a Buddha statue, a piece of plaster as old as ones shoes, peeking into some easy to figure out koans and under controlled economic circumstances, with a bunch of well-behaved answers for any question-to-be-asked, they produced mini-awakenings, mini Buddhas, enlightened flies fleeing a fly whisk Although, Zen could be a respectable cult only if those teachers were excommunicated from teaching
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The One that only emptiness could bring forth A retreat: The forest spread onto the streets of the old village. The footprints are from people that came from elsewhere They say the forest leaves make sounds that reminisce of old songs. At the foothill a stone from the old temple The war drums sounds louder than the peace drums Plum flowers follow a path never hidden Down the web ladder a spider got enlightened. Those caught in the web rang the bell, rang the bell No ear could hear it; no eye could look upon Does this mean that those attached to the self would never be saved? Dispersed stories leaves, untold autumn
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66 r Jalesh 127.
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Buddha mounting an elephant made out of pink marble: it looks like the pink marble knows who Buddha is Estrangement from the original empty state of mind makes us embrace words for prayers and invent prophets Neither excessive use of language nor lingering within the silent realm: language is limited silence is limited. Beyond guiding, where else the truth never turns into words? This stream serviced the boats for centuries. The stream on the other side of the mountain dried out long time ago: thats why a boat ride on it takes longer Shall I look, shall I listen? The bull passes the gate entrance holding his tail in his mouth Your next realization stage would allow you to relieve your previous realization stage
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If past is in the future it is not seen by a living eye The awakened ones: You could call them right now and ask them the ultimate question: Of course, you saw Buddha! What Buddha advised you to do? Some would say that Buddha is beyond what could be expressed and so no advice could be conveyed by such an encounter. Then Buddha, the compassionate, would show himself up on their behalf and in an untold manner, while using words that cannot be uttered hed deliver His Fundamental message of hope by holding up a flower And people would smile. They all know the heart of the matter that made Buddhism a light transmission of light. Thousand years passed by already and the knowing knows what is known and the unknowing knows what is unknown. Help yourself though: old stories can teach you new meanings The unseen bird follows the unseen path. Its unheard crowing is the only proven aspect of its incidence.
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68 r Jalesh 136.
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To seek awakening while working hard to prove that it cant happen? If you see it happening let it happen! If you see that it is not happening prove that it cant happen. On the distant peaks the same moon The yesterdays one travels through the immaculate fields of Heaven. To see thus youd have to free your mind from knowing this. Watch out: as phenomena (this) go in and go out, thus neither goes in nor goes out. You just have to be careful when its revealed not to acknowledge its wonder. Is this thus? Your mind cannot touch thus! Your no-mind is thus in its long longing to see it. Some use to call this longing holy! Every day is a new day; the old flag pole soaked with yesterdays rainfall takes flight The battered leaves scatter around; new buds begin to bloom.
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Notes: The breath of Buddha shouts up with every fragrance; gazing at a written word thats illegible; wrestling with Buddha and winning; Buddha taking a seat among mortals; roll another Sutra parchment cries the man on the death bed; even then, even now a lone stare that cannot follow an arrow in its flight; Buddhas molded hands embracing a sprouting bud; sure the reason brought so much resemblance of what we say with what we see: doesnt it look like remembered illusions? Every day, sampling the reality to feed a voracious mind; the arrows target is point-less; an example of emptiness: putting a string into a needle hole. Under ones feet life remembered; above ones feet the morning mist When a chick is born the eggshell is forgotten. The inner loss is always greater than the outer loss though they get recorded in the same folder
142. 143. 144.
70 r Jalesh
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The drum beat is hidden under the drum skin. You shall cut off your thoughts and enter the no-mind realm. Thought by thought, one thought at a time A bowl of rice mixed with teeth of the former guests To see what is beyond emptiness is like moving your mind in its middle and exploring its surroundings. You can hear the emptiness speak. Although beyond emptiness there is always some cattle in its own right to graze formless grass. Mud washed with moonlight Each thing has a guardian assigned by emptiness! A guardian of a snow flake falls down with the flake, melts when the flake melts When a flake dies one thousand white cows are flying over the frosty forest Exchanging thoughts for a bowl of rice
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In the distant Tibet I lost a close relative Put some light cloth on and stay: tea would be served as usual, and then the bell would be sounding as usual. Unfortunately Id have to go before the heat of the day awakens. Id also have to see a doctor. On the way to Lassa, my feet bled. Undoubtedly wisdom is sweeter than tea. Though, playing a guest could be even sweeter. As far as your feet are concerned, let them bleed Your daily life teaches you what youre going to do after you get enlightened Break through the gate, get lost For monks that are monks no more: the immobile dirt statue of Buddha Nothing but emptiness: emptiness but nothing. What else is a bow with no arrow? Learning to respect ashes as if they were a living Buddha
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155. 156. 157.
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72 r Jalesh 159.
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First, the division of wholeness happened so that the day-moon showed being different than the evening-moon. From a root source so many spring blossoming. Moon and everything else mirror the subjective realm. Not interpreting anything, bringing on emptiness. As the mind stops touching the moon, moon is nowhere to be seen as a different moon. Someone might know why a shadow follows the light The lotus flower looking into my eyes. Free from coming or going he is not coming or going anymore. Confirmed! Before the awakening came I spent lonesome hours imagining it. After awakening I spent lonesome hours trying to understand what it was. While the question could be crystal clear the missing answer is like a poisonous arrow launched to hit a target without boundaries
160. 161. 162.
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164. 165. Old man dreams telling about
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Questions as many as grains of sand; and only one truth to seek How could it be answered when it has never been asked? The day when the bamboo stems would play the anthem Not executing thoughts while having lots to do. Even after a thundering awakening it is never too late to acknowledge that you still dont know a thing about it Not falling into a deep hole face to face with the unknown Lonely journey on an empty ground: the healing wound asks the body how it did it. Killing an explanation does provide the right answer. Holding the moon captive in his eyeball before letting go.
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167. 168. 169.
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He worries from not being awakened yet. If hes going to live one more year his whole ego would leap out. Ive been stolen of my only treasure, hes shout. Remember, I told him, that a monk that is not yet awakened is still part of the family. What happens then to the awakened? So many arrows pointing at him! They look at him and see the same face though his face is one eon-distance apart. Then, is he still part of the family? Notes: If the center is everywhere where is the boundary? To discover that the moonlight weights a million tons; at the feet of the mountain, a butterfly moists its feet in a dew drop; to see through things and still not to be able to gather enough gold to make a decent meal; mourning the day as it departs to become yesterday; not falling within mistaken behavior; to shoot a bird in flight through a thick wall; clean conscience with all deeds on the mark; the barrier gave way just enough to let a thought take a peek; better not to see than to see too much; an articulate statement says less than
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a question mark; when a host becomes guest on its own turf; a thin surface that gives way with each grain of dust; a heavy smell in continuous ascent; mental things have no flaws. 175. 176. 177. Braving the sleep the mind stumbles on a forgotten dream. Same crap, same crap, same crap A plastic Buddha: It looks like glass though it doesnt have any idea what glass is. Talking in sleep but keeping during the day the vow of silence. Clouds gone north climb the South Hills. Already? When Buddha walks the woods the wet grass sounds its bells. The ultimate truth is sleeping under your pillow. Notes: Immaterial and so fearless; pressing the gates to break open a gateless road; the spring flowers face an unexpected snow; as if waving farewell to an event that walked away
178. 179. 180. 181. 182.
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and then came back against your will; one thing asks questions, two things reply; so that they know that there is an emptiness that we all share and that there is a path on which were subtly trapped to walk alone.
183. 184. 185.
No need for a golden hammer to tap on an iron nail. Pines trees telling of pine trees. Showing compassion by dropping ego, body and mind When the wind sweats the river swells Autumn: Old trees are leafless and bent; young trees are leafless and solemn. The water floats equally to their roots. And the moral is that those that dont have the know how take It for granted. Though his eyes are okay he lost the sense of seeing. Fishs desire to fly ended up on beach sand.
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188. 189.

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Not being in the realm of the created neither in the realm of the increate. Its like passing a puzzle to the mind and letting the puzzle pursue the mind until the mind strikes back: quickening hail rains To shorten the path to awakening one has to walk a longer solitary road. One legged, two legged, three legged, four legged Walking in solitude the number of legs one uses doesnt make any difference. A bulls tail deepen in water is dripping. You could see that the trace of drops ends before the bull gets through the gateless barrier The aura of a saint but a mouth of a commoner A bowl of rice eaten by the awakened one From sunrise to sundown and from East to West: same beaten path. To follow the Way- through one needs a guide to nowhere. The path is virgin
191. 192.
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194. 195.
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and virtuous. Though, as one approaches the Way with innocence the path turns through dark alleys with no compassionate voice to be heard. Walking on kneaded iron nets where not even a dragon would risk adventuring
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An awakened voice sounds muted Wanting to separate what is reality from what is falsehood while looking at a tree I found the following facts: 1. As trees are trying on their flowery spring-dress the butterflies fly around the tree branches; 2. As trees are wearing their summer leafy gowns butterflies fly towards the river; 3. As trees are loosing their leafy gowns butterflies are barely to be seen; 4. As trees are barren naked under their snow coats butterflies are nowhere to be seen. In Samadhi all seasons are gone, the trees are staring at the sentient beings, butterflies are always present but no sentient being could see them. Hard to know whats the difference between normalcy and Samadhi if there is no judgment allowed to be applied! Although, if
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one puts all these in ancient terms one needs to get any meaning out of reality before they can be applied to Samadhi. Isnt this confirming that only full knowledge could make a Samadhi worth while? In reality there is not even a hair-width difference between the reality that one is seeing and the reality seen by the other. Same is with Samadhi 199. 200. Mu: Emptiness pulled by a rope An iced moon in an icy pond Wind, riding a stony tiger turned into snow flakes.. Notes: The difference between what is thought as reality and what is residual, only subjective, false echoing, thought mocking, centered but not part of it, nothing but learned stuff, the unlikelihood of what is neither thought nor I; emptiness burden which is either what it is or what it is not; unwelcome contribution of speech on the subject (or object); unfinished perception getting frozen by a sudden demise; you seeing what is not to be seen; thoughts that are not born yet;
201.
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Samadhi chanting 202. followers
Pete
chanting,
The master of the blossoming yields way to the master of the flowersnowing Equal wisdom Water swells and then recedes: the faceless moon-unshaken A butterfly making a brief stop between a lions claws A woman wearing a fragrant flower under her armpit Riding through the emptiness on a wooden horse As long as he lived he could listens to brass music for days. After he died although he could hear only the drums beat he never stopped listening. Buddha would come along and theyd beat the shit out of the pigskin drums for days in a row The aura of an ordinary being comes from the unknown drawing nearby. The aura of an awakened one comes
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206. 207.
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from the unknown drawing afar. Hearing what truth is in the silence of an unspoken word 209. 210. 211. When a mouth talks the mind notices a seems like situation Thousand cattle roam the Heaven: no shepherd though Valued by their health and weight though no one would tell you the price. Now that nobody is interested in buying them they graze the mountain meadows East to West, North to South. Emptiness paints the sky blue and the grass green There is no cause if there is no consequence: emptiness acting stealthily Between being born and dying or before being born and after dying? Things are the same if you ignore Karma. Emptiness and the sense of its nonsense
212. 213.
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82 r Jalesh 216.
Pete
Something happened but nobody knows why. The silence of happening is though different than the silence of non-happening. Making sentences out of nothing to illustrate what emptiness is. Hate has more fear in it than love has courage. The transcendental emptiness with its ephemeral release: dew is evaporating; birds are flying beyond the horizon. To separate a shell from its sea-bound path. A half-lighted moon has no path to choose: on the lake surface galloping mosquitoes Loading an empty iron boat with iron until it drowns The emptiness drew nearer when the tide submerged. Senses left out to vanish
217. 218. 219.
220. 221.
222. 223.

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The darkened night cant figure out what a now is I learned about an ancient mirror that reflects the world as if unchanged Spring begins again. Questions bring about blooming; answers bring about scattering. No voice at fault yet. A seasoned bull doesnt bring his tail to the gate A pure and simple life walks an indifferent path to enlightenment. (Could anybody know his mind with no-knowing what mind is?) The sense of un-knowing that one gets seeing every piece of reality anew. In silence, the dragons roar is never heard. As it is heard there is no more silence. To fulfill what a mind promises a pure and simple life has to proceed day by day empty-handed. Its always about not grabbing, not taking hold of anything, not grasping, not getting hold of anything, but just letting go An iron fox haunts an iron fish in eternal waters
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84 r Jalesh 230.
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No Buddha around? Im still alive living my arbitrary life. Buddha around? The ghost of April blossoming in immaculate appearances snowing over the white sand of the estuary. What knows nomind enters no-life Awakening: A privilege one cant get by birth or inherit through a will Webs of ignorant thoughts, too wide to catch a winged robber The mystery of life is in the living. The mystery of mind is in nothinking. (The sour taste of life is noisy; the sweet taste of mind is quiet). Iron flies with the power of iron bulls Caught up on anger I charged my bow with no target in mind. The arrow went deep into my foot; no one though perished. Thats whats strange about anger: it hurts the one who seizes it without naming a target.
231. 232. 233.
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Remember: flowers grow thorns in secret in order to avoid anger; why then one would need to breed anger while getting stung by thorns? 236. The black power of a concealed act? I lived through a brief encounter with Buddha although no secret word was whispered into my ear The secret word is not in the appearance, I heard Languages perpetuate the idea that rains are helping crops grow. A sinking boat with no holes in it has the same market value as a sinking boat with holes in it. Practice Zen wisely When dragons know that you saw them - they hide, otherwise they appear The bell-flower is a bell-ringer. When it fades its bell sound fades. As opposed to the bells bell Eyes open, ears open, nostrils open One can sense whats going on and
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what goes on forever If mind is eternal what difference would it make to close the eyes, the ears and the nostrils? The difference is that one aspect has a beginning while the other aspect has an ending
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When misdeeds are followed by more misdeeds the reality as we know it gets ratified Beyond the gateless barrier, a nose with no sense of smell sampling a breeze for a traveling fragrance; the surprise of seeing teeth coming out of the word dragon; Sighting well done, no clouds in the unbounded vastness; wipe the dung off your feet before entering the Meditation Hall; we call it emptiness when April flowers blossom: we call it emptiness when the wind blows in the mist of falling flowers; the rhythm of the distant rain beyond reach washed free of clouds; every sight communicates with the seen, and every seen leaves the sight traceless; It began raining with no cloud in sight; thoughts driven out of mind, words driven out of the tight lips; even the empty
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words got emptied here; no thinking, no saying; playing with no-mind will do for now Before the myriad corners of the universe are all illumined by an enlightened mind the original face with no eyes gets there, the plum flowers traversing the spring get there, the nuptial day-night picture gets there, the shallow path of the dragon gets there, the soft summer wind gets there, the lonely grownthrough-rain-and-snow pine get there, the sky-etched fireflies get there. With so much light around who needs an enlightened mind to illumine? Scent that is beyond the sense of smell; smell is who I am; scent is what Im not. Ears frozen: no sound can get in. In water the snakes moves have no sound; in the grass the cats moves have no sound. You cant hear it even if you listen. What about a thunder? What is then listening but not hearing? Its neither like being absent nor like being deaf. Again: it is listening but not hearing, like listening but not hearing through a
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thick stone wall, like sound that sounds but doesnt enter the gate of senses and interpretation, like passing from sound to what sound is when not hearing one. Finally, it is not like closing your ears not to hear it, its like opening your ears wide and hearing no sound.
248. 249.
Virtues crowned with thorns, vices crowned with thorns With delusions rampant, whos going to point to that innocent thought that would allow mind to grow into Buddha? If coming full koan-circle means using words, expanding words, decanting words, thinning them out, dropping them, then again discovering words, using words, etc. whats the point to live outside words just to prove a Zen-point? Words pronounced in silence travel easily through mountainous walls. A flower hits the mark, a thorn hits the mark, a word hits the mark A
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question of whats true reigns over us: away from home and without an answer yet What is going to happen to a mind if delivered from thinking? Is non-thinking going to hit the mark? Sometimes ignorance is the exchange currency for nothing. Mixing words with guilt of using words as imperfect as the sense they convey 253. At night it rained. At dawn it rained To walk the Way you have to follow the answer back to the question. Then, before the question is asked youd have to watch the inexpressible question-marks that try to unfold. As you get to see the very moment when they try to stir the mind, stop them, catch them, and throw them in apathy: you cant undo an answer if youre not willing to undo the question. The pine trees lack seasons Whether we are awakened or take the living moments to a new height: there is renewal even in failures What is intimately felt could be wrongly taken as something of the
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ultimate importance: In joy, for instance life clearly manifests itself. In sorrow, death clearly manifests itself. Though the only thing of maximum importance in this case is what transcends joy and sorrow. The answer can go as far as what spring flowers communicate to a breeze or what a flicker of a firefly tells to moonlight. Nothing is void in the manifested world if not beyond cause and effect. And even then the emptiness has a secret to whisper about.
258. 259.
No being to invoke above, no bones to invoke below All morning the wind raised the leaves back to their branches. As all pathfinders had been fired no leaf could find the trace back home, not even those that piled up near the trunk. In fog frogs weight their jump: no lotus leaf in sight Teaching with one eye while glancing with two: discrimination is a mind
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issue though if you see One with two eyes youre better off than seeing One with one eye. Why? This question is already in the answer. Why not? This answer is already in the question. Its just that question and answer reflect each-other And you dont need a teacher to confirm that.
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A frosty look at awakening after awakening Eyes lost the wonder, ears got back the sound Knowing that youre back home by listening to the toad croak. Not this, not that! Neither this, nor that! Neither that, nor this! Try to find a reality where this logic doesnt apply, that is something that definitely is the fabric of everything, like what a crow would say about darkness: It matches my color but it wouldnt crow. . Neither to be known as being known nor to be known as being unknown River like a mirror, moon like a white falling bird. Both imprisoned by mind, though neither one is in nor
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is one out. When theyre around youre missing no one. When theyre not around put your hand over your mouth though neither word could bring them back, nor silence. How wonderful, how wonderful! Humans are mourning what could never be lost. Although there is no way out of thinking that river is like a mirror and moon is like a white falling bird.
267. 268.
The sun finds its way back opposite to the West. People are like numbers: there is some divinity there but also rules to peek into if you want to use them. Dharma Queen wearing a whitefeathers hat Fallen with the snowstorm, white cormorants fallen in the snow, herons fallen in the snow. Would they ever come back to see Dharma Queen wearing a whitefeathers hat? Sudden sound: too late to follow the mind guiding arrow Is this a crowned fish breaking the pond waters?
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Within the inner silence the miracle of the outer sounds A mind temple to hide into: questions that shouldnt be asked and if asked having no answer. The story says: if it is empty it doesnt have breadth and height. If it is inexhaustible it has breadth and height. All right! If it is both empty and inexhaustible what is it? Mirrors still reflect the empty air. Beyond the Iron Mountains Buddha walks gazing skyward. Neither midday sun nor midnight moon Snakes are hissing at the old grass hut though nobody is there. One partially burnt log left to own the place. This was all part of the temple including the foaming toilet and the silent candle that must have been thrown in the garbage by mistake. A mind temple to hide into It does not good to meet Buddha just to tittle-tattle. The awakening is at the mercy of ones courage to get hold of unruliness.
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94 r Jalesh 275.
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The unrelenting flight of reality: you cast a net and there is no catch. Everything had been here forever, like all the rest of everything else Call it eternal though it doesnt make sense. Call it ephemeral and youd get a spit to your face. Definitely, the ephemeral is eternal. You open your eyes, its here You close your eyes, it comes around again... You cannot make good music by pounding a cat. Riddle: It is unborn, it cant be destroyed and it never decays When all the conceivable phenomena withdraw Nothing can be done if not intended to be undone. Half is never equal to half as long as whole is not detached from their significance. Even when time is idling the space is spreading out.
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278. 279.
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The little blue book on Zen 281. 282.
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On a relative sky an absolute flying bird The chirping at the window is shaping the image of a bird in my mind: lions dont chirp, it says! (Lion chirping in a far off place). A beaten cloth gets whiter, a beaten mouth gets wiser. A broken chain puts in motion the universal links: freedom got two new ends The moon sprang from the hill forest. No one sails the moon, no one sees it tailing the water. Lone moon lone journey Stale water flies are part of let go When it rains on the hill the plums bloom in the valley. A mound of words to live through the long day; a short silence to turn your mind away; Fundamental watching within.
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Sitting on the rock, waiting for the rain It must be close now, one step away The morning-mist comes back at night: a hot path though, a hot path The intricate web of forms which the emptiness creates every moment! Theyre not silent though you cant hear them; theyre not invisible though you cant see them. If the ears stop hearing youll hear If the eyes stop seeing youll see Whats the meaning of this beaten logic? It is that forms are forms no more if theyre seen, and sounds are sounds no more if theyre heard. When senses are banished and the mind is silenced the inseparable surges forward. Nothing is left, right, below or above: were this and that, as long as we live, as long as we take breaths; thus will always be thus either were alive or dead. Question let to go; answer kept captive
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Meditate stealthily, sleep in public, respect equally the bums and the royals; while naked we all look the same and even more as we cross the Styx River. To accept thus is to agree with thus; to deny thus is not to agree with thus. Isnt this thus what this is? Nobody is forcing you to agree or disagree if this is thus. But as you untie your mind from agreeing or disagreeing youre still inseparable from thus. And thats what it is a thought of a thought of a thought And also the no-thought To catch a moon in deep waters Pathfinders use neither words to reason nor intuition to move ahead. Although, through an impassable forest over which emptiness reigns Words written by a con Zen-artist Gazing at the moon he fell from a cliff. He could have given emptiness the use of his body and mind which he didnt. (This is called avoiding awakening). After he got back on his
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feet he fell again. He must stand still or hell be eaten by dragons
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A painted drum sounds as if it wasnt painted. When the ear guides the mind a bell-call values more than one thousand images. Eyes in wonder, ears muted. The vastness of a ground with not even an inch of vegetation for miles around. When awakening is idle you can go and pee in the weeds. Try though to avoid bushes where birds are nesting. Gazing at the chaos no sound to retain When here was there Mind in exile, waiting to be enlightened: youre alone, either on the tip of a pole or while being pressed from all sides by crowds: what youre waiting for (for so long) may come now. If it doesnt come dont be hard on yourself. Emptiness never fails anybody. Its just your
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determination to seek it by all means, that might turn it off. 304. The bottom of a present moment touching the bottom of eternity. To Zen students that are students no more: did you see the original face? A century may fade away though time would never move wrongly an inch either left or right. The wise will fail, the wicked will succeed. Zen monks are born with crossed eyes. The awakened is born with no eyes. If youre awakened, go and preach your Zen religion elsewhere If youre not, youre welcome to teach it right here. Too wordy to be worthy. Nothing has Buddha nature, except the wholeness. This shows that one would have to conquer the universe to get there. What is then this rush to run away from here to there? Sleeping while asleep and awakened while waking up: a Zen spirit wears flowers to tempt the emptiness onto surrounding. Emptiness has no name.
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To call for attention use an empty call instead beyond word and thought.
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In the past you could test a master with a wink. Nowadays one wink might go further than you wish Saying things beyond words How long it takes to ones mind to learn any new trick, like the Pavlovian puppy that by hearing a bell would start on salivating. Mind is silent, willing is silent also. How does the mind after following ones desire to get a treat - find its trail back home? To get rid of attachments youd first have to get rid of reflexes Koan: All happened just when he stopped from thinking that his daily meditation has no ending. Im the flight, the bird said: Im the swim, the fish said. A mosquito takes a bite on the nape of my neck; Whack! No more Im the sting, as the mosquito would have said.
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There is nothing to say and thats all you can say. Those moments when realities seek the inscrutable: as it snows here, overthere crows pick seeds from under a snow already fallen. If events are arbitrary and chaos rules the world why crows dont look for seeds elsewhere? Snow should be the blanket for seeds that are never sought One moon, one sun, one donkey The glittering awakening has its own celebration day in the monk calendar though when it happens it takes less than a minute. Count the stars before sun appears and count the moons before sun appears When the moon is high the tidal waves tend to be smaller. As the boats sail backwards dogs start barking. Those who neglect the aspects of reality would have to be rescued.
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Once the awakening was done with, he found that everyday chores exhibit higher virtues. Journal: After my morning walk my feet are fully covered by weeds, petals and dew. Are they still going to be covered if I reached the peak? Id have to let my legs carried away by the river. If I wore cow-skin shoes on my feet I could not cross streams. Yesterday our donkey threw off the load. Today wed have to wait for its return before climbing up the vertical side of the mountain. The weight of one thousand smiles is equal to the weight of one thousand wails. Journal: These tailless frogs are unknown to zoology. Heaven though knows them. If we want also to know them wed have to look at the way they swim and croak. At the sound of the first rain drop they hide under the lotus leaves. Thats how they became a tailless species. Though are they ever dying? Nobody saw yet a tailless
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frog carcass so the secret that hides their death still remains to be known.
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Mocking understanding Her head is above her breasts as the hill is above the blossoming bank. A tongue knowing no word is still chained to the sounds of a throat. Calling a blooming bloom makes flowers loose their decorum. To call their fall falling asks for a divine intervention. Falling flowers know how blooming can look beyond the four season causality to return to blooming. In the wake of spring - flowers gradually bloom. When they fall, they fall all of a sudden. One inch further and the whole landscape is different. A stick can reach back, though is a stick having such good eyes to escape the differentiation? Where mirrors see everything in one view
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104 r Jalesh
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To reflect a shadow is easier than to reflect the light: although the secret is beyond any reflection Before awakening the eyes cant see what the seen is hiding. Thieves lacking a motive to steal get easily caught red handed. If universe is who I am the arrows can fly anywhere. Like the weightless plum petals falling on shallow waters A chest full of books that teach one ritual only A Zazen temple? The cotton walls are sound proof. It means that one can prove that sound doesnt go through cotton which is the reason why cotton is used to build Zazen walls. Those who have known what cotton is hung around to see if it is true. Those who have not known what cotton is think that letting the sound pass through since sound is meant to be heard is what a cotton wall needs to be suitable for Zazen. In
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their case sound proof walls means that it can be proven that sound gets through cotton walls. And thats what Zen is: logic on reverse.
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Going after that old koan with new arrows in the sack and finding that the place where it had been left hanging for eons is empty. Into and onto emptiness, far away from the polished mind You cant see it when you see it, you cant see it when you dont see it. Being close, so far, and far, so close. Indefinite blossoming. You went to cut the tall grass and discovered that there is still snow on the ground. Step by step and koan by koan When the weather cools you could see sometimes one single snowflake dancing in the air. Salt-frost is saltier than sugar-frost; sugar frost is sweeter than salt-frost.
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106 r Jalesh
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Beyond the echoing of Buddhas sayings Being awakened and not knowing; things happen that way; words know no tale The mist began dripping as flowers snowed down on the tall grass Asking questions you loose. Listening to answers you also loose though listening is not recorded by Karma. Nobody then should be conned to ask questions and loose while the assembly that listens gains. Thats why my Zen Master asked us to write the questions we may have on a piece of paper and submit them anonymously by throwing them in the jug. I immediately realized that a name unnamed wouldnt be able to trick Karma. So, when my question came up as the Master began reading it I stood up on my chair and began shouting: Empty! Empty! Tongue taste emptiness! Stinking dung! and I kept shouting obscenities all the way out the door with the temple guards on my tail. Id always remember that
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moment as the happiest moment of my life. After that episode, any time I get an answer to one of my Zen questions I feel like a Zen casualty.
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One seed of flax hides a sixteen billion years old trail: since there was no beginning sixteen billion years might signify the number of all falling leaves in a clear autumn day. Out of tune with this koan What is before the eyes is seen behind the eyes There are no things to be understood before theyre neither seen nor unseen; there are no seen things to be sight-undone. A moth and a candle are entering Zen together. Filled with fragrance the seen mountain remains hidden. Ultimately, if manifestation of emptiness is deceit the never receding mountain could be quite a proof to the contrary. Of course emptiness might have loomed there at the beginning of time; not now though; in math terms an object covering a square mile or lasting for thousand years should be considered as a surplus to what emptiness manifest as transitory. On a time
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scale, one never understands what transitory means if transitory spans more than the time owed by a lifetime clock. On the space scale, large objects like planets exemplify stillness and, as we know from experience, stillness never arises and never goes away.
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Inward glances with no images to be seen. Outward glances with no images to be told. Again, emptiness being shown as a white swallow perched on a snow man. Industrial koan: You can turn gold into a more pure gold, you can purify the water. A distant wind opening all gates at once: beyond here is there; beyond there is here. Thoughts approach the obvious though not a slightest consent flows towards it. The evidence in which truth is stored in words sawed on a thread What about those looted truths that were never found again? You cannot find fresh grass on a beaten path or the moonlight in an
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old grave. Though, only as one descends there, one will know it all 353. Let this be the day when spring begins The thought knows It, though It will never pair the thought and Itself together. And this goes on forever. What if It could become that element that would freely change into Thus? Concepts in the hands of the inviolable emptiness Around the playground the wild cherry trees began to blossom. But who made them blossom is still a mystery. It is always new as it exchanges momentary words. Thus is like the reality untold: phenomena come from here and never from elsewhere. Thus is like the cold vapors coming out of the deep earth after a summer rain. Flowers fall like snow, snow falls like faultless pearls on the lake surface The moon sinks its claws in a spider web. Behind the scenes a fly flies away
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110 r Jalesh 356.
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The full moon comes once more, the wind beats once more Then all sink into silence. The element of the unmanifested presence has already ditched the sky. The blind is the only creature left to walk the grounds For fear of emptiness roses grow thorns Can it be so simple? Can it be so difficult? Seeing the walk on but not the road Sutra says that it has to be as clear as crystal, even the fog A mussel that sweats in her shell has more chances to sink than a swan hit by lightening. Many aspects of the mind reflect many aspects of reality. If the aspects are forms the essence is formless. What mind reflects then? To see the formless aspect mind has not to discriminate. A mind applied equally to all forms might help one fix ones awareness on the formless essence. In an instance the chill breeze brings to a standstill the moonlight; natural things stop changing. Dont think,
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though, that this is some kind of an inhabited place that you bought at a bargain price
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Snow falls all along the field getting mixed up with crows and barren stems. Feeling like a paper in a pile of papers, like a leaf in a pile of leaves Whos hosting me is a copy of me. Whos a guest of one has to be part of a pile. Now, whos instructing us to be either host or guest? Primordial time was our true opportunity to get liberated of such questions. Deer grow their horns without noticing. The sprouting flowers along the Way: the absolute secret, untold even by the awakened to himself. To apply dualism to One is easy. To apply One to dualism is hard. The reason is that when the resonance is heard it is dual; while - when listening doesnt produce resonance it is not. However, not even the resonance found in mind can get near the ones boundary. The pursuit of meaning is a way of estrangement
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from the ultimate truth. Thats why one should never allow thoughts to grow into certainties. In a dark cave a pure mind doesnt need a light to move around. Horses that neigh dont win races.
365. 366.
Buddha turning a stony face towards the moon. To the left still dark, to the right incredibly sunny. A cat smells the moons reflection in the shallow water. At autumn the swamp clears so that you could see the moon getting three feet under the water. As emptiness-let-out, It comes. As emptiness-take-in, It goes. Metaphysical is so because it doesnt know it. Real is so because it knows about. As the Way glistens on the unknown path the walking minds are not at fault even when talking. An empty deal where seller is the buyer and vice versa.
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An expression beyond convention such as Good is bad is like a bird burning her own wings for dinner. (Extending the life of emptiness through Zen paradoxes). No escape from errors, except when errors are our own. That is nobodys path. Surrounded by mirrors with the illusion that nobody can see you In the mind of the fountain the water is what thoughts are to the mind. Zen is just the donkey kicking the water bucket after satisfying his thirst. The wheel of Dharma never stops: a pure chill circles the universe. Some seeds wont germinate for thousand of eons To emptiness, phenomena of its own making are empty. If it is bull it has to say Moo, and if it is human it has to have a chance to speak. Is that a howl having no meaning is higher headed on the Way than a word? Would words being mine what
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emptiness says that they should be, like trees in an orchard, blooming in spring, being snowed in winter?
377.
Monks that come here have to wait at the entrance for years before they could be received. Zen registration is a slow process. Signing a Zen contract that makes no promises is a hard pick As awakening seemed to be like a tree left leafless When you drop your body it is like a flower dropping its flowery aspects. At that moment your body could be called by name no more. Deep like a firestorm ash When you drop your mind it is like becoming part of the impersonal aspect of reality: the emptiness. Not fathomable, although ample: in front of your eyes, the ultimate reality, as guessed! The war of phenomena against phenomena: arrows flying on all directions hitting a random target.
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When on a horseback youre one with the horse. There is no way you could separate one from the other. Changing horses doesnt amend the statement. Why such a union unfurls? A thunder-ridden moonlight makes such a disjunction even more difficult to grasp. Thats why when we gaze at the original face the original face gazes at us. Too close to be true! Too far to be an illusion! Your sight stitched to your eyes. You wake up one day and find out that youre gone. The sea-emptiness is full of bounties. The bottom is waterless, the surface is waterless! A sky-bound crane, a fish struggling in its beak Examining emptiness: what youre going to find inside the guts of whos eating you No fog on the peak, no clouds above. The sky holds up a bird to
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demonstrate what flying is to a Buddha
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Upon whose Sutra we must apply our learning? As thoughts go to die whos informing us about the current comings and goings? One approaches the absolute with no-mind to ask questions, though all no-questions should be carefully lied down. Most living fish are never caught; most fishermen are catch-less. Live well, die well! Round around the corner the sucker carrying your bones to the burial doesnt even know how to spell correctly your name, so that you could go to Heaven. In the distant Hell though, Heaven is just a block away. Beads on strings, graveyard grass dew on the
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Restless thoughts go to Hell. Nothoughts go to heaven. As you are here, there is nobody like you. As you are not here there are plenty
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like you, most of them roaming the junkyard for fresh bones.
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Call the archer; let the bird know that she trespassed. Outside the words, emptiness! Inside the words, incense for parted lips. Whats that endless Zens need to quiet the sound of an ax by wrapping it in cloth? What about the woodpecker? Now that it rains the plum flower fragrance might follow the unknown track. The compassionate one travels along with it - although nobody saw him in flesh or bones The unknown truth among so many delusions You borrowed this smile from the slow motion of the snow flakes dancing above a crackling bonfire You catch a ball but emptiness escapes through your fingers Even commonplace things return to dust.
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The moon has sunk in the shallow water. Knowing that tomorrow shell come back as if nothing happened Listening to the thunder, looking at the mountainous night. If emptiness sees good and evil being equal then its own demise values less than the sound of a one hand clapping. What about the sound of clapping bred by a handless man? Emptiness galloping to nowhere? Already using no-hands on to show what no-mind is? Red tobacco leaves used to feed red pigs. When moon emerges heavy with blossoming trees and captive shadows are hovering over the shepherds hut A castrate wolf stealing a sheeps meal In the mirror that sees thus there is no reflection that could hide
401. 402.
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First, there is this thought remembering the awakening; then there is the memory of it that makes the awakening a distant happening; and finally, there is the distant happening that doesnt listen to questions and doesnt give answers. A shelved emptiness witnessing the Ones homecoming Emptiness: like some supports everything. God that
407. 408.
Neither being a vessel nor a stream Thirsty, finally stepping waterless spring over a
409. 410.
For years this pigsty bred flies. Now that the dragon swallowed the pig the flies breeding path cannot be learned. The silent perpetual thunder Anti-Zen manifesto: The blossom can rob you of your mind. Try to converse with it, keep it under the control of your senses. Remember, the grass to the sheep is the one and the same with the grass to the buffalo. Why blossom would be so different to you? Your
411.
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mind can be pulled over the edge by a breeze. Dont let the emptiness insult your reason! Enlist as an anti-Zen mercenary.
413. 414.
The beginning never began and the change was always unchanging. Asked to give up his I he resorted to We instead. Unfortunately We is neither immortal nor a living body. One has to breath, eat, and drink using his own nose/mouth. I dwells in ones body. To give up I means to let emptiness dwell in your body instead. The I becomes inner emptiness as pure as an ego of a lumber, as loose as a breeze that flickers in sync with a candle flame. Awakening: dark everywhere Nothing to be expected from a lightening flash The sturdiness of rain falls Emptiness would have taught me plenty if it wasnt for my desperation to readily recognize things that words were pointing at.
415.
416. 417.

418.
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To save people from their own faults greet them with silence. One season, one thousand phenomena; when it is warm butterflies fly; when it rains foxes hunt for a lost rabbit. The wonder of right circumstances Rain comes down like a fine powder. In the woven basket a bird looks for seeds; the stream is brown and the sky is lead-gray. Watching the suchness so peaceful while trying to reach my minds pure reflection. It is deep if I look at the stream and shallow if I go with it. Never call the emptiness by its name if youre not bent on anything but Zen. Under the monk robe you wear, theres nothing beyond the similar and there is everything beneath the different. Emptiness sees it this Way, anyway That is why dogs dont fly
419.
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How long it may take to Buddha to become human? That is one day our nameless world could hear a call and recognize it as a call from Buddha What a joy: our Buddha, the ceramic toy, playing again a role in the world comedy. Are Buddhas still looking at us? Some are looking, others are smelling incense; some are endlessly looking, others endlessly smell incense A seed turning into leaves that grow and fall: a longer fall would create a shortage of leaves meant to fall while a short fall would throw the snow flakes into a swirling puzzle A giant seed grows first as a small plant Living-on-meditation and fasting-ondesires he obscured his eyes while looking at light only. Those who dont seek anything but have their mind directed on the right path would gain liberation but not a rank in Buddhas family. Isnt it illuminating to get enlightened and then get nothing as a reward?
425.
426. 427.

429.
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So why that rain keeps falling? The pond is already full. Trying with your own bones to open an iron gate: if the crowbar cannot crow a scarecrow cannot scare off Its like using your ten fingers to count to twelve. Known as clear as a scattering mist; the ineffable yet clearly expressed truth of a tombstone; when Bodhydharma took control of the moonlight; with a thick arrow you cant miss a thin bird; with a thin arrow you cant miss a thick bird; knowing the reality of the mind and its mindless release; fierce in knowing, gentle in not knowing; the fetid emissions of a brain overwhelmed by thoughts; truth covered with merits and deeds; a handful of truths, the rest lies; a perfect circle marred by irregularities; known as clear as a faraway entrance; known as clear as a map that doesnt need guiding; like a lost ray; tonguetied when thinking, tongue-cut when talking; this urge to find a suitable
430.
431.
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truth that would be a proof of your enlightenment.
432. 433.
The knowledge of ones self denies to one - new straw sandals Questions of faith cannot be asked; answers of faith cannot be given. Fleets of koans that take whom they meet prisoner. Single flowers spin down shrouded in mystery Whats the meaning of a deed that makes a blooming tree lose its adornment? A wild ear hears wild sounds None shall be allowed to live into eternity as ones life ceases The gift of life shall grow into the gift of mind One shall paint his eyes with what one is seeing and compose his ears with what one is hearing To enter ones life is what shall be the beginning To exit ones life is what shall be the ending Mind shall look over mind as life shall look over life Life beyond life shall be permissible only if mind beyond mind
434.
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is permissible On the corridor of doubts the emptiness-bound-steps of the awakened sound empty
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The sky color is changing; the North Pole could be reached from both directions; whats the cause of these? The courtyard is clean. Buddha rests on a wet spot. Foxes howl in hunger; crows crow to carry on the message. The thought is that water was whitened by fallen blossoms. The afterthought goes from what blossom is to what blossom is not Yet, it is all the same: the west wind opening the east gate Dont overwhelm your Zazen so that youd not be forced to delay the awakening. It is right in front of your eyes; it is like seeing the seen. If it is thousand miles away it belongs to other senses. Dont forget: a sight is a measure for the distance and not vice versa. Moreover, dont forget that the sight
438.
439.
440.
441.
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conquers the distance only when it hits the perennial milestone.
443. 444.
Fake snow-flakes dont melt A conventional world is worse than a relative world. At least, if the relative world fails you it does the same to everybody I know. A conventional world though clings to the mind as a reality that everybody takes for granted. If it failed you it is that it is neither relative nor the opposite Water of the unborn rain Whos the One that the water borrows its flow from? Whos the One that the moon borrows its radiance from? Whos the One that the noise borrows its silence from? Whos the One that the echo faces before passing away? Whos the One the gives to the fire light but darkness to ashes? Whos the One that unfolds the multiples? Whos the One that gives to the blind ears to hear and to the deaf eyes to see? Whos the One that lives within the unborn? Whos the One that
445.
446.
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ordains all facts by letting things go unchecked? 447. 448. Zen circle: when the emptiness would go full cycle Clearly understanding and never resorting to understanding again The wind wafting the wings of a bird As the bird is chirping is she talking about wind and wings being in this shafting together or on the contrary the wind is using the bird as an instrument to play music? Striking a harp chord, wafting a wing? This One, never seen, never heard though it reveals itself as mind appears and vanishes as mind goes away? Indefinite wait: most blossoms fade, leaves come and go. The absolute has not a saying in this. Were it not for a relative world the universe would be filled with ice. Not easy to walk on or to hold still A skipping rope is used by commoners to imitate royal games.
449.
450.
451.
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128 r Jalesh
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One finger in the air is plenty to sense the direction of the wind Flowers in bloom: those that need identification scatter at once. How a blossom adapts to hearing its name? As they (flowers) fall unto grass are they still listening to voices? Following a bud on its lonely journey: When one says: Watch the blooming! is there a way to know when blooming is going to happen? Although, as blooming occurs, things remain unchanged forever Emptiness giving order to a shouting mouth: Go and make an echo! Caught in the minds maze like a fish in see-weed. What end will there be for an arrow aiming point blank at the weeds? There is a wide range to ones fate even when encountering the obvious. That is, one can escape an arrow but not the shadow of it A bareheaded monk on his early walk through woods
454.
455. 456.
457.

458.
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Attending to duties while ignoring how pleasant your duties are The same utterance works for unpleasant duties; although the attachments are equal theyre different Not to see the difference means that your ear cant differentiate bell sounds. If this is so, youre enlightened Light breaking through clouds when clouds are the target Thats like entrapping the answer in an unresolved question. And thats what a koan is The most telling description of a koan is that it conveys a specific meaning about awakening experience. The koan story and its resolution (wato) revolve around various aspects of awakening. In fact all koans could be classified based on certain characteristics (level of comprehension, level of realization)and the extent to which they relate to a certain type of the awakening experience either as a sudden happening (accidental) or as a necessary outcome (intuitive leap towards another level of realization). Ill give here two examples that are
459.
460.
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subject of a book on koan currently in the works: 1) Main case: On the road to Mount Taishan a monk came across an old woman who sat there in her tent waiting for a passer by to talk to and eventually to try him out. The monk would ask Which is the way to Mount Taishan? and the old woman would respond Go straight ahead! As the monk walked away the old woman would mutter A fine monk and off he goes. One of the monks told Master Zhaozhou about such encounter and Zhaozhou said: Wait till I check out the old woman for you. As Zhaozhou walked by that woman and asked her about the direction to Mount Taishan he got the same answer back: Go straight ahead! Zhaozhou came back and said to the assembled monks: I have checked out the old woman of Taishan for you. The background of this story is Mount Taishan which was a sacred place for Buddhists that believed that the mountain witnessed mystic apparitions of Bodhisattva Manjusri disguised as a golden lion, a hermit or a beggar amidst scattered rainbow-clouds and other Heaven like
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joys in bloom. Such visions were considered by Zen schools as being bigot and so inauthentic. For this reason monks have been advised not to visit the mountain though most of them disobeyed the advice in pursuit of some miracle encounter with the enlightened one. Now, what the old woman was truly (Zen) saying and what Master Zhaozhou meant by checking out the old woman? First, the general sense of the old womans answer is a direction Go straight ahead! which in relation to Zen awakening means seeing-in direct, direct vision, direct knowledge. Zhaozhou checked out about the old woman, so he was the one who recognized that the woman was enlightened. The old woman knew why the monks would make the forbidden pilgrimage to Mount Taishan and tried to warn them that the straight ahead road is the upward road of the mind not the downward road to the world of miracles and discriminations. Shed ironically strike the same line A fine monk and off he goes, whenever her directions were heard not as directions to Zen awakening. 2) Main case: Dharma Master Tokusan comes
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across an old woman selling rice cakes on the roadside. Tokusan expresses his desire to buy a rice cake but the old woman challenges him to answer a Sutra question in order to get to buy a cake. Tokusan fails to answer the question; as a result, the old woman refuses to sell him a rice cake. First part of the koan introduces the unknown participant to Zen as Master Tokusan asks the ominous Zen question: Who are you? and the old woman responds with Im an old woman selling rice cakes. Further, we realize that the woman is already aware that Tokusan was a Master and so we presume that for Master Tokusan to introduce himself as a master would have been a redundant Zen statement. Even though, for the sake of what-isknown-is-not-known reasoning, Tokusan says about himself and pointing to the bag he was carrying: Im the king of Diamond Sutra. I have penetrated all its levels of wisdom. Here are my notes! We perceive from Tokusans grandiose presentation that whatever happens next is in reference to Diamond Sutra
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text. Consequently, the old woman acts like Pythia guarding the Delphic oracle. She was going to sell a rice cake to Tokusan only on the condition that hed be able to answer a makeup Zen-question: According to Diamond Sutra the woman inquires, past mind is ungraspable, present mind is ungraspable, future mind is ungraspable. So, which mind would you like to satisfy by eating a cake? Tokusan stood there speechless and so he got deprived of a cake. Now, I agree with Dogen that the old womans behavior was cruel and that Tokusans response was incomplete with the following clarifications: That Tokusan said nothing is what Zen is at its core, for the reason that a silent, mute answer to a fundamental question is the very foundation of enlightenment. To have a dialog with an ordinary consciousness about fundamental matters is deficient to an awakened mind. On the other hand after Dogen the Master could have asked: As past mind is ungraspable, present mind is ungraspable, future mind is ungraspable, where is the mind that made the cakes? The woman could have answered No mind! and so prove that she was
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enlightened and the argument would have continued with the Master saying: Then let me buy a cake to satisfy no-mind. Tokusans attitude looks primitive for a Master, although, if we analyze the old womans saying (If you answer, Ill sell you a rice cake) we see that it implies a reward, something unacceptable in exchange to an utterance that seeks a Zen meaning (essence). Tokusan is puzzled by the situation hes forced to get into: he could have either answered the question and so trivialize its meaning or not have said a word and loose the reward (rice cake). The koan stops at the point where the mind touches an impenetrable wall. The old woman that seems more apt to ask questions than provide answers knows that the cakes are used to satisfy bodily needs, theyre wanted by ones sensual consciousness and so for her, Sutra testing, would have been interesting as long as it didnt relate the answer to a sensual endorsement. If no rice cake is given for eating, a higher consciousness should be attained. Therefore, the old womans reason
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not to sell a cake feeds the Masters want to remain the King of Diamond Sutra. The Master could also have said: Go to Hell, then! Feed your pigs with your rice cakes. At any rate, pigs are excluded from any dialog involving comprehension of Diamond Sutra. 461. And then it seemed natural for the night-blossom to change into a morning-blossom when time was right. The wood letting out its secret; the fire still keeping its secret hidden. If you want to live a timeless life youd have to cook this meal forever They came up with this idea that in principle a day that has yet to come transcends a day that has past away. But then, the day that has yet to come is known to emptiness. If emptiness would blindly let things happen nothing that happens would ever transcend what already happened before. The point is that to emptiness whatever happens must be known in
462. 463.
464.
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advance, including what is eventually missed. Now, that what is missed, would surely transcend
465. 466.
If you understood Karma, there is no ill omen Sitting in Zazen on a hard wood floor: A rubber-made rocking horse would make all the difference to a riding ass. Far beyond what wood acknowledge about a fire. may
467. 468.
It seems that the nature of a lion and the nature of a gazelle could easily merge. With a Zen eye a fox can fool a fish to jump out of a pond and lend on a patch of wild grass. With a Zen eye a fish is till in doubt about what is right and what is wrong if he does so. Thoroughly analyzed this story shows that the one who tries to catch is favored by Zen. Although, what could happen next is in the blink of an eye
469.

470.
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Not the essence that cant be explored but a potency to keep feeding the seen with forms and the heard with sounds. Awakening: The step you stumble after Your foot for the step is what an innocent is for an incoming arrow Bending your head while keeping the eyes at the same height Notes: If this is what really It is, I dont have remembrance of it. If it is remembrance you can still turn your eyes away; time seems immeasurable though nobody witnessed such thing; choosing a strategy and using it in the most direct way; after getting awakened he went to sleep and woke up in an unknown house; during the awakening celebration tongues have been extensively used to pronounce forbidden words; shooting at random at a tree in full blossom to kill the noisy partridge; a solution never satisfies a guest in search for a higher meaning; no drumbeat goes forever; an arbitrary present brings forth an arbitrary future; (Whats arbitrary? The will of those never born);
471.
472.
473.
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stepping onto the grass that reached the cliff edge; you aim you miss! Whats the point? You dont aim bulls eye! Far from where the arrow missed there was no sign of a miss at all; when the moonlight grows dark you can take a crow for a black swan; birds have made their flight a matter of fact; shield the talk by building a wall of silence; holding in your mind the word whispered by the unseen
474.
Big phenomena dwell better in wider mirrors. Cynical when dealing with phenomenal things but clothed in a straight jacket when it comes to eternal matters There is always the arithmetic that makes emptiness looking as if its being trapped by limitations. Like what number (infinite) or 0 (zero) become going forth and forthwith? Writing on a gravel with a trembling hand: ten directions in which (infinite) and 0 (zero) have been seen shining. Rollup the gravel to expose the clean ground expounding the
475.
476.
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Dharma. 0 (zero) is not equivalent with nothingness, or nothing, or none though it is not free of interpretation. (infinite) is not one and the same with everything, or all that there is or not, the all in One, though it is not free of interpretation. To seek an interpretation is like dividing by zero to get the infinite or dividing by infinite to get zero. What woks in arithmetic is a matter of conventions. Zen is above conventions and interpretations, thats why (infinite) 0 (zero).
477. 478.
When phenomena grow old they eventually vanish leaving no trace Carrying a donkey down the stream to expound Dharma. The whole load lost in the swirling water When an old thing is beyond repair you have to think that something new to replace it has to be on sail The lotus color clearly sounds like a water-bell, its fragrance runs through the nose openings like a cold breeze; gently poised the moon moves forth three knots.
479.
480.
140 r Jalesh 481.
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Beyond thinking and words there is emptiness. Although it is thought as void but not empty, when void sets in the emptiness is void. It also depends on whos attending to the origin of the world: if mind is attending, there is no void in the ten directions. If mind is not attending, voids and empty are not distinct. The formless and the countless forms are uniformly distributed in the midst of emptiness. The sound of thunder breaks by day; the dragon howl breaks by night; the sound of wind is like water flowing The land East of Mount Summeru where the moon goes to dwell. Awakening is like seeing reality stripped of whats real: a reality that does not talk to the living The trance that comes along with it seems neither ephemeral nor endless, although, as it ends it seems to be both The more you save the less you use to live on.
482.
483.
484.
485.
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Free like a barren desert: tidal dunes, rising and falling at their own will. Drown in the deep, Dharmas watchful eye Roaming the grass like a cloud roaming the sky To cows looking for grass, the inner seeking is not of use. To calves waiting to be brought forth, the outer thinking is of great use. Dropped on the hard ground, not knowing who they were? For outer seeking there is no turning back. Inner thinking would still make it difficult to a cow to graze. Anti-Zen letter: {If one practices Zen with no purpose whatsoever, just for the sake of it, neither to get personal benefits out of it nor with the thought of benefiting others, a question hangs around: do one really wants to spend his/her life moments caught up in things that might not be good enough to liberate a dog from hunting his tail? Is Zen just a mental game and nothing else? If Zen cant do any good to benefit others isnt it true that it is
487. 488.
489.
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nothing more than an ego play? One goes to a Zen temple and sees those egotistic monks planning to live another day watching their mind laboring to bring forth an awakened creature? Then what happens to ones life if one commits it to the wrong Zen way or Zen teacher? Were talking then about ones life wasted which cant even be consoled intellectually Life, ones life or the universal life is everywhere and it passes by quickly. A wrong Zen teacher might say that one misses awakening because he/she was not a right student. A dog left outside will yowl the whole night to get in. A wrong Zen teacher lets one wait outside the barrier though on the right Zen Way neither inside the barrier nor outside the barrier makes sense}.
490.
491.
Where the living Buddha used to play after finishing his 9-to-5 daily job The plum flowers brighten for a split second before they fall.

492.
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A chest filled with gold but no desire for spending. Thoughts like a flock passing overhead: as it gets nearer the crows are hammering. As it gets out of view the crows cant wake up even a grass blade. If this proves anything it is this: to prove thus one doesnt resort to logic. Answering a Zen question by using another Zen question could be sometimes illuminating. An example? Whats Zen? The answer: What is not Zen? The upper jaw of a dragon is to test the wind for snow flakes. The lower jaw helps the dragon come out of the test alive. Immortality means to a donkey what koan means to the awakened. A bifurcated road is like an arrow returning to the bow. No way one could distinguish where it went and how did it find the way back home.
493.
494.
495.
496.
497.
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Doubts are similarly - indefinite roads
499.
With what people call intuition a burglar could make night explorations blindfolded. Difficult to make sense of what the whole world would look like under a hammer. Thats not what one calls dust! A see through universe would make such a question obsolete To maximize discrimination to a point where One is not allowed to cross into the objective realm With no love in mind the breeze yields to the snow. A blue-eyed sky, a blue-eyed lake The moonlight cant go through and the snow-fall weights heavily. This is the secret of sages: if theft is going to proceed - the weight of things dont matter. Foxes are assembling to hunt the moonlight The trees have roots; the birds have wings; why all these forms would be empty? Like a pigeon between the
500.
501.
502.
503.
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claws of a falcon, like a log thrown in a fire
504.
Notes: Being-as-is has major drawbacks: what is as-is today can be harshly different tomorrow. That is as-is is relative; also as-is will be always as-is and this is what can be taught-and-learned about absolute. A flower doesnt exhale the same fragrance, its smell is fluid; the sound is fluid also. As far as the fluidity of a reflection you could talk to the chameleon-mirror about it. Changing lights with shadows, trapping butterflies trying to reach the other side beyond the undisclosed mirroring surface. And then, of course there is the echo and the fragrance vanishing as it ascends. Thats all that could be said about attachment. Detachment is all of the above if negated. As people awaken they may feel that neither aspect whatsoever is true. The question may still remain about who created the as-is and who maintains it. There are lots of spokesmen one can meet on the road, none of them though can turn speech into a mirror or conduct their lessons without saying a word. Spring birds bath in
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melted-snow-ponds. Autumn birds hide from the thin drizzle; a lone bird on a solitary branch, gazing, chirping; Buddha walking the path, on his own
505.
Census: As river recedes fish come out of existence. As river overflows fish jumps out of the water to be counted. An old speech is teasing a reality that looks like old ashes. Do the narrow streets of the city still remember the departed? As-is deceives us the same way it did long time ago? At times what changes stays the same; at other times whats the same changes. Understanding time but living above events The ruler of this land was never seen. The hired servants of this land never came out alive. Instinct feeds the jaws of the ferocious tiger, thats what the monkeys cry about. The intuition puts all these in perspective.
506.
507.
508.
509.

510. 511.
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Climbing on a pine tree the poor squirrel touched the thunderbolt Rain filtered through a leafless tree: one tree and still ten thousand wet threads. As the rain stops the sun shines through ten thousand pearl drops; what is the basis of order? Sorting out things that no one could touch The departed spirit of a stone. Questioning the legitimacy of Buddha is like hanging from a high cliff without any worries of the outcome. You had never seen a precipice then. The wrong side of your mouth says: Yea! Another scarecrow. Some had been already decorated for merits. Wait until crows come into view! When truth appears it is unexpected. It delivers mind from what is expected Cut off your ears when you hear it, take out your eyes as you see it. The moonlight mirrors every ray of sunlight as it emerges
512.
513.
514.
515.
148 r Jalesh 516.

517.
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Phenomena suddenly come into sight, holding their flag into the air. As long as I feel pain I know that Im still alive and well. No matter how long it might take, Im not going to die before it is meant to happen. Feelings, led away to suffer, sufferings led away to be felt! Notes: Like a bee hive emptied of wasps; water edge without a shadow; seeing with the eyes of the other; the unseen gap; from the sight of nothing on the road to nowhere; simple sell no trace of smelling; the tongue wed have to use for talking chasing words; often the words look like saying nothing; silence is obedient to sound; tailless bulls enlightening unresolved koans; no footprint in the sand, no fingerprints on the rock; hermetic touch; living with the aim of learning, learning with the aim of living; immeasurable interpretation; innocence is a source of mistakes; shying sight shedding shadows; a season comes from the waiting; whispering solitude; sandaled with
518.
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mud; a subject with residual objectivity; the far point in the middle of nowhere; no comments; moving on a circle with no ending in sight; the staring sight of a square corner; wipe out the sound, listen to the unmarked silence-field; invoke the chant of homecoming; sounding like pee drops in a puddle; fishermen waiting for fish to bite; sound resounds and then gets entombed; I wish I could send my mind home along with my nomind; timeless sights gazing at each other Im still that child that emptied a bucket of icy water to separate stray dogs from fighting; Nomind trying to get mind: mind trying to get no-mind. 519. 520. Living one more time a remembered moment of pain The door that let you get in may not be fit to let you out Every day, clothed in the last cloth, eating the last meal The uncreated good meets the uncreated bad. Like pure water in a
521.
522.
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rusting bucket, like a snow flake on a cherry bud.
523.
To penetrate the truth of one hundred thousand eons of manifestation and yet not to be able to fly: a fish flying out of deep water becomes bird; a bird plunging deep into the water doesnt become a fish. In this forest all ponds, grass, trees, creatures and ghosts are empty. When a phenomenon is undone the emptiness casts an eye for a quick check: zooming and then fading away. Dumping emptiness: dare to look at this original face! It is so sad; it is so pity; the brilliant pearl seen on the bottom of the pond was a shining penny. To see the sun shining youd have to let the clouds pass. Once the expectation is silenced, the search should proceed one thousand feet deeper.
524.
525.
526. 527.

528. 529.
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To recall a thought that no mirror could hide. The plum flower fragrance didnt change a bit for the last thousand years The fiery dragon ate the lake: it is now a cloud, raining somewhere. Each summer the fish weep, the ducks follow the black path to the river Knowing that gold is shadow for iron. Where gold has no worth and no one knocks at the opened gate. When mind starves Buddha nods to thoughts as theyre coming and going: no thoughts though get in. On a fundamental ground words howl, thoughts are like decoys used to catch sound with no tongue in it or content with beyond words in it. The black fish stirring the black pond, making black waves. Like a screwdriver through a Suisse cheese hole: penetrating the gate with
530.
531.
532. 533.
534. 535.
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full force and meeting no opposing resistance.
536.
The living words fall in live traps. The dead words are singing out but nobody is listening, not even the dogs waiting for a human voice that may say bone by chance. Then, there is the doorbell Too thin, the essence might contain just what would never perish: a white shell holding white bones inside Notes: Disregard the knowing and also disregard the not-knowing; what are you telling to your mind if your mind inquires about dharma? Not using old words and not inventing new ones; your body hands the secret of life to your mind; dropping scriptural words from the answer; is your mind following your body movements or it creates them? Whos leading, whos following? If body stays still why mind is still moving? Harmonizing body-mind movements; harmonizing body-mind stillness; when body is subject of thought if the body was dropped what is the
537.
538.
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mental content? Mind: empty but resistant, air-like but durable; Body, as a mental prisoner? When mind attains liberation body is surpassed; is the mind also surpassed? When body attains liberation mind is surpassed; what is that time when body attains liberation? What is a genuine body, a genuine mind, a genuine life? Should one send thoughts into exile to call whats left a genuine mind? Dropping body and mind and walking on your knees the realm of untainted life; body feeding mind with attachments; what mind inherits from body is stagnation; motion turned into stillness with no stagnation going through; trying to see stillness in what is not standing still; things unsoiled by words; passing the word back to the original thing; mind still discarding words; the realm of the unknown blooms; when there is no remembering or resemblance mind has nothing to hold onto; when looked upon a thing is seen; a seeing thing fleets the real knowledge realm; peering with a Zen eye and seeing nothing; stepping inward; the chamber of an enlightened mind has no furniture; the arrow pierced through the drum
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resonance settled down; I never had known this silence before; in cool rains falling leaves are already fallen; white lightening adorns the barren branches; no leaves on the water surface: you could see with each thunder the swarm of fishes as they disperse.
539.
Zen students are not allowed to ask their Master about his whereabouts. Above the rain-beaten forest, a rainbow! One may think that the rainbow is a consequence other may think that it is a cause Beyond cause and effect, a rainbow is a rainbow A denial of awakening reaches as far as emptiness does. Going to live in a mountain village, seeking fairer minds to do Zen with. When here becomes remote its mystery grows. (Violent Zen lessons to be avoided) The teacher says: You had your own insight (sic!), for the insight, if felt,
540.
541.
542.
543.
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cant be possessed by one and owned by the other. It should have been expressed as You had an insight. The student responds: I looked everywhere to see where my own insight was and I couldnt find it. The teacher retorts: If it doesnt stand, it floats, if it doesnt float it roams the beyond the beyond. The student quietly stares at the teacher for a while then gives him a powerful punch between his eyes. The teacher says: I see 544. Total awareness transcends the thousand realms: would you be able then to contain the real world within? To pass to an ear a word whose meaning you never understood, as an enlightenment key, is like poisoning the tea that you serve to your ailing teacher. Analogous is if you hit a bamboo stick with a stone, again and again, hoping that as the story says youd get enlightened by the sound A cat and a mouse finding together what a true nature means.
545.
546.
156 r Jalesh
547.
Pete
If it is there youd see it and understand. If it is not there youd not see it and not understand. A Zen assertion would be: If it is not there even if you dont see it youd understand. Thousand minds thrashing thousand sorrows: what an elegant way to mourn in silence. So many thousand years of doubt: one might think that those who got awakened were never really awakened but they died in peace with themselves by thinking that they were; and those who did not get awakened had been conned into believing that awakening is a real stuff so that they had to die a bitter death. The truth is that due to the universal changes the awakening is defined by what is the state of universe right now. If you bow to the real aspects of the emptiness youd be let to pass. If you resist it then you might loose your eyes and ears before seeing Buddhas face. And even then, listening to a distant yesterday will make you go astray
548.
549.
The little blue book on Zen 550. 551.
157
A well tuned sound that ear doesnt hear. Over nature and Buddhas, the supreme vehicle of the emptiness: no mouth to swallow (it), no entrails to process (it), no ass to let (it) go. In the sweet mist of the rotten grass, the first snowflake spinning upward: neither to be gathered, nor to be caught in a silver bowl. If you see thus theres nobody to confirm it. What thus is? is a question asked by the living whole. Remember though that, as your legs walk into a river, two legs at a time, and then again two legs at a time Thus is inseparable from this. You might say: two legs empty the river of this and deprive it of thus. Then how one could see thus if one really cares? When you look at it, it is as is. The transcendental aspect of it thus penetrates your bones. Its neither nearer nor further, neither revealed nor hidden, neither deep nor shallow: what is this when it turns into clear emptiness? Thus.
552.
158 r Jalesh
553.
Pete
The wave that keeps moving after reaching the shore: blue mist on a hill top Thoughts dropping; clear mind at the ascent Use reality as the interpreter and the thought as the middleman whos trying to sell you what you already owe. Now, what you dont owe is right in front of you, toes to head, quite remarkable resembling a way of seeing things if eyes were not involved. A flying bird on a cloudy sky: shooting straight with a bent arrow. That the sky gets lighted or it gets darkened is a matter of a false perception: to be in tears every morning and to laugh aloud every evening is a matter of insincere living. Listening to nightingales: hot in the cool air, cool in the hot air. Yet, the song seems truthful to the world of phenomena.
554. 555.
556.
557.
558.

560.
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Drinking emptiness: dare to look at this original face! The Way for an octopus is eight times longer than the Way of a dragon. Devouring the emptiness: who is dazzling fire, who is frosty spreading snow? Like the summer waves getting sucked by a dry beach sand Between octopus and dragon just eight capping phrases, each on a bright step toward darkness. (As long as the chain is not broken it is irreparable). Grass under ones feet, grass on top of ones body The native nature has deeper roots than the true nature. Although a true nature can uproot mountains Thats Zen: silent in meditation, hissing like a hurricane while dismantling thoughts from phenomena As the native nature withdraws Suchness is up-to-the-minute, though there is no secret passage to see it. As the reality unfurls, the perception of it (and the knowledge of it, etc. all banned by the intuitions journey
561. 562.
563.
160 r Jalesh
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within suchness) unfurls also, as much as it seems fit. The gentle breeze is neither a seer nor a blind.
564. 565.
A swarm of fireflies above a raging fire: around, the darkening unknown. If self is turned onto its head it may look like One. Otherwise it has to give way to thousand negations, like fall does in each falling leaf. How would you hear this with ears that never heard a word before? If you turn around and leave youre utterly free. Once outside there is nothing to listen to though you may face a stranger asking you where Buddha lives. Give him a real address. If his mind is clear hed understand. If you know the address he might also know it. Inner loss, outer gain; outer loss, outer gain Poor and old though having the privilege to be awaken every morning by the howl of the crowned dragon
566.
567.
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Buddhas voice cannot be heard; deaf people are equally discouraged to look into this matter. Try to make rights and wrongs from the past starve to death. What a stench! You cant distinguish which is which though there is no one watching your appraisals. What a mirror contains, the mirror discards. You cannot keep the image there once it is gone. The bird that already learned what flight is acts! Otherwise the flight acts upon her. Blooms come and go; leaves come and go; snows come and go. As events sail away mind waves farewell. As they come mind waves welcome. Though the mind is free not to act as it acts it conceals the reason. No doubt, seeing the things right gives one the illusion of will. Those who scratch the surface might know that there is one truth and one truth only, and that this truth doesnt have a replica in reality. And, if this truth is right before your eyes and ears, why it is neither this, nor this? One day I
569.
570.
571.
162 r Jalesh
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was trying to tell to my students what a blue sky was and as we got practical clouds began to overcast the sky. It could never be seen if covered, I said.
572.
Are you Buddha? Yes, Im Buddha. Then, whos Buddha? Is the reflection of emptiness an empty image? It depends where the reflection is and where you look for the reflection. The mind mirror would be more appropriate. When the mind is clear the reflection is not to be seen. When the mind is foggy the image is foggy: how much you see then is equal to how much you know about. You must realize that things that you never touched before with your mind are never going to be remembered. With one exception, which is a consequence of what was said before: if you got to see it, as you see its reflection your mind could get shattered in thousand fragments of things? One thousand years tall, though only one day old only!
573.
574.

575.
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Despite the mud the lotus flower doesnt think that purity is of any merit to itself. Same does the white smoke rising from a pile of burning shit. A rice stem that blossoms at spring is one door step away from a meal. The mist following a short summer rain: its name is unpronounceable, its description is unprintable. If you know what is all about Im not going to ask you how you found out. Some ignorant might think that this is a mock statement. Chirping birds exchanging stories Not even this could grow into a full moon. If it could it would have to exhibit river-bound-lights and tidal reflex. Naturally moving around without leaving any trace. Becoming without knowing, passing away without remorse. Painting light in the morning and darkness at night.
576. 577.
578. 579.
580.
581.
164 r Jalesh 582.
Pete
If you smell it, you loose your nose. If you hear it you loose your ears. A blind one who doesnt know what seeing is could see it as a triumphant sunlight, thousand times brighter than the sense of light. Fierce in nonappearance, gentle when blossoming Notes: A well tuned drum emanates no sound; mirrors reflect: what they reflect is beyond blindness, what they dont reflect is beyond the seen; think emptiness as if it was your tomb before you got thrown into it; your newly found perfection gets refreshed every day; low ankles, high wrists; a sudden leap out; a blanket one mile long and no body to recall under; oranges and apples become equal on the lips of a withered body; a slave dying for freedom: is this home coming or home leaving? Life is horizontal, death is vertical; from looking to seeing a sea of nameless resemblances; frosty instincts: shooting empty birds with icy pellets; he got awakened - although his hands kept searching for the moon in the
583.
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water; bring a net when you chase the moon; deprived of taste, yet shining; thousand elementary particles value less than one penny; emptiness in its manifestation; a bowl of incense overturning Buddhas nose; Ive been conned into calling Buddha though this smell travels beyond him and comes back as an old Bodhy tree; summoned by Buddha; if you want to get a seat next to me you must first die, he said; the prayer to grace him life, killed him; the burden of ones birth; unknown lived before being known; it is why knowing is called guilt? An awakening- secret knowing dies in silence, a common knowledge dies in a hale of casual talk; male words and female words, nesting; from words slit open to fruits that one takes aim at.
584.
Dragons howling at the ghost of the awakened: Theyre called the howls of death! although life is not just a hidden presence When mind opens a mouth to say something the thoughts fall like autumn leaves. When mind refrains from opening a mouth thoughts enter
585.
166 r Jalesh
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the secret oven becoming ashes. Neither based on words nor on suppressed judgments Neither created for the mind nor absorbed by the mind Words are prisons for the one in the many
586.
At autumn time leaves hung around in the air for days Zazen stretched to the point where there is no time left for living. Whos fault is this and how the damage could be compensated? Compulsive Zazen generates compulsive awakening? Know what you want before getting too much of what you never asked for A golden bird meets a lead arrow. Questions have a weight that an answer should pay for. The fragrance of a plum tree flowers comes from its roots. There is no deeper communion between emptiness and reality than the one that a fragrance projects. If emptiness were the true architect of reality it
587.
588.
589.
590.
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would be also the place where this stuff would be discarded. Unfortunately other creators came to claim their copyright for fragrance: Is there a simple fountain that could quench the thirst of all? one might ask. 591. The dog is bound to his doghouse Anti-Zen Letter: If you ask it does no good. If you get the answer it does no good. Though, there was never like light goes against light and dark goes against dark, opposites included. You take a shot - it is thus! You take another shot - it is thus also. Is it so difficult to see this as thus? What would mean that this and thus are equivalent? Each flower is dressed in a different color; each drop of water has its own sound So do the seasons Both, this and thus are there As Zen tries to suggest, do really flocks never migrate and plum flowers never snow? The awakening makes this standoff likely to ensue. Freezing the world in a flash makes things and events cease to be reality. If one looks ahead there is that canvas too-soon-to-be-painted. If one looks
592.
168 r Jalesh
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back there is this unmovable mountain, standing still. Though, in any event the present shows a clear picture of reality, with all those pristine plum blossoms and all those untainted reeds as being part of it; why this clarity would have to be defended against Zen? What is the wisdom of those wicked needletopped flag poles, those wretched meditation koans all shadows, all devouring dragons, all shrunkendwarfed pretenses meant to say that wisdom built on thoughts is far from the truth and that what we call understanding is an appearance and so a lie??
593. 594.
The golden lion broke the chains Ashes have eyes, dead trees blossom inwardly Transcending this is like going back to what one calls life. Like a baby bird before breaking the egg shell. One would still have to resolve this koan before getting free. The iron doors are rusty. Either you slam them to hear the sound or you close them carefully watching for
595.
169
your fingers. The doors inner view is that it is closing. The doors outer view is that a finger might trouble the closing. How emptiness is choosing the time and place of such an event? All the doors are either open or close, and this seems simple. To make the door move one has to apply his strength on the open (or close) door. What the fingers see? Just bare iron plates that lead nowhere. Then the noise that usually comes with a slam is not there. And then there is this precise movement, an inch increment at a time, while the door creaks. Why we explain all these here? To show how perfect every rational event is: no incomprehensible emptiness, though as one looks at it, the emptiness looks back at ones eyes. If this world is empty the only thing that is not empty is the way we think of it. 596. 597. Wait in the shadow to see the light Clouds and their droppings freed from any course of action, freed from time and space. The winter wind is blowing; the fire burning in oven is meant to bake bread. There are many kinds of bread
598.
170 r Jalesh
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but only one could help the inner thought get to know the truth. The rest will be eaten
599.
The diamond shines inward When the transmission occurs between sages none of the sages can carve in words what is transmitted and what is left out-of-the-Way. The indifferent emptiness above and below, where it fits when a transmission occurs? When a terrible death occurs a terrible birth follows: the ceremony of transmission is where these events take place unnoticed. Transmission is a desperate gesture of survival, a hopeless exchange of unfulfilled penetrations and mind entertained disillusionment. One of the sages carries a bag full of fundamental meanings while he is still searching the matter of the ultimate fundamental consequence that he would never be able to attend as his life approaches its end. If a sage is lucky to recognize someone who by chance went beyond his own realization he ordains that body-monk to carry on
600.
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disillusionment. Is this transmission a recognition of attainment or a handin-hand recognition that the ultimate attainment (the one that had never been realized by any Buddha, the unattainable, what is beyond the attainable and what is beyond what is non-attainable, the unknowable secret that shall not be discovered and that will never be possibly uttered, the untold and unfathomable fundamental meaning of all) is still worthy to search for? Although if the ultimate truth is going to stay for ever hidden what is the purpose to search for it? Is Zen a hopeless practice that produces hopeless results? And for the record, what the ultimate attainment should unveil? The diamond shines inward
601.
Water falling, flowers falling, leaves falling: as you snap your fingers they stop falling. From movement to stillness a hair-thin line. All things receive their state from the same binding: fish swim in clouds, flowers are singing opinio dei. Lightening opens the gates of light Knowing precisely what Buddha is and yet not being able to see it.
602.
172 r Jalesh 603.
Pete
When the eyes rest the half-hidden side of the emptiness comes into view. Are the eyelids taking part in this story? Theyre not tied to it. Like clouds that free the lightening? (In Zen lightening occurs with no clouds to be seen. Although, with the thunder the story could be differently thought though expressed in the same way) Afar in Heavens unfathomable. the sound is
604. 605.
Who said that detachment is a way too long to witness? Or that attachment is a too slippery way to call it life? The sole witness to awakening is locked between a tiger jaws If beyond attainment is nonattainment and beyond knowing is non-knowing how do we reconcile these Zen sayings with our everyday thinking? What is everyday thinking? Lets state that one could say about himself: Im alive. Facts, happenings, things and concepts fill
606. 607.
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up ones everyday living. They pass by with a nod of his head or they get recorded on a thread of events that need to be resolved and classified. Some ask for future review others are discarded. During such a day there is no interest whatsoever in what the ultimate truth is. Though, such interest appears if one practices Zazen and inquires about what this ultimate truth is. This is not a passive endeavor that would ask one to wait until such a thing appears. It is an active search for it; a vigorous and dynamic investigation into what is it? Although, if what is beyond the ultimate truth is not knowing what knowing could say about not knowing? Also, if non-attainment is beyond attainment what the attainment could say about non attainment? One practices Zazen, one meditates, with every day one feels being dragged towards some unknown territory of the mind where this ultimate truth might dwell. Nothing happens until one sees the awakening as it happens. Then as one tries to go beyond what awakening is one finds out that beyond awakening there is non-awakening, which is not not-being-awakened or not-
174 r Jalesh
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attaining, the same way as nonknowing is not not-knowing. Then in retrospect one understands that what awakening reveals is carried out by non-awakening, and what becomes known as the ultimate truth is so clearly displayed by the everyday truth. Open your eyes; dont look for meanings but concentrate to see that things are as they are.
608.
If it emerges from the fundamental it doesnt have inner or outer nature. In the clear the original face annihilates the original mind. To transcend a transcendental experience and get to see the transcendental in words of its own: invariably known in the unknown. Throwing words outward, gathering thoughts inward Tongues talking as if theyre alive. Leaves and flowers seem living in agreement with hills and rivers. One inch above ground Heaven meets Heaven. The permanent things rest at the bottom of the impermanent ones.
609.
610.

612.
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It had stripped his brain bare but couldnt find his mind A: The same emptiness creates both the ugly and the beautiful. B: They both spread Dharma. Every day, flour turns into bread and the wet dries up and the sun fades away. Building silence so deep that it awakens the dead! A single note descends from the sky, the rain that keeps howling among the barren trees: whos watching all these happenings? Or, who says come and then go to them all? We must not use words when answering Sweat is clearer than the spring water when the emotion that created it is sincere. When the eye sees form and also when the eye turns its direction of consciousness towards exploring knowing and non knowing the ultimate truth declines to appear either in the vicinity of what mind knows or in the far point of the unknown where non knowing dwells. The truth of the matter not answered above is that one whos ready to see
613.
614.
176 r Jalesh
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beyond thus needs some kind of enlightenment to interpret, some beyond-answer to use as confirmation of This is it! eye-opener, while such a confirmation is neither possible nor is it the right confirmation if it is recognized as one. Simply put, when such a search takes place and when there is some graceful response to it, one is alone, so much alone that one might accept in desperation the company of a death moth as the witness of it. After this happens whos going to answer further queries? A leaf in its autumn sleep, a snow flake before drowning into the clear water
615.
Until the koan emits light and fragrance, the rice prepared yesterday shall invite innumerable guests Beyond the boundaries where bones get cleaned by eagles Zen mumbo-jumbo: Knowing things as they were but doing them differently like instead of eating supper youd just eat supper or instead of going to bed youd just go
616.
617.
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to bed? If this is you, youd never get enlightened. If this is not you youd certainly become enlightened To get very enlightened youd just need to eat well and sleep well. 618. With a white chock painting a landscape on white paper Thats what the real world is: an unknown inner form drawn on an outer immaculate canvas. You wouldnt happen to know where Buddha dwells? Jaws to masticate general food end up asking the tongue to suck the teeth for some leftover taste of particulars. Error in the truth is what truth is in the error. The mysterious auditor laughs: Im not going to debate this The white-pear trees sprout white flowers, the yellow-pear trees sprout white flowers, and the purple plumtrees sprout white flowers. A mind can withhold the truth better than a mouth does. They burned trees and got ashes; the burned ashes and got trees.
619.
620.
621.
622.
178 r Jalesh
623.
Pete
Knowing where things are helps an awakened find his way to bed. Things look better when theyre not present. A tiger with frog feet would be at the disadvantage to a frog with tiger feet. But then, a lotus leaf would change a pond for the ocean and the jungle would burst up all hiding places. What precisely a mind can do to acquire grace? No picking, no choosing is a rule that it already follows. But grace doesnt have definite rules. Grace is like aura around ones head. Pure state is what mind needs, while walking awake or walking in a dream. No more judging things while you still breathe, no more hammering the thoughts out while you dont. Remember that things that are endless, infinite and eternal hatch questions but not answers, and that mind, hindered or not, dwells where meanings dwell and in its quest it
624. 625.
626.
627.
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never looks for answers that could be available after its demise Some things in life are insolvent; others have solutions in the clasp of one hand. Who wouldnt like to look further than that? Who wouldnt dare to look beyond? If beyond is within ones mind one would have somehow to know it. If beyond is outside ones mind there is no way one could realize it through a living body-andmind. Thats when one is going to look for a miracle answer. Whos going to guide ones mind to get in the proximity of it? Buddha! But remember: Buddha is not mindconsciousness and delusion is part of a higher logic. 628. The Master Bird: Catching a fish in flight without touching the water surface In the wake of the dawn the primeval boat Old bones turning into jade One thousand guests but only one wardrobe
629. 630.
631.
180 r Jalesh
632.
Pete
The tea in a guests cup is sweeter than the tea in the hosts cup. A fly in flight is a redundant fact; not against the claws of a cat Not against the teeth of a spider. When a word expresses one thousand things at the same time a Buddha has a loud laugh while another Buddha cries hard The endless meaning is the end of the meaning. The clouded eyes of a three feet ten inches sheep cant stop a one leg wolf to transgress. Heaven and Earth eating lunch at the same table? Together, as they accept their fate, there is neither brevity nor fear. As the restrained sheep stands still the lawless shadow deepens its claws and teeth into her skin An unexpected Zen proverb from Bavaria: A mouth gives to a shout what a hole of an ass gives to a loud fart. Thats why Germans when they socialize talk in a whisper Quite farts are smellless.
633.
634.
635.
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First, the eye sees the thunderbolt, and then the ears hear the thunder. The smell of gun powder comes with the first drop of rain. In the midst of life, the edge of the other realm. The indefinite shadow of emptiness that makes water what water is. You cant see it in the mind realm, though it is a mind creation. In the nomind realm pure clarity not even a crystal flake can pass through Things that melt freeze; things that multiply can be counted. The secret of the mind is unknown. Although it doesnt have a trace, it records facts and events in words. Thoughts are just the arrows used to penetrate the unknown. One reason is the price it pays to be left to watch the ultimate unfolding At inception, fact looks for an opening; after the fact the opening can hardly be closed.
637. 638.
639.
640.
641.
182 r Jalesh 642.
Pete
When the mind wakes up it puts in the right place almost everything. Leaves are again painted in green and the old lady selling raspberry on the side of the road is smiling. The reasoning looses its stream in a flash. Now that the ocean moved back to its old shoreline its time to repaint the bridge over the old pond. But the pond-lilies would have to be left to come back on their own will White smoke mixed with white fog, streams of milky water Facts lined up in rows, ready to be discarded. One says: Though they never cease to appear they all come to an end. The dead pink rabbit answers: Back to their origin they thought theyre eternal. Like snow flakes circling a log on fire. An iron fan to keep the thoughts out
643.
644.
645.
646.
647.

648. 649. 650. 651.
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A pool of beautiful appearances but no essence to be found anywhere. Rabbit-ridden wolfs consciousness Enlightenment: Cut off the parachute and jump out Shall match! Even now He treated his thoughts badly as if they were his enemies. One day they left. To resurrect a living mind youd have to kill it first. Zen adepts talk about being in the process of doing it but nobody knows how! And Mu began to throw stones onto the onlookers... To a Zen adept to watch thoughts struggle with asserting or denying is not desirable. Though, even the best families live through undesirable moments behind close doors. The point is that thoughts are thoughts. The dead ones are thrown in the old well; the new ones are wandering over the green pastures! Detach yourself from the evidence they carry and from falsity that they project: thought should be like a drop of dew bouncing on the water surface Any un-natural efforts to
652.
184 r Jalesh
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penetrate this path could be treacherous Let thoughts hung around, enjoy their laughter, and be compassionate to their crying The natural path to Heaven is to let thoughts live with you as long as you live If what It is is what there is, there is nothing left for a mind to discover
653.
So superfluous to let your mind use concepts to explain what blooming is. Bathed in petals a dead butterfly says it all. The defoliated light of a sitting sun Those mind-games we used when playing hide-and-seek with our childhood. Keep your mind there until your thinking comes clean. The moon never changes while changing its appearances; the sun doesnt know what the other face of the moon is. A bird chirping about the Way Before the mind ran through it all The kiss of the guest as opposed to the kiss of the host! Both accounts
654.
655.
656. 657.
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thrown in the original fire: it all comes from ashes and goes to ashes There is not much there one can teach 658. The emptiness without phenomena would look like a priest without a pulpit. Youre not getting the truth as long as you stick to your knowledge. To understand this principle youd have first to get some knowledge so that you could not stick to it. Otherwise the truth of honey would look to your mind identical to the truth of salt. Surrounded by enemy troops: no moves allowed, no talking allowed. Not even a shout like Help! Help! Trapping emptiness in a ten cubic inches wonder cube. Shadows rising out of moonlight, lights rising out of the darkening wind Shaking mind to look at no-mind. Mind-no-mind coin cant be seen. You flip it on one face you lose;
659.
660.
661. 662.
663.
186 r Jalesh
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you flip it on the other face loose. No-mind is still mind! Buddha is still Buddha. Cutting woods with a non-Zen hatchet get you nowhere. you No Zen will
664.
When there is no trace of phenomena, mind gets lost. An open mouth on the border of saying-no saying words! Pair them together if you dont know what to say. Names for departed boats, no names for those that reached the coast. Trees bow, waters lock their waves, hills flee the mountain shadows, and whirlwinds come full circle Away from standing, the awakened struggle to sit Trash shining like a pile of pearls. Fundamental meaning: You banished it and discovered that it didnt go away. You summon it it doesnt come by. To kill a lion with a fly whisk
665.
666. 667.
668.
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Knowing no words she spoke freely using things and events as decoys. As her tongue rested her mind looked like a beaten rag draping the windows of a poor house. Flies danced in the hot layer of air above the villages main sewer. Fooling around with a daisy for reasons that went to waste: Let me know, dont let me know, let me know, dont let me know Zen-Mosquito: Buzzing happily at a Zazen-doing-ear. Mind breathing in and out. On the brink of no-minding breathing in breathing out. Inwardly emptied of the outside world, outwardly as seen by the moon passing through the clearing. Notes: If emptiness is everything that is outside, self is whatever is inside. When ones mind impulses cease to create thinking the cat gets intimate with the mouse and the scattered flowers freeze into the air. Its like breathing in and out at the same time, like walking a landscape in which you readily can separate the objects as those that rot as opposed to those that
670. 671.
672.
188 r Jalesh
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transcend, as in the planning of the beginning of all, the radiant darkness, clapping talons rather than clapping hands, birds that line up quite still on a high voltage wire waiting for snow, the must feel needed by the living to feel alive, down to earth though not downer, rising to reach heaven and missing it by an inch, the indefinite outer, the indefinite inner.
673.
The unseen uses drums; the unheard uses flashes. So far the sun comes back every morning following the roosters song. For emptiness, things seem equal, that is, if roosters would all get extinct the sun will still come in time. If sun will ever get extinct, the rooster will still sing the morning anthem. Seeking, seeking, seeking but never reaching the truth Universal chaos in a gentle breeze. Telling stories of things that never existed while burying real stories alive? Is it true that if one Buddha starts a fire one thousand Buddhas
674.
675.
676.
189
cannot extinguish it? I mean, fanning a fire to help it get strength and then fanning yourself to relive the heat is a reality of life. Zen is just like jumping into a flame, like a stupid moth does, and pretending that youre still alive after you get burned to ashes. 677. 678. On the mountain peak a gust of wind. Together they are like question and answer. Apart its up to Karma to decide. The innocent side will live. The guilty side would be left to die. Thats a story about a gardener that faces the task to hatch the overgrown rose bushes in order to make room for the incoming sheep. Stars bounce gently in the universal void. One day you may wake up to a great awakening: remember that moment is going to be too short to challenge your reason but long enough to wipe out your mind. Seen remains as is even in shortsightedness; sounds resonate beyond a deep ear.
679.
680.
681.
190 r Jalesh
682.
Pete
Koans like an upside down tortoise on which weeds and lianas sprout at ease. Phenomena, lined up, in waiting Wrong approach to Zen: Burning koans inward while peering outward for solutions. I dont know what thousand seasons would mean to a leaf. To the distant original face, what one sees is colorless and what one hears is soundless. This whole-some looks like a reduced reflection of the multicolor suchness. When seen and seeing get resolved The memory of what a morning is will make the sun rise; the memory of what a night is will make the moon rise. The ultimate truth is not into the timeless nature but in a timely one: sun among strands of clouds, evaporating The moon responding
683.
684.
685.
686.
687.
688.
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in tune The memories making all the happenings happen 689. 690. The golden lion passing through the hole of a needle Cloth left out to dry on a winter day: the soot would undo the cleaning so that the cloth could be washed one more time. Emptiness born clouds? Looking up wolves howl obscenities What a nerve to say that after getting awakened there is still a final revelation waiting to be revealed. Obviously, there are thousand of other revelations and none is final. What this statement tries to do is to convince you to pursue the illusion that the awakening conveys until you die. After you spontaneously got there and asked yourself This is it? Thats all? you should know that There is still a final revelation to be revealed. This reminds you that until you see the final revelation youre not yet done with the awakening. Then of course, there are an infinite number of stages in each awakening level and so
691.
692.
192 r Jalesh
Pete
on and so forth. It would be nice and economical to know of one awakening that would exhaust all other possible awakenings and to pursue that one your whole life. If you were a monk, and I suppose you are one or you tend to become one, things would have to be expressed differently: awakening is just a drop of rain in an infinite ocean; in this respect even one hundred thousand awakenings would never suffice! Revelations would pile up, yea! and grow upward like a frozen mountain, every thing - small or big would become sacred, the poverty stricken Buddhas would appear in front of your eyes asking for guidance, no creature would ever cross your path without bowing, (they better not glance in the direction of your walk), the incessant moonlight would direct your feet, things would draw near though theyd come from the infinite afar, the cosmic drums would suddenly empty their celestial sound, youd enunciate the laws of the universe so clear of the outcome though not as clear as those that are meant to guide the mortals things
193
not known and never born before would come to ask to be recognized by you, and youll be pronounced God. Despite the fact that youd never tolerate calls to be uttered and no spoken word would be allowed to reach you in that ultimate encounter with the truth youd have to give to all of them a compassionate response that may engage words of love. To get there as a monk youd have to spend eons in Zazen, while eating rice and drinking wine. If you were not a monk, and I suppose youre not one, youd have to notice that although calls and spoken words are commonly used and the deceived mind submits itself to understanding, the ten directions of the Vast Heaven reach the same snowflake with a random arrow. 693. 694. For the Way to live a Buddha must die When a moment arrives a one thousand wheels of fate turn to the ascent When youre passive thinking emptiness opens active inroads. Dont
695.
194 r Jalesh
Pete
rush! It will tell you to walk when youre ready.
696.
Mind will let you know when you get there Emptiness in its manifestation: sorted out as phenomena-in, phenomena-out. Its up to the mind to see it and to the tongue to abstain from talking about. When a moment leaves a one thousand wheels of fate spin on a downward slope A flower doesnt mock another flower. The cow-dungs eye: looks at the cows behind as the cow is leaving. There is no way one can have a handle on what the other is. Like a thread that never saw the pearls it has to go through. Hearing this and getting enlightened by what was missed in the saying
697.
698.
699.
700.
701. 702.

703.
195
In a foreign pond a frog hesitates to commit herself to a lotus leaf if she feels that things are not going to be permanent. Sound lost among its own echoes (like a spear lost among its shadows). A bouncing ball is not bound to the ground or the intention of the thrower If it was, it should have had an eye and wings A fish can outsmart a fox as long as it doesnt fly out of the water. The moonlight that appeared inside the hut was a leftover of the last appearance of the ancient moon that is nowadays remembered only in the dreams of the awakened and the dying. The future is already here when the present appears. If you take your eyes off of time there is no smoke coming out, no fire burning inside. The time transcends the physical world. As mind fades away the essence becomes the substance of awakening. Cotton ears breed silence.
704.
705.
706.
707.
708.
196 r Jalesh
709.
Pete
The eyes that youre using are shut and the remnants of what you have seen lately are gone. The Zen image of chance is burning under your skin. Then, with the echo of a bamboo sound the mind looses its way: grasshoppers are hopping in the tall grass of the graveyard; sky, rivers and mountains leap at you with dazzling might. The old bamboo tree and the young bamboo leaf. When thoughts still linger the emptiness is hidden. Surely, when thoughts vanish, emptiness comes into view. What does it mean? It means that forms can be seen empty of content with no dependent thought to rise into the mind realm. In the morning heads go up; in the evening heads go down. This new koan feels like pushing the rear of a donkey
710. 711.
712. 713.

714.
197
Notes: All beings are eternal; life aside, whos going to recognize what eternal means? Arbitrary pleasures bring arbitrary pains; specific pleasures bring specific pains; Awakening, like a poisoning mushroom: the temptation is honest the consequences catastrophic; awakened by the moon reaching the window niche; alone in front of the wall: sometimes you hear your mantra called by the self-conscious voice. If nobody knows of you, whos calling the mantra? Buddha, seen wearing ancestral garb; A fact involving the ordinary could be the source of the dragons roar: Im like a fire turned into snow, like the sunburned desert turned into a snow path; the wheels of Dharma are running over the world of senses. Opening up the cave: one broken bone of a bird The flight is still drifting around The mirrors iron frames are empty. No more reflections, no more shadows on the path to knowledge; and this shall go on forever and ever
715.
198 r Jalesh 716.
Pete
Things encounter the cause & effect law: events carry a sudden change. Things dont encounter the cause & effect law: events never change. By grinding details no thing appears truthful. Blinking before changing no event unfurls fully. Emptiness denies a view to what was overlooked. Again, the world of phenomena is unraveling: no direct hit seen although the world presented to the mind is by now gone. The tragic spider web: a fly bearing offspring in captivity No-mind pointing directly to mind is like no-aiming pointing to arrow with no cognition of what a target might be. Not what a target is but what a target would be if there was no such thing as target. The unconscious land of phenomena gave birth to intuition. The question is: rationality and reason are just illnesses of the mind or they are intuition known devices. Not being able to see all that there is and the world between in one view? No
717. 718.
719.
199
problem! Use intuition. Except that while living through the day use reason more. While reasoning and sorting out sense from nonsense, the intuition is going to snatch bits and pieces of un-reasonable thinking. 720. 721. Elusive like a snowflake reaching an open fire. In the orchards mist a white shallow flies right then left, playing hide and seek Once he was done with the awakening deeds he could hear the music that a deaf man was singing. For a deaf man, he said, music will always be preferable to words, since one doesnt need to read lips to understand music. Tradition: grasshoppers are grass cutters Thats right, wild flowers grow wild; in the unreal world of Zen, though, wild flowers dont grow at all. The answer to the ultimate question is that the unchanging world of emptiness makes such a growth impossible.
722.
723.
724.
200 r Jalesh
Pete
Now, is the growth really impossible or the ultimate question should not be asked. Terrified by the random arrows a rabbit cannot go out to search for a carrot. Like anything else, though, as things grow they dont increase their significance; as questions are asked theyre still bound to answers. As a question summons an answer the emptiness fills the in-between reality of the unknown.
725. 726.
A thin grass blade can kill a mighty breeze. Carried away by delusion my footprints still emerge untouched by snow. Only my sight rises and falls with no trace to be seen anywhere. Thoughts litter ones mind. Being an ignorant or not doesnt make a difference. Emptiness underlies every single thought, even thoughts that converse together. Under the cherry tree one can smell the permanent fragrance of the ephemeral blossoming. What cant be sensed or told is what is not understood. One shall never wear the old Zen-monk
727.
201
robe that contentedly carries with it the likelihood of having those meanings resolved though never plainly. One shall wear the new Zenmonk robe
728.
Present remnants on top of old remnants And it could go like that forever. Although the past looks now so clean it used to open itself for everything when it was present. It is clean now because it has passed through death Moon: If immersed it shows nearer. Water: a mirror in which it would plunge. Sutras: I dont believe a word theyre saying! I dont believe a word theyre not saying! What was gain is gone now. What was loss is gone now. So many bitter words are used to defend the awakening torment! Certainly all those who got awakened in the last two thousand years are dead. They all fought to defend their degree of awakening worried about their own authenticity, envious of what others might have achieved while getting awakened. Lucky were
729.
730.
202 r Jalesh
Pete
those who kept their awakening hidden. Buddha is still smiling while knowing that the stubborn monk might get it and then see that the sprouting leaves are still bound to spring and that all purpose causality is rolling back still- happenings.
731. 732.
The golden heart of an iron ox. Donkey: With a head swing he says no; with a head swing he says yes: words had been long forgotten. Chance could empty the chaos of essence but not of phenomena. Eyes over mountains, ears under the mountains of water. A subjective view of an objective reality is sometimes taken as an objective view of a subjective reality. The two views coincide in clarity. Seeing Zen in the ordinary and ordinary in Zen is the only healthy view of the awakened, the rest is pure delusion. Free of matter and not dependent on thinking! Ephemeral
733. 734. 735.
736.
203
thins out and becomes illusion. Clear vision comes with an essence that cant be sensed or interpreted and become delusion. Similar Zen schools, various flavors of delusion. Different Zen schools, poles apart, any choice of flavor-of-illusion. 737. 738. Revisiting emptiness: a bone to feed a dog With no word calling things the wind blows and then dies with no penalty applied to the truth. The eyes that do not know what seeing is could surface in the absolute realm. Were not talking about blindness here Very unseen, as the essence of the seen The path that encompasses both kinds of awareness (meanings) the way of knowledge and the Way is open. When one of the meanings is present the other one is already gone. Things displayed as real (mirrored) or subtly experienced are both mistaken appearances. To walk the path of both meanings youd have to teach your mind to bring about a spontaneous
739.
740.
204 r Jalesh
Pete
way to respond to the nameless suchness. You dont need a doctrine to do that and silence is a good teacher only if you can liken it to the original no-sound. When awakening happens, youre on your own and via your own strength of mind you walk on that untraceable path.
741. 742.
The wall of silence where the blue Heavens get refreshed. Light letter:Whats better? Being born one thousand times or not being born at all? If your answer was being born one thousand times whats this whole fuss about getting awakened so that you could disrupt, interrupt or even reverse the birth-death cycles through reincarnation? I got accustomed with pain and suffering, more so than anybody (anybody!) I know. How could you tell me to stop my birth-death cycles through enlightenment when I hope to see a better life next? You ask me if I have Karma-prescribed merits. Plenty (plenty!)

743. 744. 745. 746. 747. 748.
205
A profound Zen graphic banner: what you see is what you get. Among the cherry branches, a frog Clouds drifting around a mountain peak Giving voice to an unnamed object No singing and eating at the same time. A stone bounces on the water, water bounces on the stone. Notes: If mind shapes the thought, the thought also shapes the mind. Whats deceiving to the mind not to dwell, not to grasp, and not to reject is also deceiving to the thought? What about ones will to use the thinking in order to shape ones mind? This will sounds like a subjective judgment. As anybody knows subjective judgments lit subjective realities. How one can defeat subjectivity and have a mind that dwells nowhere, stagnates nowhere? How one objective reality would still be objective in the midst of thoughts and remembering? As
749.
206 r Jalesh
Pete
soon as it gets contemplated it borrows subjectivity. On the other hand if one is not delusional how the mind could deceive him/her? It is a Zen belief that reality could show itself in a direct way more truthful than the way it shows to a judgmental mind to a mind that is always genuine, the beginners mind, a refreshed mind not polluted by thoughts, as if would be worthless to keep any or all the old thoughts around. But when one says: A cold breeze gently passing through the formless noontide, isnt this utterance meant to call to mind, and to stir up a feeling that further could be experienced in the most subjective layer of the mind? Mind gets summoned by the outside reality on the path where senses dwell; the outside reality is summoned by the mind where thinking dwells. Like a pair of paths If thought is the root of birth and death to cut thoughts one would have to cut the paths to and from thoughts. How one does that? Secrets yet untold, unprobed paths
207
It if is so, cant it be so? If one has to tell - consent cant be reached. If it isnt so, it still can be so. A narrow path can make iron caravans rust: early spring flowers are dying fast To a dying lion, the roar sounds useless A word too foreign to wake up a fly Eating clothed in tuxedo, but sleeping naked. Among words I is the lightest word around though it is the hardest to push away Nothing whatsoever being born, nothing whatsoever dying Transcending moments, living in eternity. Neither a time before, nor a time after. Living in the totality of the present. A web of words to catch a flake of snow.
751.
752. 753. 754. 755.
756.
757.
208 r Jalesh 758.
Pete
Zen says that the experimenter and the experience are one. Quantum physics showed it to be true by linking the observer to the state of the observed object, like rain is linked to lightening and crows to crowing. The insight is that the observer never ignores the observed and that the observed never ignores the observer. Reality laws miss the fact that things with no self participate equally in a relationship with things having self. Recognizing a reflection as a known object. Why the mystic mystery is wonder and the common mystery is not? The scarecrow values more to crows for what could be hidden behind it (mystic mystery) rather than for what it stands for (common mystery). So long sought and never seen (mystic mystery) although it supplies both phenomena, snow and blossom with shared aspects (common mystery). The disguised emptiness (mystic mystery) guarding the water fall (common mystery).
759.
760.

761. 762.
209
The crumbs on the table should be discarded wisely. Intent is behind whats given though its target is hidden elsewhere. Notes: What kind of blossom is never revealed by a formal orchard? Inquiring on the coloring intent while examining an open bud? Emptiness cast into a shape with color and scent The weeds grow in places where they dont see any agricultural intent; over the flowing river, a flowing cloud; it is possibly true since they saw it happening two thousand years ago; a dozen heads that turn at once see different things; emptiness related notes: to be sorted out in the order of intent; who is content with lying could find the ultimate truth unappealing. When there is no difference one becomes one; when there is difference one becomes multiples. Where thoughts are not allowed to enter.
763.
764.
765.
210 r Jalesh 766.
Pete
Wasting money on purpose: emptiness passes through each and every deal The tongue talking. that turned against
767.
768.
Cleansing a mind in a particular way: turn out the speech, peer into the gateless barriers opening. As the iron bolt rises the gate falls; as it falls, it raises. Does not happen though around here The riots of the first noticeable phenomena: at a snail pace the raw blossoming; while the breeze blows on the other side In all four directions everything one needs Just the words talk of deception Knowledge: swallowing words spitting out utterances. Material senses in their mental becoming: if not caught in the process some directly experienced facts become insights. When becoming insight a
769.
770.
771.
211
sword is harmless, moon swims in the depth of the commencement ocean. 772. 773. 774. 775. Boundless forms asleep like white geese on a white patch of snow When the breeze flows the three-feetof-water-column laughs heartedly And the I that was here slipped away with no plans to return I agree that the emptiness is empty. Therefore you cant let it grow into phenomena. And, if you do, would you ever let the phenomena decay? Would you let the seed give birth to flowers that are meant to die? Would you let the Earth at the mercy of hurricanes and floods? Thinking of emptiness and finding out those teeth, claws and horns are not only to help the climbers but also to throw the climbers down there, in the universal pit, at random. If emptiness creates stuff at random then the snowing of plum flowers are less seasonal than the real snowing. With every moment the mystery of the universe keeps deepening. Say a word, it deepens one inch further.
776.
212 r Jalesh 777.

778.
Pete
Shutting ones ears is not a safe shield against talking. When the wind left the scene, the moon moved slowly across the pond. When the wind came back the moon did not return. Old morning dew on the evening blue-prints. The faithful glance of a Buddha made out of stone at a Buddha made out of brass: agreeing that beyond the material base there is a spiritual base, and then that there is that old bamboo tree in full blossom. Leaves buried deeper than the tree roots. Phenomena, based on the number of entry The dark beaten pond where black cows nest in the blackened reed
779.
780.
781. 782. 783.

784.
213
Outside the world, nothing; inside the world, nothing. Thousand gold ponds, one unknown thief In the rice-bowl a jackass is taking a cold bath Coming and going, again and again One moon at a time Black crows flying through moonless nights. The shadow of a sword is the same as a shadow of a blade of grass. Learn how to differentiate in full light. The shadow of Buddha cast in gold is the same as the shadow of Buddha cast in brass. Learn how to differentiate the same. Overturning a snow furrow to unveil the blossoming. As far as enlightenment quality goes there is no difference if you jumped from a one-thousand-feet cliff or from a ten-thousand-feet cliff. Although, a bigger height brings a deeper enlightenment.
785.
786. 787.
788.
789. 790.
214 r Jalesh
791. 792. 793.
Pete
On the cliff edge a hanging moon. The smell of cow shit dwelt among strawberry flowers. Spring flowers wasted by hail; hail wasted by spring flowers. When few labors the food is scarce. When lots labor the food is sufficient. When lots meditate and beg the food is abundant. In spite of time that comes right at handy Awakening involving a bone exiting the ground Hide the words; exile your thoughts in the silence of Zazen Enough sense is equal to enough nonsense Loosing depth the sky lets a bird fly Hes moneyed. Youre going to tempt him with hunger. Vast blooming that snows at a blink of an eye.
794.
795. 796.
797.
798. 799.

800. 801. 802.
215
The moon that comes from the sky of nowhere. Broken sight helping fragments come together. While involved in a conversation remember that what youre trying to say is already known to the other and that what youre not saying has not yet punctuation signs, or rhetoric intonation: those would come when a lovely audience could not accept silence as an answer. No fault in a buried skull. We awe and wonder at the mountain peak Rain like fruit bearing lianas, snow like chaste blossoming In the silence of thinking, bell sounds draw nearby Emptiness eating its (own) offspring. All the awakening stages have been successfully completed, though mind still starves on achievements Then finally, the eternity comes, riding a donkey of high virtue
803. 804.
805. 806.
216 r Jalesh
807. 808.
Pete
A bunch of nice words with no resemblance to reality. A spread of moonlight to adorn the marshs offering of a white-lily What separates a bird from its flight? It is true that once you see through, the chain of thought would never again be broken by assertions or denials. Youll have the patience of a shadow waiting for the light to get it resolved at the right angle. Human sentiments yah-all-right, are turning ones spirit left and right with no respite. Riding the world on an iron horse that you can whip without remorse When ones mind goes to smoke and ones body is cinder, Buddha appears! No need to get your own awakening if you dont look for some spiritual promotion during your lifetime. Are the words fruits of thinking or on the contrary?
809.
810.
811.
812.

813.
217
Words giving birth to things: inward when giving birth, outward when words are uttered. I dont know where these phenomena flow into: some hang around for days, others are squashed at the moment they claim birth. Why water erodes a clay pot not delivered by oven. Dont use a lie to reveal a true story. Virtue is the fruit of Heaven. Now: hold your words without thinking and keep your thoughts with no wording in place. Virtue is virtue; the fruit of Heaven is a fruit. A furnished universe is as empty as a bare one. Zen landscape: Stumbling on the moon, splashing water all over the place. The relative is shallow Lights are beginning to push away the darkness and what is known about daily life proceeds in order Every fraction of a second a new born mind gets into the rhythm. The unsoiled universe allows another reading.
814.
815.
816.
817.
818.
218 r Jalesh
Pete
Buddhas in white flowery robes direct the human traffic.
819.
Were it not for the crowing in the morning no village would raise from the mist. This morning, the breeze around the lake. Tonight, with the moonlight spread on the lake surface the breeze around the lake A living rises high: a body rests deep Eternal leeches suck hot blood. Feed them with frozen blood to make them cure frozen illnesses. The dark wind blew away the dark leaves A tree in blossom gazing at the sky: could I articulate that seeing? With no eyes and still knowing what sight is: beyond senses, where mind goes to rest.
820.
821. 822.
823. 824.

825.
219
When your steps will become thousand years old memories whod still keep journeying in your shoes? In an instant I apprehends I and the world. What I makes out as being what world is (knowledge) is beyond I. The knowledge that I accumulates is lodged into I. That is, I changes as knowledge changes. If I becomes non-I where the knowledge gests lodged? On the other hand, are any processes that used to act in concert or against I still acting as far as non-I is concerned? For instance, is Karma still acting against I when non-I is established? Whos keeping I and non-I together in the course of their makeover? A selfless I is still an I or it could be designated as nonI since it appears as being a different entity? If any of the answers to the previous questions are based on reasoning isnt reasoning a product of I? Does non-I preserve the reasoning and if it does, does it mean that non-I preserves some characteristics of the I? Then, what is that part of non-I which is not the preserved part from the I? It may
826.
220 r Jalesh
Pete
seem nonsensical to separate an entity from a non-entity in the process of emptying one into another.
827.
When the mountain peak is seen, voices turn mute in the valley Eight arms and yet not enough to sweep the fallen snow When drops are allowed to grow into puddles, when rabbits are allowed to grow into lions Offspring of the same chaos Countless blossoms came to watch this mountain The whole universe can fit into a walnut. Leave out the phenomena and youd not find a reason why it would have to be bigger. Leave out the essence and youd not find a reason why it wouldnt have to be even smaller. The mystery is in the howling Getting lost in an indefinable reality.
828.
829.
830. 831. 832.
833.
221
The fundamental matter is that Im aware although I dont open my mind to interpretation. Like, being aware of this but not waiting for the next and as the next comes it is neither a known form nor a recognizable sound. As if one would be a pianist playing the piano keys instinctively without looking at them and knowing what sound theyd make without hearing it. (Think Beethoven!) When asleep not letting a dream fall onto the interpretation realm. Raising eyelids are meant to supply a gesture for the unmovable ears. Fresh from exile you barely remember if you got killed before you got awakened. To distinguish one from the other youd have to set them apart, though this is contrary to what Zen is. Shattered boats can sail only at night. Messages: When a word is questionable its message is also questionable; a lesser shadow doesnt bring more light back to it; noise is cleansed out by silence; choose words
835. 836.
837.
838.
222 r Jalesh
Pete
carefully even when in pain; questionable words defy an incoming truth; claiming that people suffer setbacks from questionable words through inappropriate sentences they build cases and they raise the stake of those that judge so that they bestow to speakers a prohibitive order not to talk, that is equivalent to an unconditional defeat; acacia tree with its flowers of oblivion such a nonZen example; The cave where the emptiness shaped its course; the rainbow across the Path; the facts that raise questions are not inconvenient to Zen if the questions are not raised; restless thoughts kill silent thoughts; a misused tongue hangs always outside ones mouth; a rain cloud meets a snow cloud; a truth doesnt have a rank; if you want to know, dont ask! Talk to the message itself, dont ask the porter who brought it in.
839.
I had this feeling of guilt as I missed the mornings rooster call. The day continued muted till sunset. The evenings rooster call though was harmless.

840. 841.
223
The thunder not heard is not feared. To practice one koan and only one and fail it for as long as you live? Youll understand what anger is, for sure Although, if you kept busy doing other things who cares! If a monk confronts you in Heaven struck him on the head with your wooden shoe. Once in Heaven there is no reward for those who pretend having Earthly merits. If the monk confronts you in Hell youll know by reading his eyes why you fail: dont blame Buddha, though Knowing that the river meets the ocean I throw myself into such expectancy: the wild rapids get quiet and the water becomes hard to swim into. Eternity implies birth only if death is not an element of the equation. Partings, dullness, fears and decay are all part of the incarnated beings. A Zen probe can detect if any of these living things can be taught to fade away by their own will. The moral is: get enlightened before it isnt too late.
842.
843.
224 r Jalesh 844.
Pete
If it is there you dont have to point at it. Point at it if it is not there and the unseen will get back into view. Interlocked and powerful although they neglect the thoughts and the thinking. The mystery that cannot be learned builds bridges for those that manifest ardor to know what is It The nameless emptiness escapes the arrow pointed at it. The unbound subtle strives to meet the coarse relative. Under a right cloth reality doesnt leave room for confusion. If the cloth is made out of words since they didnt preced anything they cant see even what is obvious to the mind. If the cloth is made out of sounds that cannot be spoken it does no good to what one strives to understand. No confusion means that all that can be distinguished is approached as a reason that comes from the outside. As one turns his sight around the outer reason is gone, but still clinging to ones inner reason. One may realize one day that reality is a go
845.
846.
847.
225
between outside and inside and that everything else is nonsense. As one thinks that the whole humankind knowledge accumulated till now could be miraculously erased, would a tabula-rasa mind be able to see the absolute within the unfolding reality? Is this really a big deal or just a poetic fantasy that could strike an innocent awe in the easy to be fooled Zen novice? 848. Throwing heavy nets to catch dead moments. Perennial has a precedent only in the sense that it can be thought and spoken about. Once it is thought any past event is a precedent. Once it is talked about, the precedent instantly vanishes. The hunter pulls out a dead rat out of a trap for foxes and throws it at the bottom of a well that dried eons ago. To the open eyes the reality will always be impermanent. To the eyes that exhibits reality even a dead rat is perennial. When sound dies out ear has it still trapped inside as a tought lesson.
849.
850.
226 r Jalesh
851.
Pete
On a thread one pearl is real the other one is fake. As the thread gets longer than the universal size there is no real and no fake, no truth and no false; the breeze used as persistent measurement blows here, there and everywhere. Scratch the mirror of reality, see Buddha sitting under the tree, becoming no more The plum never blossom in metropolis and the artificial plum flower fragrance is in low supply. Thinking of flowers that cant be seen makes people bow to weeds. The seeing of a wave splashing waterdust and the contemplation of what knowing is after sorting out the dust. Emptiness tirelessly mixing up reality and illusion: one is in the gazing the other is in the thinking. Yet, if they both are empty, they empty out what is seen and what is thought, erasing also the present argument.
852.
853.
854.
855.

856. 857.
227
Do you dare to look at It and clean its duality before taking it in? Not consistent with activity though the fact cannot be removed from experience. If emptiness is form and the form is not matter, why do we discard matter as not being the real aspect of it. Mind conceals that it seeks itself. Notes: Think without thinking, and dont want to know; basically the seen is in ones eyes; a tongue sings, a ear listens, a leaf shines, and eye awakens to the seeing; when water is seen as a wave, the last wave had left already; the ceremony of watching the snowflakes; nothing to see no boundaries; not a sound, again and again; a Mu flower lost in a Mu cloud; only a Samadhi resemblance though; common knowledge common enlightenment; hidden under the frost, the old frost; talk if you want to soothe your Zazen; it accepted the flesh but not the bones; in the marrow of the flag pole; growing of words; immeasurable
858.
859.
860.
228 r Jalesh
Pete
listening; God conceived as self-love; the original face resembling an empty bubble; fresh dew on a dead leaf; will they come this time? The whole family of the dead was assembled around; no one asked but they got answers; a cocoon opens not a single ghost inside; the awakening was stolen from him; the deathless target; a wooden bowl filled with frozen shit; the mute is singing; to index a wave; a blind-deaf encounter; words beyond wording, says beyond saying; in a back-to-front range; one word - two lips (sic!); a black arrow in a pitch dark flight; one lightening two trunks; one spider one net; one net two flies; hunting on moonnights with no bow or arrows; endlessly singing.
861. 862. 863.
The Way never ceases to recall its victims On the last day of the universe the last cloud would carry the wind with It. Born in a conventional way though the story says he was unborn otherwise
229
Right minds dont set apart right from wrong: wet your pants and youd know what I mean. Dont waste time: Be that falling leaf before autumn comes. Quick-arriving, quick-departing! The mind is lying still Holding a candlestick with two hands to see the insight that yielded to the fundamental: the subject matter of penetration Breathe the breeze, wind the wind Zen: The still eye over the still lake Hearing what water has to say though the message is not addressing the ear. The morning breeze opens the poppy heads at once, throwing in a vaulted arch tiny black seeds towards the unseen world Not yet any intent set, but still disseminating A beggar that stole the bowl of rice but discarded the transmission robe
865. 866.
867. 868.
869. 870.
871.
230 r Jalesh
872.
Pete
The fecundity of the emptiness is an oxymoron. So are the obscenities about it that make news in Zen intellectual circles. Stealthily getting awakened: thought itd go on forever you
873. 874.
What a mind within a mind would be? A glimpse at the peak on which once Buddha stood Mind turning homeward, self going away Staring with eyes as clear as the sky I visit the Path to the Peak: The fountain wheel turns with every breeze, silent like a moon ray Flowers that still breed the original fragrance snow on my every step... A solitary race against time This is the shore where all Buddhas come to rest Wings that never forget the way back home
875. 876.
877. 878. 879.
231
Beyond the goal of enlightenment there is the hope that the root of all that there is is fundamentally reasonable. Out of the source, the unveiled truth Eating twice a day, sleeping once at night The drowning moon, hand in hand with the sun-brought-forward. This could still happen on those ways that are yet to be known. Is the moon letting go and the sun holding still? Or, on the contrary, theyre equally (hand in hand) part of a tale with no obvious reasoning? A drowning moon is not a trivial event Questioning why noon follows morning although there are not so close. The anguished cry of a cormorant on a dry riverbed. Erect a monument to which you could bow without getting punished. Brilliant when absent, dark as it appears.
881.
882.
883.
884. 885.
886.
232 r Jalesh
887. 888.
Pete
The endless blossom snows endless petals. Not knowing the tide thatll drown his boat One that lacks knowledge is talkative; while ones knowledgeable finger in the air could explain all. Who cares to look gets exposed. Who cares to listen gets shouted at. On a daily bases it doesnt make sense; if eternal, it raises eyebrows Sunny day: the iron rooster is dripping: brown spots on the fresh morning snow. In the vast blue sky a primeval cloud: the grave yard pines know it better. Having a pine as a speaker and the breeze as interpreter Setting aside any thoughts and feelings the door without hinges
889.
890.
891. 892.
893. 894. 895.
233
opens slowly: in no need to pass through, though
896.
Might be that the essence weds phenomena In between there is no stream. On the outer there is no shadow: one can see what it is without seeing and trace what is as it breezes away Beyond existence and non-existence: what appears raises its head, what goes bows its head. If you look at it without eyes you can see it at all times as it crosses the pathway The dancing wine flies drown ultimately in the wine that borne them out To know It and yet to talk about as if It is far from being known: some people tell the truth, other lie One word between the teeth of the dying: thus After the monks fled weeds overran the fountain. In better times people would get awakened while listening to the wailed sound of the raising
897.
898.
899.
900. 901.
234 r Jalesh
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bucket. The sound never failed them. Though nowadays the bucket sounds no different nobody gets awakened. Its just that the weeds made that sound loose weight
902.
The winter long absence doesnt benefit the crows. And the spring time seems out of place A lizard lets his tail go when the thought of being chased races through his mind. The rooster song: A wake up call for each tree in the garden. Where body is the eye and the mind the interpreter, sun-bearing-moon is like cause-effect stuff. In the Dharma eye (omniseer emptiness without eyes) the silence of moonlight is the only guard to the universal grave. To see life cause shall develop again Is the Dharma eye - living within us trying to steal the show? Teasing Zen to initiate an intellectual probe
903.
904.
905.
235
Riddle: What is better than the original beginning and worse than the ultimate ending? (The Impermanence). Anti-Zen letter: Is an awakening enough to a man? Subtlety, selfrealization to completion is what clear water is to a drown moon. Life is too short to harvest eternity but long enough to make the dullness of awakening unwise. Though, as Buddha instructed us, whats left untold is the best part of what could be said about A blue frog vanishing in the tall blue grass. A flock in its nocturnal flight to nowhere: one bird following another bird in a simultaneous and synchronized mass. The mind stolen away by movement and stillness. Eyes following the movement, ears listening to the stillness. Nothing (outside) could be in agreement with the universal law if it was not for the mind (inside). Whats partial steals from the whole.
907.
908.
909.
910.
236 r Jalesh 911.
Pete
Post-awakening hangover: Send the mind homeward and ask it to fetch a practical thought. Once mind does that do something practical - if you still had left any desire to interact with things. What should be visible is in hiding. What cant be seen is displayed in the wide open space. Melting Sutra words and utterances in a shitty pot. Stealthily doing more Zazen than others Hail-crowned rains The outgrowth of an hour of Sutra reading is neither vacant nor filled up. Its like getting soaked while trying to avoid the rain drops of a torrential rain in running. The stone roots of an iron tree. Stillness makes things move; movements make stillness stay.
912.
913.
914. 915. 916.
917. 918.

919. 920.
237
Awareness of what it is - without the exclusion of what it is not. To transcend the ordinary youd have to surrender your mind to the ordinary. To transcend the holy youd have to surrender your life to the holy. On a path with no boundary there is no ride to chose, all directions are equally rewarding. Dont accept anything just because is part of tradition, dont banish anything that is foreign. An old woven basket could still bring the cloth to the river if held with care. A new iron basket would rust if left unused aside. Taking present time into account while searching for an old or a new place where mind can comfortably dwell. The fire manifests its strength until the water shows its powers. Courting each other results in a bowl of boiled rice. Still, the confrontation is open. Remember though that between fire and water there is always the one inch bridge of flowers in bloom.
921.
922.
238 r Jalesh 923. 924.
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What the emptiness offers the emptiness takes away (What a mouth whispers an ear echoes) Two pine trees within sight of each other: the breeze carries their seed talk, the tall grass silences their seed meanings. When the blossom stands still the inner light stands still. When the blossom snows the outer light stands still. Let the phenomena withdraw so that you could contemplate the essence They say that weeds that sprout by the sea die by the sea; and that coal find solace in distant fires; and that a grave with a name is not a common grave; and that flowers are fresh as long as spring doesnt retreat; and that the white gown of fog weds at dawn the water stream Do you really believe that all those are just emptiness? Loosing a sense of smell yet knowing what a rose smell is for eons to come.
925.
926.
927.

928.
239
The beaten path of enlightenment: no traces through Since the mind does not abide anywhere it cant be found. Dwelling within: once you turn your sight away, the mind runs away Take a pick and the entire mind leaps out Essence is like light without shadows. Phenomena are like shadows in full light. At the edge of understanding and comprehension where minding and nominding are one what is proven to be - is as is and what is not proven to be is as is. You listened long enough to the mouse scratching the wooden wall! Its time to nail it down acting like a cat, running on your paws, crouching, listening, waiting The waiting is the most difficult stage to carry out. Same with Zen Describe the moment immediately preceding the awakening! Like a candle exhausted while burning at both ends
929.
930.
931.
932.
240 r Jalesh
933.
Pete
Within the emptiness image and eyes are one. Outside of the emptiness ear and sound are two. What the arrow failed to see but the oversight caught a glimpse of I gave you a mouthful of secrets: your throat must be clogged by now. Walk with your eyes, run with your ears Beyond the invisible emptiness Same beaten path one destination only An empty mind has emptiness on its side Emptiness: What one sees through the eyes of phenomena When the awakening comes the ancestral language speaks to you using no words Dispossessed by doubts, enriched by doubts
934.
935. 936. 937. 938.
939.
940. 941.
942.

943. 944. 945. 946. 947. 948. 949. 950. 951.
241
The emptiness shows its colorful tail just before our eyes The taste of hot steel for a hungry iron dog The first night of full moon the soaring whirlwind reaches the sky. In a moon shell a one-horn-sun spewing brilliant snow flakes. The flag-pole clothed in moonlight. An answer that collects dust has to be cleaned. Neither entangled nor bound Silent as a moon ray after the last cock crow The moon making faces at us: Mu aside, as it shows the original face The pathways are filled with weeds: they obstruct the walk through, although north is still a pure direction and south is still a pure direction. The moral is that regardless
952.
242 r Jalesh
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of all, the snow flakes flee the spring blossoms
953. 954.
Every moment the unseen cock flies round around the Earth. The height of the mountain and the breadth of the water: one goes up freely towards Heaven; the other guides the water while being confined. With eyes or without eyes: the arrow looks for the seen not for the seer What is invisible is also indivisible. With nothing to be grasped, effects lack a cause and there is continuity that doesnt have finality, eyes that are stared at, and ears to which silence binds sounds that are heard within. The emptiness making faces at us: a reality doesnt become arbitrary because of an arbitrary thinking! The water flowing under the river bed
955. 956. 957.
958.
243
And you shout: Help me! Help me! and then mingle with your life for a while before coming back to your Zen practice. The mountain path is slippery: the sheep wouldnt hop; the dogs would just stare with locked jaws at the mountain peak: the shepherd nowhere to be seen You! Be the shepherd! you hear When the tiger comes around seeking shelter The moon thorns displays its golden
960. 961. 962.
Awakening confirmed: I knew that he knew. He knew that I knew. Cessation of anger: Anger demolishes the love gates that line ones living An empty space turns up with no entry point And then the guilt comes carrying on its vigilance, guarding the awakening realm If you see it worsening, obliterate hatred, as it appears, since, if you dont - guilt will irrevocably becomes more guilt Be kind and modest in love. Dont eavesdrop at other peoples hatred. Pure at heart, brace
963.
244 r Jalesh
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yourself in the one-mind search for the truth. When hatred stops people are alike; when there is love theyre even more so.
964.
965. 966.
A high-arched gate meets a lowarched gate To pull the awakening using a koanrope Compassion for your enemy is the greatest present you can give to yourself. No such form can be used to draw what self is In such circumstance formless and selfless - are better representing each other. What is sold as profound is utterly superficial. A competition on profoundness is easily won by a mute If a mute would have said no comment hed have lost the competition. Awakening: Who sees this knows that there is no word to express it. Who sees this not - makes up a story.
967.
968.
245
The uncertainty about truth comes from the preconception that it is either inherited by the mind or learned about. Its like mind already established the bases that produce the tacit arguments that validates a truth. Remember, if it is not suchness it cant be taken as truth even if it was based on mathematical aggregates that proved to have an exact solution. Within suchness the virtual force of causality creates virtual effects. On the other hand, if one talks about an everlasting truth what is more like it than the virtual realm? Mathematics is a cousin of emptiness. Suchness is its proof of concept. From afar emptiness looks like a weightless blink of an eye The surfacing roots of emptiness on a night vigil: shiny black marrows All painted, all erased, all painted As long as there is separateness things are for sale: words are the middlemen, mind is the buyer. If mind goes away without buying things become
970. 971. 972.
973.
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inexpressible. To achieve cessation stop loathing the words that you listen to or desiring things that you didnt buy. Were talking about attachments here The bamboo leaves are hissing the wordless song of the departed winter
974. 975.
Steadily though tremulous The phenomena are born pure and perfect. The form-self is what acts at their incipience. As they take shape (formally exiting) they perish as lonely as they began. Not an inherent birth, not an inherent existence, not an inherent death The essence that could be taken as inherent is conspicuously missing Striving to mirroring attain the silenced
976. 977. 978.
Blowing out the snowflakes: frosty grounds though Body: a bundle of bones awakening in their walk a scare-crow

979. 980. What echoes sounds? dont originate
247
as
Up when thoughts arrive, down when they go away. Is the awareness a inbetween living world? Koans and capped phases, carefree Zazen, whos going to authenticate you faults? Success is stylish; failure is like an unseen rainbow in a hideaway, or like a gravestone that no body is going to be buried under. What you do with an olive tree that doesnt make leaves? Allow it to grow into a plum tree! Yea! The ear breeds sounds, the eye breeds images A faultless Buddha contemplates the faulty nature. Knowing the difference implicitly leads to knowing the similarity. When theyre mirrored they both cant escape causality. The morning breeze whirls the spring blossoms down the hill. The fishermen that dont smell like fish cant put on view a catch.
981.
982. 983.
248 r Jalesh
984.
Pete
Sometimes answers arrive before questions are asked Seconds that last years, years that last seconds. If you dont take the time in - there is no causation. Eyes peer at the moon appearing between flowery branches: its light cant pass through, its shadow cannot follow. Mindful mind of things; mindless of
985.
986. 987.
Fallen blossoms pile up overpowering the seeing. Hearing the rooster song and then removing it from memory; then calling the song back as soon as it is forgotten. Buddha couldnt speak when he died: Rolling his eyes to draw a circle He knows that beyond what creates the difference there is some-what-that that cancels out the difference. The inner view of what blossoming is searches the roots for clues. It is the entire unknown and all the
988.
989.
990.
249
unending Who within the stillness (of the emptiness) decided to create so much significance? 991. Tradition says that north is that way and south is that way. Snowing with no limitations! The old pine tree squeals under the snow weight. Crows dont rest on its branches and the thousand fold moonlight shows unheeded. The time of infinite completeness is that things that dont melt are in agreement with iced things. In hideaways the moonlight seems deeper and difficult to grasp. Ashes of burned charcoals washed out by rain a fine sense of what moonlight is. This path is owned by later Buddhas. It accumulated weeds because of neglect The mystery of the frost that the ancients called the silenced water. Looking from the inside and glancing towards the inscrutable: ice is waters marrow. The dark flakes of the unknown shrouded by flakes of silenced water.
992.
993.
994.
250 r Jalesh
995. 996.
Pete
Buddha as numerous as grains of sand Anti-Zen letter: In the definition of eternity there is no mentioning of senses though senses are without bonds as one dies. Also the hard labor of bones as they merged ones body with time and space of the living doesnt get appraised. Desires are never addressed. All those are attachments. What is mentioned is non-grasping, non-thinking, nonmerging, non-desiring. Nonliving is not mentioned although it gets replaced by a cold intimacy of the mind with spring happenings like blossoming and flying fish (cold blooded particulars!). I know from experience (perception) that darkness gives always to one this illusion of total transparency to nowhere. No matter that all Buddhas are gone. Be assured that one will come to witness your awakening. The stone head lost its face: no witness then to face this
997.
998.
251
blossoming? The teapot broke down after so many years of effervescence Its whistle got already erased from memory: whos going to find out if the tea stains on the book cover are not in reality nameless roads to nowhere?
999.
1000. 1001.
The ultimate word would not deliver you from reality. In the midst of nowhere the golden butterfly roars towards the sun. Before the arrival of thoughts and after the departure of words: the unbound silence that knows no reality Thinking was left behind so that the mirror could escort its image elsewhere. the inscrutable: the answer is caged and there is no key to unlock the door. Weeds fill the threshold with shadows. Watch it until the moonlight passes through Kick the door open with the hack of a sword No more shadows, indeed! To a sword a sword
1002.
1003. Thoughts left to die while searching
252 r Jalesh
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is a sword is a sword They all feed the mind with fear and courage. How then a sword that cracks a-lockeddoor open could lack comprehension?
1004. The ultimate truth covered up by

transcendental words.
1005. The snowing petals actually know

what theyre going through. Thus and It, moving-in along with steady, parading phenomena. Nothing but a forever coming-and-going. Did it ever come? Did it ever go away? 1006. Zen variant to Dantes Inferno: On this Way youd have to walk forever, for there is no return tells her to do 1008. Fallen leaves from one thousand autumns worth the weight of a feather A horse wearing cow-skin shoes and a cow wearing hose-skin shoes, both entering the Buddha world! An iron sky reflected on crystal water: the sky
1007. A gliding bird does what the flight
1009.
253
is always beyond measure, the water is clear 1010. When the sun shines the air is warm; reed flowers shadow brings chills on the clear water bow while hunting for moonlight 1012. When the moon passes over the bridge the clawed water spiders call for special attention. Trapping mosquitoes is put aside; when the moon reaches the other shore what was transcendental hangs like tiny dew pearls on a bare net. Then again, when moon goes away the water spider sets up meetings with mosquitoes. the old path 1014. If Buddha would leave in this world his immeasurable compassion would be the measure of it What kind of rain falls on the shore? What kind of rain falls on the ocean? Without a doubt one makes crops
1011. Even the old warriors stopped using a
1013. The footsteps on the sand belong to
1015.
254 r Jalesh
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grow, the other make fishes jump out. A mother treats her kids differently
1016.
Coming from nowhere, back to nowhere so that they could start a fire
1017. Using ones body heat to dry leaves 1018. The virtue is inner. Although, when it
gets exercised it becomes an outer manifestation of the inner. With each successful trial the inner virtue gets one point, the outer manifestation of it gets one thousand points.
1019. The ancestral vow that makes the rain

manifest before the gate 1020. 1021. The aura of mystery of what doesnt exist. The silent emptiness meets the silent mind: if everybody was enlightened the chameleon-emptiness would throw poisoned arrows at the manifested world. Draped in black a crow flies beyond the black horizon.

1022.
255
A Zen seeker testing Ssu-hsin: When life begins death ceases; When life ceases death begins; There is no ending when death ceases; There is no beginning when life begins. Reality check: Is there a beginning when life ceases. would anybody want to interrupt his/her birth and death cycles? A universal life strayed into a human being is the greatest achievement of the universe within all the infinite Big-Bang cycles combined. Those who hate the livings keep writing according to their mystic paranoia about attachment-attainment opposites: but hey, who do you think is so stupid to listen to the Biblical cock or the Buddhist crow crowing? Nobody! Absolutely nobody! With resigned hope if I came back from death as a bully-man Id buy a baseball bat to beat up to death those who dont like the livings.
1023. Letter: If reincarnation exists, why
1024.
The sky of delusion is blue. The real and relative sky is blue. The ideal and absolute sky is blue. The sky of knowledge is blue. Its like walking
256 r Jalesh
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four times a beaten path in order to explain some topic to small children though the four sentences aim higher
1025. 1026.
The rational whole is just a small part of the total whole. Using the sun just for warming and the clarity to watch its transcendental route. Sorting out knowledge by putting the question where the answer is! How the relative reality knows to put colors where seeing goes and sounds where ears open for listening? there is not. Emptiness exists because of the twos above and dies from the twos. Does this say that emptiness exists and dies because of discrimination? Its obvious to Zen that what we know is not for emptiness to know (otherwise this fuss about discrimination and dialectics wouldnt make sense); but, what is tragic is that what emptiness knows is not for us to know. That
1027.
1028. Letter: Either it is there is or it is
257
wonderful Zen crap about Buddha being cow-dung and cow-dung being the living rafter already thousand years old and going could be proven true if you stare at a fly on a wall after it got smashed with a Sutra book.
1029. Having no intention to have a

reckoning with what transcends
1030. The arrow gained even more speed

after hitting the target.
1031. The treacherous paths of a koan taken

for what it is not: enraging with poetry a landscape that will never blossom. A mystery inherent to dawn is not going to sprout up again at night. In other words, if you jump in deep water, swim in despair otherwise youll drown. In even more other words nobody really sees beyond a koan if he doesnt leave behind his legs before walking. 1032. He reached his own limits before attainment. After attainment he couldnt reach back to them. Vigil for a Buddha misunderstood. that died
1033.
258 r Jalesh
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1034. If you see thus with open eyes would

it still be something you could be living into? How would you answer without saying a word?
1035. This is always near, thus is always

afar. Although an eye starring without seeing sees it near.
1036. Emptiness enters in every house

uninvited. Cut its head without hesitation! As it howls on its way out you might understand that thatwasnt-a-stranger-that-you-tried-toget-rid-of.
1037. A moonlight ray on the peak and all

the piles of shadows vanish At down though all the rays get trapped therein Pure like the mounting dew, heavy like a whore scent 1038. Known as clear as the blue sky is known to an eagle. water at down; known as clear as the pain is to a pain-killer pill; known as clear as a thousand crystal mounds;
1039. Truth: Known as clear as the autumn
259
known as clear as an arrow knows its path; known as clear as a lacking argument; known as clear as a healing eye; known as clear as a leap onto unknown. 1040. The verbal awareness is an after-thefact awareness. One misses the heat of a fire; one misses the cold of a snow. Not a single flake to be found in the ashes. No horse, no cart; all gone long the winter will last by counting the fallen leaves... Have you missed one? Error 1042. Awakening: That you may have missed it? is a lone query. The emptiness making faces at us survived. Thousand rains will not bring them back. Their tails and wings are dust now. The birds fly above but no one plunges into Somehow they know. Next fall, clearer than a mirror, the pond will open its eyes to see the fox coming
1041. Same, same, same You know how
1043. Fable: The pond water got hot, no fish
260 r Jalesh
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by Does the fox act as if she doesnt kknow?
1044.
Emptiness emerging from decay seems more at home than the frenzied one that comes in sight when a cherry tree erupts in blossom. transient; getting back in the open eye is everlasting. That is called consequential discrimination. If it is not consequential it is silent forever. If it is consequential it is like noise guiding noise. Listen to which is what!
1045. Vanishing in the closed eyes is
1046.
The ultimate truth could open a gatebarrier with a wink. listen to you hear. How does it happen? (The mind pairs them together). Without learning words youd easily find out how. As falls draws near the cold eyed fox walks on marginal roads. Fish are still swimming with care in the deep water.
1047. What you look at you see; what you

1048.
261
Crying when born, crying when going away
1049. A Nonsense: Two small things are

less different than two big things. One composed of small things is smaller than One composed of big things. To say that both One are the same is like feeding tigers with shadows of meat. One can learn from a tiger that One small or big is not the ultimate word to be preached. Though, one cannot make sense of the size when One contains all. 1050. What seems to be a trace is untraceable. What seems to move is the immanence of the unmovable. High if flying in the sky, low if echoing the thought of the flying. The realm of all mountain peaks smells of bird droppings. Downhill, fragrance of pure blossoming mixed with mist Enlightenment, if missed, could be sought on lower plateaus as long as ground is virtuous. What you see, hear or think is clear and the
1051.
262 r Jalesh
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indwelling spirit shows its presence in every thing. Hanging white cloth to dry in a snowy breeze
1052. 1053.
A singing bird but one thousand echoes Circling round the pond where my cow drowned; that day, I recall, there was no water in the pond though the layer of dust was one thousand feet deep. though it is all there to be seen. An eye can see through armored gates and yet miss commonplace elements. When it is not seen it is not manifested. When it is seen - if it is taken within it gets wasted. When it is seen if left free to roam north, south, east, west it may open and close at once. No leftovers after seeing it, no withered threads beyond what had been seen.
1054. It is not something you can see
1055.
A silk floor on the ducks pond. One drowns if one walks on it; being an ant, being a fly

1056.
263
Snow falling on the wing of a flying heron Buddha is silent. Although, when I wake up I know that Buddha has spoken. When I eat I know it again. As I walk through the garden the worn out Way seems unchanged: the fragrance of blossoming trees is everything but the eternal life, and what one defines as white or black depends on what one gives as opposed to what one gets. I let go the attachments so I could be the one who doesnt know
1057. So the Dark Age is back again and
1058. 1059. 1060.
The flawless plum would be soon firewood. A fragrant fire? What things are not aware of is that we call them names When emptiness will come full cycle, the circle would be as empty as if the world never began. The well-tuned universal strings vibrate but never sound. He looks with one eye and knows immediately what two eyes might see.
1061.
264 r Jalesh
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1062. With the head on pillow thoughts tend

to rest. With the head in the air thoughts tend to breath. With the head in drum thoughts tend to resound across the square. The moral of these all is that if the head is properly arranged thoughts act appropriately. Thats why I cannot believe the story of a Zen fellow that said that while sleeping in a stable (against all that smell of animal stool and bird poop) he had a revelatory dream with Buddha and other saint portraits serving fragrant fruits to an assembly of ancestral beggars that he was part of. Could the sleep be free of sensations, I was thinking, detached from smell and eye irritating fumes. Then, why the fragrance gets in the way? Ear tries to sing what the eye cant see 1063. Stealing Buddhas sandals keeping the old glasses. but
1064. Emptiness is as definite as its

manifestations within forms: enough to know those that are seen for there is no more else to know, except those
265
that are not seen. Reality is what reality is not if we dont account for the seer.
1065. To see through the essence is like

acknowledging with an unknown mind what cannot be understood. If you get there there is no time to bow to Buddha. Wining or loosing is not the point either. You transcend as you spring back from there; you become dust if you let go 1066. The muddy waters in which you lost your jewel truth that is beyond all other truths. To the left the moonlight, to the right a reflection showing what one doesnt know about it. Mysteries are as numerous as clouds obstructing the moons view. With every additional inch of knowledge - a new mile of deepening mystery. It has been our chance to celebrate the sixteen billion anniversary of the emptiness with the thought that our existence has a purpose. To Zen all these statements would make sense if read with no eyes. The absolute is still covered by
1067. The unrelenting come and go of that
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relative. It is also in Zens believe that relative is needed only to make the absolute reveal itself when things become indivisible to the mind and Buddhas of the one thousand directions merge. Not a single thing to be accounted for and no word available for use. One could witness such merge on the earth at the moment when a herd of oxen moo in a great universal chorus while watching the first seasonal snowfall.
1068.
If you rush you might brush past awakening when you obtain that spread. Expanding and Broad are kin. Thinning and Shallow are not. This is because while one is in the acting the other one is falling into oblivion.
1069. When you obtain this withdraw;
1070.
I was in Bora-Bora when Peking events took place. The spring there looks like the winter here. You cant change easily one for the other though they both have the same Zen inference: opening the eyes to look
267
over here, closing the eyes to look over there. 1071. 1072. Translucent furrows crows dont fly over which
This spring my cow reached complete maturity. Her moos are enjoyable; no bitter weeds would ever alter the sweet taste of her milk again. Pure absolute soiled with distinctions and differentiations Wash them away and youll see the endless stream of the emptiness in its transformation. Even then though, plum flowers would appear whiter than the snow. Seeing colored houses that might turn into black towers In the green fields things are green. In the yellow fields things are yellow. When they snow, the white flowers are at peace with red flowers able to raise a body from the dead without a word spoken or listen to. And this was it.
1073.
1074. 1075.
1076. He read from a Sutra known to be
268 r Jalesh
1077.
Pete
So, the blind man went out Why dont you ask what more is there than the essence? What is One when all is One? If the fiercest tiger doesnt eat its own offspring, cats often do.
1078. What more is there than phenomena?
1079. 1080. 1081. 1082.
The fish backbone supports the swimming Emptiness, like everything else will disappear one day without a trace. A night when lightning uncovered the tiny white flowers under the pine tree. The sitting Buddha on the meditation hall has more than two hands though it appears that none of them is of use. Dogs turned into humans due to a Karma error. Peach and plum flowers have been patented as awakening blossoming. Same were the dear horns, the reed red-roots, and the fiery brawls of the dragons listening to human words.
1083. 1084.
269
What about the lowered behind of a monkey or the erected tail of a skunk? The virtue of a bad smell is that people seeking their awakening may run away from it.
1085. The solitary reed has its sway. Each

sway models a solitary reed 1086. My mind is gone to do meditation. Meanwhile I have to cut bamboo shoots for soup and prepare leeches to do work on my swollen ankles. One needs to eat to get enlightened. As far as my swollen ankles go I read that Buddha had gout also. Although, he never overlooked it he didnt use leeches with the thought that sticking to ones body they can carry ones body away. Gazing at an emptiness that has known so many Gods. Eat your rice bowl before it becomes a koan motive used to stimulate dieting. A good listener keeps his ears upright.
1087. 1088.
1089.
270 r Jalesh
1090.
Pete
Covering the path of one thousand ways with one Way in mind an unknown idiom. Behind each word, the bulky eyes of emptiness spread in a smile. Enlightened by a spoken word that has no substance? Being oven: swallowing bits and pieces of cold coal to use them as hot food.
1091. Trying to catch what had been said in
1092. 1093.
I walked the Hell Hills and the Heaven Valleys. Watching the river meeting the ocean: when one thinks of a boundary it is always that the end of the river is the beginning of the ocean. And this is how it is thousand miles from here mind watches the shower of the cherry petals
1094. As soon as here becomes there, my
1095. Sheep cannot pronounce a dogs bark.

Its not because they have to comply with different deeds, but because to be able or not to be able doesnt
271
make any difference to the mind of a sheep.
1096. The celestial mirror reflects the

worldly one: feeling betrayed? In heaven or on earth things are the way things are. When theyre not, theyre not following the fundamental principles and have to be taken out of reflection. The light comes and when the light goes the darkness comes. The moonlight and the sunlight are moving on the same ground. What all these mean apart from the doubt that things are the way they are?
1097. The Ways Great Gate in which no

words have ever entered: ducks are quacking, dogs are barking, on the way to the hill an inflatable dragon going nowhere but here: time entered is now gone, space entered is already exhausted. 1098. All forms created by day are stolen at night. The iron lion though awaken cannot stop the plunder. Lawbreaking uncaught walks innocent grounds. Thats an example of how good and evil could live together.
272 r Jalesh
1099.
Pete
When defeat follows defeat the departed thoughts tend to return. When success follows defeat the thoughts never depart. Blackened by night the swallows penetrate the crows flock. Aware of the lake surface he forgot the deep. Bring your mind on the high hill: clouds sound up there as loud as an echo. Not a thought, not a word, not a sound; not a thought, not a thing, not an image. Dwelling where emptiness is no longer form just as the form appears. Now, transcending the words that you just tossed away. your mind: it doesnt need a thing to be resolved and it tells you all you want to hear: Buddha tells a different story
1100. 1101.
1102.
1103.
1104. Being sought the word got stitched to

1105.
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Even the chain is free What about a chain ring? Not a slightest contrast over there A landscape must be prepared with diligence for a painting. The attachment is noisy, the detachment is silent. Icicles dont go without dripping, clouds dont come without rain. Every one hundred years ones mind and body double their capacity to understand the world. While mind is nursed from the inside the body is nursed from the outside. candlelight at night. One does not reveals the other, though as one stares at the other, so the other stares back at one. Fleets of arched lights with their bow riding the arrows path.
1106. 1107.
1108.
1109. By sunlight, during the day, by
1110.
The ebony appearance of a pitch black night. Lacquer makes it shiny to push by opposition Moonlight choked by a Great Fog. The sheep
1111. London like Zen: To pull by consent,
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that no one remembers came back home - cloned.
1112.
Flowers: they fall north of the path while their fragrance spreads on the Deep South memories of a fact that yet has to happen. Events that are events no more are like flickering of extinguished candles. What are they? Theyre the path to emptiness, the mystery that makes the bamboo stick grow in silence. So far, though, the Heaven and earth both seem to obscure this vision.
1113. Words before the unknown and like
1114.
One seldom thinks of words as being unspoken. Thats why hearing words adds to the listener that strain that is common to things being transported. tree doesnt answer. Some say that you cannot talk to revelations before revelations talk to you. As an example: distant places lack frontiers so that trees can have roots in one country and blossom in another
1115. When I call the tree by its name the
275
country. To pronounce the tree name youd have to use two languages. If you just contemplate the tree with abandoned interest and go beyond what you know about trees (that you sincerely forget) then the tree will let you see the immeasurable image of the emptiness coming onto the manifest world. You can walk on this beaten track until you get awakened: therell always be memories and remembering that would try to talk to you. Try not to converse or respond. A muted mind is a mind kept intuitively alive. 1116. 1117. Grass sprouts on an arrow that never reached its target. Since he wouldnt answer your questions he must have known the questions before you came in. for one arrow only. 1119. 1120. Watching your days as they come and go: no time for longings A muted explanation doesnt apply to a reality check. One has to mouth
1118. A wife is for one man only; a target is
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words to explain what a salty taste is, though the intricacies of words dont make one feel what salty is. The wisdom comes only when one tastes it; so it is the Way. Of course a sweet taste would be a different story if it wouldnt have the same ending.
1121. 1122.
As long as body is alive mind is not reliable. To get awakened and find your trail back to reality is like jumping in a dried and empty well and trying a long-legged escape after. Cherry flowers are cherished; plum flowers snow on a white carcass The glance is meant to see the original face; instead it sees the late bloom of a tree that no longer exists. Borrowing stillness into my seventy years of eternity, washing the water of mud Not being entangles in things, not harvesting any ideology: mind
1123. 1124.
1125.
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breaking the hard cocoon Untainted path in the midst of stillness 1126. Compassion: The sight of your eyes gives birth to a mountain. The bright stream of tears irrigates the valley. hidden a little dot makes it leap out. Another dot sends the mind on a long journey. 1128. Looking into one self and finding out that what affirms is no more, what negates is nowhere to be found. Asking yourself: is there anything beyond that? the good-ness to another object. Keep your mind clean. Prior to any good or bad, there was the glory of an empty mind. Let both be, the good and the bad, but push them away gently when they bring into being distinctions and differentiations. If you dont do so, youll hear the original face hissing at you.
1127. In spite of the minds resolve to stay
1129. The bad-ness of an object could be
278 r Jalesh
1130.
Pete
All gates seem to be open behind the fences: to keep the thieves out youd have to answer every call. could still hear without listening, though as one is listening, one cannot hear at all. To compare this with seeing youd have to get thrown into the fearless circle of the unseen and let the visible reach you there. (That monk was raffled when he spat on the floor of the Buddha Hall. Compare this with what happened to the one doing hard stuff while walking the Way).
1131. In the Buddha Hall, at night, one
1132. The old fragrance of the living in the

Buddha Hall
1133. Is it the iron pot still learning about

what rusting is? 1134. A great galaxy aglow and above; a small candle extinct and below thoughts, wasted afterthoughts
1135. Haunting

1136.
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Cutting off a hole in the bed sheet to spy on the sky: if sky had roots they would be blue, for, its obvious that its branches and its flowers are white. The word enlightenment, if used properly, could help one boil rice using moonlight heat. corner of the Earth. His body doesnt stick anywhere though his mind is stuck in this marble bust. Listen to what he has to say!
1137.
1138. Hes been born monk on the other
1139. From sunrise to sundown the ants

walk back and forth over the old stone bridge. I miss them in the winter and I wait to see them back when spring comes. When they come out they know what all is about. What do they know when they hide underground? My mom used to say that the truth of man is hidden in Heaven. What about the ants truth, the fishs truth, the cormorants truth? We contemplate their truth in silence as if they couldnt die while living. 1140. Forms born aloft in the midst of clouds and winds.
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1141. Nobody can follow your steps in life.

As you trip and fall nobody could follow your steps in death. You are the guide that must see where the enduring of life goes. Every moment as a fateful moment though different: blooming in April, crumbling in September.
1142. Its been a whole range of facts and

the corresponding range of principles. The intention of facts is easy to discern. How principles apply to facts is a task too difficult to deal with. It looks like everything flows from there, the point of everlasting return, though in practice facts are perceived in the midst of principles that apply to a living moment. 1143. Through thick clouds no arrow can go through. If moonlight pierces through arrows can go through. To see the moonlight through youd have to wait for the moon to appear. The only subtlety of what was just said is that Zen should be done with patience and in the waiting: waiting but not craving
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1144. They cut the plowmans ox in two but

let the koan cat go unscathed.
1145. To cancel a thought you must first get

approval from your mind. Once you cancel it, mind could bring it back with no consent. 1146. Actually only when one opens his eyes the mystery ends; although it ends also when there is no one in sight. When seeing, thoughts rise. When not seeing, thoughts fall. The golden passage should be vacuumed using a traditional broom If there are no appearances theres nothing to penetrate. A proper penetration would show the appearances as projections of yourself with no back to step-back into and no front to lay your forehead on. Mind no clinging on anything and yet, are you still alive? Not even the healthiest flesh lasts forever A wandering mind through the original fields: along the path things and events are still seen like pearls from a jewel untold.
1147.
1148.
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1149.
Pete
The way at the feet of the mountain looks like a bridge across a bare land: it helps the mind to quickly invent a river. Then the wind let go its cry. To differentiate between what is real and what is just thinking is darn difficult. Emptiness is dark in appearance and black in substance though with each instance of manifestation it may emerge indistinctive of color, neither transparent nor colorless. No-mind stages: Zen sand, Zen dust, Zen mud. The bird among clouds, the moon among the stars Even if it is not larger than a second a pause is a pause is a pause In a real world the continuum is neither diminished by a pause nor increased If the pause didnt exist it would have made all the difference. This may explain the gap between mortality and immortality for a pause
1150.
1151. 1152.
1153. Every movement shares a pause.
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creates the new while a lack of a pause renews the old 1154. Cleaning a spear in a dragons throat wormwood is bitterer; the pain is bitterest. So bitter that it darkens the sight and deafens the hearing. 1156. 1157. Leaves already fallen, snows already blown away. The fingertips that hold the arrow are like buds opening to relieve fragrance. Though as you follow the arrow you could almost see the target that brought them to life. The universe is happy with itself and this is what love is. are still silent. The only sound comes from a thousand melting icicles. Therell be some days before the cold shade will become fragrance and the blooming buds will put on view flowers. The nesting leaves are still lacking a cause to rustle.
1155. The winter wind is bitter; the
1158.
1159. The blooming is still silent, the leaves
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1160. The magnolia flowers in a dazzling

fall It uproots all those Zen koans based on plum flowers falling... The question it poses to Zen is if size matter to awakening
1161. The banner says: Outward birds hatch

delusional eggs. 1162. The need of a failing Zen adept not to see anybody getting awakened is like the desire of a terminally ill patient to see that all people that move around die of benign diseases first. This Buddha, that Buddha Fractured realities teach about fractured wisdoms: the law for those whore coming or going is equal. hearing fishes howls unanswered. 1166. The places of nowhere could still be known in a long journey. Be ready for submission, act humble as if you were in a dream
1163. 1164.
1165. Living on distinctions, dying on

1167.
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A steady laughter is neither this, nor this! Its an insult to a smile raised the reflection principle to a new height. Zooming on a leaf a bird takes the leafs green color as a Heavens virtue - lost in a pile of extra abstract-data. Is there anything else but a practical knowledge for a bird? Yes, there is: beyond the transcendence of the common nature, a toad resting on a leaf could make a knowledge taste good.
1168. What a splendor! The morning dew
1169. When morning comes, night goes

away. Not if you change this tune to that fateful day
1170. Knowing the time when the universe

was born is not going to help you breed better dogs. If all lying DNA would be erased youd have in your hands the designs of a new species a species that aspires to bark that youd call dog. You realize that just by calling it dog you estranged yourself from your own creation. I tend to think that if youd avoid naming it dog the barking would be Okayed by Zen scholars.
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1171. To love life is to hate death. Raise a

finger eastward so that the west becomes indistinctive. 1172. Buddhas name spelled out: stepping on hot coals with icy feet going back to the original ground If one could stop just before getting there hed be able to see the illusion of reality as it gets through the initial metamorphosis and create differentiations. One would have to use a definite way of seeing, so that one can see thus without using discrimination, as if differentiation wouldnt create distinctions. One could do that by becoming a Zen-likeman with no physiological (senses) or Psychological (perception) residue. Whats that? I mean, we all know what life means and what death is
1173. Talking about a break through, like
1174. The crows are coming crowinginsults to a scarecrow

1175.
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Those things will always happen if you play with lights when no shadows are in sight. Above the mountain peak golden miniature-flies bouncing in the air: last glowing phenomena, I suppose. Like golden snowflakes: phenomena with no weight and sense of direction. Clothing in gold his murky bones stands at attention. Both thought and object - are locked on that spot if there is some mutual ground to this summon. For instance, a tree would not act in response when somebody thinks of it as tree. After thousand years trees should have perfected this relationship with the thoughts that name them, like dogs do when they ran after a ball thrown by their master. It might be that the fact that trees cant move is the cause of all misunderstandings
1176.
1177.
1178. When a thought rises up the object
1179.
Mind lost in the solitude of people waiting to be reincarnated.
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1180. 1181.
Pete
Awakened, with no robe or lamp to be transmitted at the ready Laugh is like a primeval Zen principle: it reminds one that the chances to become Buddha are very slim. The face reflected at the bottom of the well belongs to a Zen teacher that long time ago lived around here. What is this? Mountains are mountains, ponds are ponds, sticks are sticks, etc. Although, would I ever know if all these are essentially true? Truth to thinking is like the horse that rides back home with the rider sitting high in the saddle. The rider knows the way back home. What the horse knows? Talking about emptiness without knowing anything about is like trying to explain why a glass bell sound is transparent even after the bell gets shattered to dust. The armory of the awakened is made out of silk.
1182.
1183.
1184.
1185.

1186.
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Mind knows what emptiness hides but would never understand it Asking the mirror what face youd have to make if awakened The bell rings the chaos tumbles my true nature would judge such a statement. When ounces would gain be measured by height and width (half way weight measured as half way volume) To distinguish true nature from false nature one would have to walk with bare feet on hot coals without moaning Neither walking at a slow pace, nor in haste
1187.
1188. My nature is truthful. I wonder how
1189. 1190.
The mystery of a spring blossom as told by a weeping rain Suddenly the real world made sense while the Zen world confused the two of them. Turn your intuition off and youd see this Turn your reason off and youd see thus Thoroughly cleansing the ponds water surface of fallen petals
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1191.
Pete
Enough to know but not enough to forget. eternal; from the (true) reality-angle the shadow is eternal
1192. From the enlightened angle light is
1193.
Emptiness was here, sort of forming phenomena Though, once it did some work on it the form showed its own teeth A bird is riding on a lion-tail The seeds of wisdom looted from granaries: if they swell they become mind traps. Left to rot they release the smell of emptiness. No guards at the granaries, no police to catch the thieves Eight-arm Buddhas cannot catch a fly There have been thousand years of enlightened people and the world didnt change a bit. One mile from the wolfs den no red-hair rabbit to be found.
1194. 1195.
1196.
1197.

1198.
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It emerged as snow until it entered the water. the clouds I wondered what kind of Zen wed pursue if one day the moon would not return? No more enquiring the water about light or comparing its deep darkness to a flock of crows
1199. Waiting for the moon to go though
1200.
How question becomes answer? Is the comprehension of the question the same (as is) of the answer? The ritual of question-answer goes back to the beginning of the universe. Although, since in pure emptiness there was no arrow and no target where the aiming goes? One may find out that the mysterious aiming is a no-mind proposition. No-mind a good teacher indeed If you meditate on a subject youre not free. If you meditate avoiding a subject youre not free either. In the deepness of your mind there is another mind in which living, acting, thinking, dying have no imprint. Call it no-mind if you wish. And use it as if you were unborn.
1201.
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1202. There is only one moon at one time.

Once and only once it comes and goes. To come twice the moon would have to exit the world of emptiness. Who could witness such an unusual event? Only the mind, that when it sees is elusive and when it does not see imagines the emptiness turning the corner! The lead bowl is like what could be thoroughly conceived. Now, is the moon going to appear twice tonight? Is the lead bowl going to go down beyond the bottom of the lake? The spring season just began and so many beggars are already asking for attention!
1203. Who can find the footprints left by a

walking Buddha can talk harmlessly to the sun and the moon.
1204. Like a horned fox roaming the

grounds the old moon comes back every night as a new moon - with nothing on its way here, with nothing on its way there. 1205. Swiftly blossoming, hardly bearing fruits
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1206. The opening of ones mind towards

the invisible One: because everything is as is, it is everywhere. The thousand years old phenomena vanish from sight and all you can think of is where do they go? One day I went to see a mountain man who was famous for being born with three ears. I asked him how his hearing was and he said that he listened with all three ears but hears only with two. I translate: whats extra is empty of purpose. Is it extra empty of implication?
1207.
Its right in front of you. Close your eyes to see it, close your mind to be part of it. there is a chance for the mind to get the truth out of it in a flush. A story says that between Peking and Lassa there used to be an unknown spot on the map that if passed one could hear the thousand directions of the universe singing one song in one voice at unison. Not many people went there though, most of them afraid that theyd die if they dared Nowadays, for tourists, to see that spot is easy, though to get out of it is
1208. When a word is unpronounceable
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still hard. The moral is: if you put a moth through a flame you dont put moth balls under your pillow to keep your awareness awake: is the moth still around? The other moral is that if you dont put stress on events the events are not going to put stress on you.
1209. 1210.
Seeing all never changing things in one glance. Life within what is alive is impermanent. The alternative would be to be a life within mist and dust and snow, like a breeze seeking a target that is constantly changing its place around. Did you ever hear the clasp of a single knee? framed in spiritual sayings. When the mind is lit it gets to the point, although only when mind is extinguished it recognizes the point as its final destination.
1211.
1212. Emptiness framed in forms, forms

1213. 1214. As a matter emptiness of course
295
the
Awakening is 99% candor and 1% doubt. The other way around could work also if you cannot let yourself get lost in the process. It neither knows nor could it imagine the truth. The white cherry flowers know more. What time and space are to a flower? Neither using sightless eyes nor hearless ears A sixteen billion year old mystery and going with every breeze
1215. Attachment is the breath of delusion.
1216.
Through clasped hands an iron fly finds her Way out; the Way she used to fly in is closed; the Way she used to fly out is closed. Shadows, spreading as they come, vanishing as they go. Clear water all the way down. Tales of guests that wholeheartedly would not talk as the meal gets served
1217.
1218.
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1219.
Pete
When an event takes shape the emptiness opens its gates: the moonlight is rising, no waves though on the whole ocean surface. The barren beauty of the original self: unraveled stillness. It is obvious that near is not far; though it is less obvious that far is not near. You look at a dry tree and see a no thing. You turn your eyes from it and see the thing, leaves rising into the breezy air, flowers like snowclouds blooming. Mind never fails to see what nature stops telling. incident under a witnessing moon and not being allowed to tell anybody of it except to Buddha. What one gets there is not to be given even to those that are letting their life go. Unbound silence that resonates
1220. 1221.
1222.
1223. Being tied down to the flagpole
1224.
The universe expands, gets emptier day by day: in Heaven God grows silver hair. On Earth the moonlit gate
297
opens wide. A silver net to keep the intruders out. Milk sprinkled on snow 1225. To see through phenomena and yet not to know: what liberates - enslaves, whet enslaves - liberates. Things are not what they are as long as opposites exist. Using an ordinary eye you can see the One emerging, building and destroying the reality. lack of sound doesnt indicate what this labor is. And then the crowing of a crow: the crow could say Im the crowing of the crow What a flute could say? One thousand sounds stolen away by a carved wooden cylinder with holes in it. It is not clear when the sound would be emitted or heard. Although, the vastness waits. Not a single sound, not even a drop of a sound. Although, one can see a crow crowing before the first snow flake comes into view. When the flute labors to make a sound?
1226. A flute labors sound; although the
1227. The silence that follows the leaves

spinning to the ground on a rainy day. As wind stops the moonlight
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commence its dancing on the water surface. A leaf swims like a leaf, a fish swims like a fish.
1228.
To transcend the talkative one has to shut off comprehension; talkative though, is not what untold is; yet, there is no reason to fear that your mind could be beaten by what comprehension is not. Even then, who is the posthumous face trying to convince you of the contrary? The beginners mind: knowing cause, nor effect. neither
1229.
1230. Im fluid, youre fluid, time is fluid,

space is fluid, and the emptiness permeates the whole universe. 1231. That moment when the bird calls her wings to act: there is not need to call them twice. Though, the wings regain their right to be detached from any calls as they rest. Mind doing things with the grace of an unknown God: the unseen beyond clouds driving the seen; does the
1232.
299
unseen carry the whip under the sleeve? 1233. Claiming that one word can be used to call one thousand things like the word tree calling a whole forest of trees At the beginning there was a word for each one of the trees around and the experience was the same for other things also. Nowadays there is no thing for which there is no word for. And this is the source of all problems. Myriad of problems come from individualization, generalization and synthesis. Live things are mortified, dead things are revived. As a remedy to global enlightenment all words should be retired. have to follow is the one that I just told you about here. The other beaten path is known only to you. Youd still have to come across it and grow with it. A koan is what mind thinks about no-mind. Intuition is summoned to respond while the mind participates as a secret witness. Two statements on reverse (The sweet feeling of resting after a long fatigue! The sweet feeling of being fatigued after a long sleep)
1234. One of the beaten paths that youd
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describe the awakening. Besides this metaphor there is that serious approach to Zen To know what was the original face one has to face again and again the question Who am I? The image of God comes easily into ones mind. Should one drop this image in order to have the original truth taken into account? Only if Who am I could encompass in ones belief a nameless thing rather than a word. Although, whats pity is that so many words are getting thrown into exile in order to be ordained koans and so guide one to get a difficult answer to an easy question: Who am I? Youd have to trust your guts, to walk straight towards it, and never wobble
The little blue book on Zen Prolegomena to Zen of the Realization Realm
(Fragments recovered from a book-length text that vanished in a computer crush).
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When one says I what are the limits of I? The limits are those that correspond to the empirical (emotional and psychological) I. The relation of such an I to the relative world is ambivalent: on one hand I is called to know what reality is and on the other hand it is called to know the I itself. While reality seems to make apparent (to disclose) its nature the I sees itself as not being part of the reality but distinguished from it, separated from it: for the mind I is just a witness of the reality in transformation. If one thinks of a mirror - that mirror - when compared to I seems to be just a dumb witness, that is, it reflects and reproduces what seems to exist as reality. The I is not just mirroring given that it is an aggregate of senses that defines reality in a complex way, a living way, a vivid way a way that is not suitable to the inanimate matter. In a manner of speaking,I as reality (anybodys I) could be perceived as a reflective device that adds its own characteristics to the empirical reality. The added information comes from the self-reliance of I with reference to what it reflects and its detachment from it, its disconnection from what is inherent to matter. Seen as such the reality becomes subjective and with it I becomes a relative I. How could one understand the absolute I, an I that carries with it the knowledge that incorporates the whole infinite universe if not by assuming that this absolute I has something of a spiritual nature in it that makes possible the existence of a relative I? The I in its transformation into an absolute-I represents the fundamental unknown that the awakening moment should bring forth and taking nothing else into account has to be researched in view of whatever else we want to know about the absolute. It is alleged that something happens during awakening that brings the I together with the original nature in its infinite manifestation, an experience that is not supposed to come about to an ordinary mind, sort of a chance of the mind-I to become something else or to be part of something else; is this experience a true fact coming out of realitys miscalculation of what mind-I is supposed to know or an illusion of the mind in search of an absolute truth that cannot be reached by a living mind and as such remains forever unknown? Why the absolute truth should be different than the relative truth and belong to a different reality that cannot be known by
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a relative I? A relative I is using senses to know the world. As far as reality goes, I is just an empirical object as any other object. As I tries to understand reality though a thinking process it puts it in words in order to build knowledge. In this process the reality gets alienated, estranged, misleading, deceptive and so untrue. Its obvious that things dont depend on thoughts. Only thoughts depend on thoughts. Whilst thoughts and language didnt exist there was no mind. As far as mind goes though, even the inner awareness of reality or the awareness of something that is beyond the objective world cannot be interrogated without making use of thinking and language. If one tries to change the direction of the seer so that the inanimate world becomes the observer one meets another challenge: if thinking and uttering alienates the aspects of reality in its true state how then thinking of whatever-cannot-be-thought would render any glimpse into some truth? Isnt such an attempt another fabulous illusion about things (like the original face, the ultimate truth, etc.) that cannot be questioned without getting entrapped in a web of abstractions that cannot illuminate any truth because theyre empty of it? A subsequent question that we should not be afraid to ask is if this pursuit of an ultimate truth is not in fact an illness, a Zen defined illness which is adopted by Zen in order to resolve and cure other subtle illnesses of the mind exhibited - for the sake of an example - by religious visionaries, parapsychology claimants, reincarnated spirits, holy mediums, etc. By migrating the mental delusions onto a spiritual domain mind creates a virtually controlled environment for the mind. In this controlled environment super-mental illusions catalyze the mental activity by directing it to focus upon a non-causal world, a nonconsequential world where there are no threats for the mind to run into and no coercion to veto, so that the repression mechanism that seems so damaging to the I wouldnt flare up to prepare a response. This being said we would discuss the object-reality as a seer in a noncommittal way, accepting such an angle in order to play a mind-game and so trying to attempt to see how mind could go into knowing nomind. The vintage point of an object as a seer may underline immediately the sense of artificiality and inadequacy that a language has while trying to grasp the ineffable out of reality. Why mind needs to see that inexpressible reality, a reality that inhabit the no-thinking, and look into the original essence of the universe - the emptiness in its manifestation - and in due course into the subject of the ultimate truth? What happened when the no-limit-to- knowledge or omniscience came into sight to the reasoning mind trapped into a mind-body creature? How could we understand the evolution from a universal
303
mind to some mind acting within a body? Lets say that by practicing Zen meditation one gets delivered from ones mind. What cessation of mind means for a living being? What is thinkable becomes unthinkable; devoid of reasoning the body becomes an object. Is the body, in this state, able to sense the universal mind and participate in the aggregate of things as a knower of the finite and the infinite truth as well? It is obvious that a living-being as a body being transformed into an object signals no-life. To the extent that we could conceive an object being aware of the finite and infinite with no limitations of the thinking implies no-life. That an object could be aware of itself and of the surrounding universe says that matter relates to matter with no need of whatever we call reasoning or knowledge of Even when we reverse the angle of the seer and make an object a point of reflection of the universe we mentally acknowledge that a no-eye (a no perception) seer has still to deal with laws of nature that exist beyond consciousness that are only partially assembled as human-knowledge. The object-reality could be approached as a no-mind reality where construct like mind-object or mind-consciousness dont exist. This vintage point should allow us to extract some apriori knowledge of the universal existence before the reasoning mind appeared and after the mind-reasoning would get extinguished. We could eventually narrow the whole subject to two questions: 1) why mind-reasoning appeared on the universal plane? 2) Is mind another dimension of reality? What is obvious is that an incorporated (human) reasoning-mind carries the weight of the universal evolution towards spirituality. How could one deal with spiritual or transcendental issues while using and ephemeral mind? Most of the argumentation about these issues is based on self-evident proofs or believes and so they get better described as metaphors of the mind that dwell in that part of the brain where fantasies, superstitions, mystical believes, divine utterances coexist unchecked by reason. If mind was indeed a universal dimension before mind-reasoning appeared it didnt care about selfevident proofs, it didnt have any cravings to know what It is, it didnt think of things as having some nature that could be different than the true nature, or differentiate phenomena from the essence. The scope of such an original, universal mind would be to equally be aware of everything that there is on a finite scale and also on an infinite scale. Is the awakening experience getting to catch sight of this? What the awakened mind acknowledges is that what it is is what is It and that there is nothing else above or below it. Reality speaks outright to mind! No question about If reality speaks to a sane mind there are no misgivings, no uncertainties, and no illusions. For an object however, such exchange does not take place since an object doesnt have a sensitive body (senses, feelings, perceptions) in order to make
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contact with the surrounding reality and create an imprint similar to what ones mind creates when reality asks the mind for attention. Then what is the difference between seeing reality as is using mind and the reality that no-mind Zen claims of seeing? What is the ultimate truth seen by ones Zen-mind when it penetrates the reality and becomes part of the original emptiness in its manifestation? Did the world have any meaning before consciousness aroused? If the whole world created by reason including the humankind with its moral, cultural, intellectual values is not all that there is it seems that whats left unknown has meaning though no meaning had been given to it yet. Would this left unknown become completely known one day so that one could become omniscient? What does it mean to be omniscient? And also, what does it mean to be liberated from the cyclic existence? According to Zen the last two states omniscient and liberated from the cyclic existence - are consequential given that by attaining one youll get the other. All these expressions spring from mind tendencies to cut loose any limitations and go beyond the common sense that inhabit its works. These tendencies generate dreams, fantasies, illusions, metaphysics and Gods. The questions they all launch cannot be answered before one reaches the illogical impasse of Zen. Zen presents itself as a religion due to its Buddhist roots, though most of its practices old and new depart from those origins and tend to echo nihilistic philosophies. To distinguish Zen from those philosophies wed have to define what Zen is and what is it useful for. If Zen cannot be usually acknowledged as being different from nihilism it is because the illusion shaped by perceiving reality creates an insurmountable crisis for the mind as it tries to reach the other illusion - presided over by Zen the awakening. If words cant be played as instruments of truth the illusion that is nearing the ultimate truth belongs to Zen. This choice carries with it the hazard of favoring a teaching without words in which a Zen student moves from common language to a koan and from a koan to an even more advanced koan meant to enlarge the realm of awakening. In theory there are various levels of enlightenment: the higher the level the less its surface could be permeable to words. Eventually what remains to be communicated about the higher levels is outside the language and understanding. How is then communicated? Through direct experience of It! Such experience has nothing to do with philosophizing or with meditation on concepts including the concept of emptiness and would have to be reduced to something revealed as objective but not empirical, that could be intuitively sensed but difficult to be grasped or expressed, rather inexpressible or devoid of a sense that is part of our day to day
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thinking and as such emptied of mind constructs. How one can accept such a hypothesis to begin with? The world seen by the enlightened and the empirical world share identical phenomena. Therefore the enlightened is seeing the same world though, in his vision, the world is neither exterior nor centered in the I. The difference between the two worlds is generic to initial conventions and hypothesis of the two points of view. The reasonable reality seeks solid grounds with phenomena set in rock-hard and inflexible laws that illuminate their manifestation. The enlightened world subverts the reality of any phenomena and so their meaning uncovered by the reasoning process. Testimonies of the after-awakening experience tend to invalidate this difference by letting the enlightened world to be integrated with the reasoning reality. The take is that reality has already within it the view of what the awakening brings forth. Its like as if before the awakening happens the world as is is doubted. Or its like saying that yes, reality may exist and show itself as phenomena in their manifestation, although it would appear even more so after its transcendent aspect is revealed. Once its transcendent aspect is revealed the seen reality acquires the quality of completeness. But, isnt this completeness always present in every moment when mind and no-mind merge, when knowing and unknowing, reason and intuition play together? What is the difference between what is known reality and what is sensed as transcending reality? The difficulty to understand how one could look at the world before reason was born or to look at mind before the thinking mind was born comes from the fact that were still trying to use mind to be able to see into it. Most readings of the inanimate world come filtered by our six senses and at some extent in this process the inanimate world becomes existential. Nobody could tell what mind if any existed before the thinking mind was born. Without an interpretation of some kind of what kind of mind existed before thinking mind well always live within uncertainty and may accept fantasy and delusion as answers. The informational field underlying intelligence - that created the universe and gave birth to the living world, what actually is it? Lets say for now that the underlying intelligence penetrates all things and beings. One does not become aware of it in any way and so it looks like easy to make it part of the universal unconsciousness. The effort to make it part of consciousness would never succeed for the reason that consciousness in human terms means that one is able to distinguish ones self from the external world, a world that is drawn out of ones experience. If we talk about the inanimate world the effort to make this world have any way of seeing is just a projection of ones self onto the indefinite universe to knowledge. The need to create this illusion of a mental regress to an indefinite state of mind comes from the need to explain that founding
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base of the world emptiness and the way it unfolds phenomena. Once mind starts unfolding it, it obscures the original pure and simple truth. If one uses mind to get there, no matter how deep the analysis goes, mind keeps returning upon itself, over and over again. The original underlying intelligence that preceded mind could never be proven that it exists through a mental process that involves thinking and words to express thinking. Thats why the concept of an underlying intelligence like any other concept is loosing, under scrutiny, the power to clarify matters related to emptiness and in some respect remains as elusive as the concepts of God or absolute are. Once again, what is the underlying intelligence? Could one call it mind? If it is mind, is it an omniscient mind? As humans were going to spend our life while reasoning and wed die failing to answer an infinite number of questions, failing to understand or recognize an infinite number of things as existent or real. Zen tries to avoid any of these reasoning traps by degrading thinking and verification of truth brought into being through thinking (experience and certification of truth based on facts) and by appealing to intuition to validate truths beyond reasoning. If reasoned, the meaning of the universe before the birth of the living mind would create sort of a hallucinatory reality in which the sensed reflection does not exist. What is the underlying intelligence at the base of all things that gives to the universe the capacity to mirror itself? If we talk about the inanimate universe in which the living mind was part of the becoming it looks as if living mind imprint was already present within the underlying intelligence of the whole universe. The living mind would therefore be part of the hidden design of the original universe. Obviously, when one says that awakening is a stage in which an individual mind merges with the underlying intelligence of the universe, one means less than saying that ones mind catches sight of the original mind; and obviously one says less than that ones mind experiences the original mind of the original universe. Those are just Zen metaphors. Humans are complex organisms so that this pendulum movement between selfidentity and the identity of self as reflected onto the external world could be stopped for a mere moment during meditation. That moment is felt like a dissolution of mind and body that liberates the mind from the burden of thinking and the body from listening to its web of senses. The irony is that a true dissolution would mean death - which is what the great death put forward by awakening stands for. Lets consider the physical world as we know it from physics. Is the perceived world nothing else but space, time, energy (material particles in interaction)? Materialists use the material base to explain
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the universe so that matter becomes fundamental while the laws of interaction become peripheral? Physics though says that those laws are as objective as the material world is and that they include space and time as part of subtle equations that govern the universe. Such laws have been already discovered, checked out, translated in math statements, verified, confirmed, etc. When one says that nature is omniscient one refers to these strata of equations that can explain how the universe manifests itself as phenomena. Is awakening lending to a mind this omniscience feature? Due to the limitation of the mind such a transfer seems doubtful. Though, going back to the concept of omniscience, what is the meaning of this concept when applied to humans? In that purported merge of the awakened mind with the universal underlying intelligence, what omniscience means to a mind imprisoned in a human body? Omniscience cant be called to fill a space that is confined Then, is awakening only a mere projection of a limited mind onto this infinite land of universal intelligence that we call informational field? A projection from within merges with a projection from without! The projection from without needs some explanation since it implies that the object of contemplation could be a subject on its own. The purpose of changing the vintage point from subject to object is neither meant to create a true philosophical angle nor to subvert a reasoned approach to reality and so create an absurd realm for the mind. The new vintage point should though produce a new conditioning for the thinking process. The effect of such conditioning is similar to what Zen tries to suggest when it talks about mind before mind-object thinking appeared. In that pre-mind formless reality all categories could be seen as merged or diluted in such a way that no distinction, discrimination, dichotomy, cause and effect, coming and going could be conceived. Such hypothesis creates an incomprehensible texture of thoughts which seem to revolve in a loop as they try to grasp a reality outside the mind and yet use language to express a point of view that has to develop meanings before becoming text If this discussion would somehow lead us into the realm of metaphors or pure illusions, so be it! What is it to be mind as opposed to be just part of the underlying informational field? The informational field is the intelligent background on which all that exists matter or living beings interacts and communicates with the whole universe. Mind usually works by extracting, verifying and confirming laws that exist within the informational field. What mind extracts as a law is part of the relative domain of reality used in the thinking process and so it is subjective in nature and limited as far as truth is concerned. In the analysis of its own work mind finds itself trapped in a strange puzzle: on one hand mind would like to use common sense or science in order to understand the nature of the informational field (underlying
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intelligence) for the same reason that mind uses common sense or science to make sense of what mind is. On the other hand mind makes a suicidal attempt when it tries to understand awakening experience which is by its own course uncommon and unscientific. If one takes a step back and peeks at what Buddhism says about reality and existence one finds that things - as far as existence is concerned are empty, they have a non inherent existence, they have no intrinsic existence, they are a no-essence or a no-nature in their own right. On the contrary, the informational field could not be seen as such. Firstly, it cant be seen as having any relation to things - though it permeates them all. Secondly, it exists in its own terms as the essence (so that it doesnt need to be verified or altered by experience). In the quest of understanding it mind could attach thoughts, believes and faith to it and so make it look like having life (being) on its own (God and the like). Fortunately this is not the case with the awakening experience. Since were not yet talking about awakening were bound to repeat that everything in the universe is governed by the presence and manifestation of the underlying intelligence with which mind would merge when the realization happens. It would be useful to move a little bit towards understanding mind which for the sake of a common sense or a scientific approach is a function of the brain. The brain is an organ meant to operate within the realm of reality (phenomenal) and develop through perceptions learning that accumulates as knowledge and so builds an abstract model that gets nearer and nearer to what objective reality might be. The model of reality as it is built by mind is always conditioned by subjective hypothesis that subvert the objectivity and molds the understanding to some pragmatic extent in which seen reality is slightly off of what reality in reality is. In this pragmatic approach as we already mentioned, mind builds a progressive model that narrows the gap between subjective and objective view of reality. By repeating this same idea over and over again we realize that this process of knowing further and deeper will never end. Its easy to find out that the empirical mind through consciousness assembles knowledge about existence and nonexistence of reality while the informational field though partially acknowledged in a logical mind process remains unknown and unknowable in its very nature. Mind thinking gives to concepts the appearance of truth. The informational field though it looks at this moment just being an abstract concept, a conception holds the ultimate truths of the universal existence. Therefore there is a precise distinction between mind and the informational field and the idea that they could converge on the same intelligent plane during awakening
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is a hypothesis that needs to be proven true. If we go back to some philosophical concepts used by Kant such as apriori judgments and the plane of immanence we notice that these concepts connect us to the pure reasoning mind. We call it pure reasoning because it has to deal with mind invented concepts that have nothing to do with reality. Whats the difference between this pure reasoning and the pure truth that is brought to light by awakening experience? When awakening happens mind needs authentication of what it sees with no association with whatever could be asserted in connection to experience, thinking or knowledge. Such authentication can come neither from the empirical reality nor from the mind itself. When it happens mind finds a reference plane that existed before mind appeared and this is the informational field. At that fortuitous moment the subjective world gets dissolved into the objective world and one gets a direct view of what a no-mind reality looks like. Is there any way to extract out of this statement some certainty that awakening is this kind of merge? First one could sense that this informational field (underlying intelligence) is not separated from consciousness since it permeates everything, including the mind (consciousness) that there is. One could redirect such thinking by saying that the merge of mind with the underlying intelligence is revealed by awakening rather than construed by it. In other words saying that mind merges with (gets dissolved into) informational field is more of a kind of discovery that mind is part of the informational field without knowing it. The awakening is just opening the mind (revealing a passage to the mind) towards the informational field, a world where emptiness manifests itself freed of any shadows of rationality and where truth could be apprehended directly. At that moment of merging mind holds onto the underlying intelligence and has the illusion of having an external experience when in fact the underlying intelligence as seen comes from the dissolution of consciousness as a vehicle of knowledge. The mind does not dissolve with it but assumes a state of wonder. The same mind that one is using to know the particulars is the one that participates in this no-mind state where mind assumes its original state of being a living particle of the underlying intelligence. The argument here is simple: the awakening and its consequential reviews happen inside ones mind. It is felt as if mind vanishes into some vintage point where there is no-mind though mind is the witness of it. Finally, the mind withdraws from a relative world of cognition and plunges into the transcendental world. This transcendental world is essentially empty and has no existence apart from its projection as infinite awareness. Nothing that is known as being knowledge resides there be it phenomena or consciousness made-up essence. This sudden and brief communication of mind with the underlying intelligence oddly
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enough is still subjective as it occurs inside a subject though the subject seems totally disengaged; also it is trapped by ones mind though mind is on the verge to become no-mind; it is contained though it seems devoid of container. The proof that such experience is subjective is that it is felt differently by every awakened individual and that each experience if expressed or not keeps being relevant only to the one who felt the experience within. Why a short event of awakening is needed when it proves to be incompatible with an empirical mind? Is such an event an insight into the objectivity of the world into which we live our ordinary life? If we gaze at the other factor that is part of the awakening merge the underlying intelligence that is responsible for whatever is transcendent, essence, absolute, and omniscient could such an entity be known? Does one know in the merging state what it is? As mind returns to its dual state the underlying intelligence hides away in its incomprehensible likeness of mind that reaffirms to the mind its natural limits. Awakening is an attempt of the mind to fit the empirical world into a transcendental form. Post-awakening fits the transcendental world back into its empirical form. None of the worlds is fully resolved and in this endless oscillation between what is existent and what is transcendental, mind tends to break the confines of what is known as real. As it goes back to a reality that is understood and known it finds that something has to be said while experiencing the awakening and the transcendental. What if nothing could be said? There is only one way one can use to look at truth in its transcendental aspect, truth that the universe embodies in its timeless, permanent state: this only way is non-mental. A transcendental truth does not fit into any knowledge be it scientific or otherwise. To offer a description of such a truth through words is ineffective as long as it does not provide a direction of awareness that is outside of the text meaning. In order to do so one has to reverse the subject-object direction of knowledge and try to understand how the objective world sees the subjective world. This leads to a philosophical impossibility. Lets try first to imagine how an object a stone, for instance sees the world of the living mind. A stone does not have mind senses sight, hearing, etc. or consciousness. For this reason whatever humans call knowledge is unknown to it. What is the advantage of such a point of view for the one who wants to get awakened? The most important advantage is that such a point of view cannot be placed in a mental framework. (Were trying to get to see the emptiness by entering the mind through a back door). How a stone (an object, a particle) sees the surrounding universe? It is scientifically proven that any particle in the universe is omniscient
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about itself and the entire surrounding universe. (I prefer to use in this case the word omniscient rather than the word knowledge which is recognizable as a mental process). This omniscience consists of a cognizable reality that is neither made out of ideas nor is it made out of any other processes that belong to mind. Imagine the universe in its original states of affairs and before any living creature appeared. In attempting to see such reality one has to use mind, though mind is what we try to remove from that reality. By saying that lets try to detach ourselves from the mental world and by doing so to look with the eyes of a non-mental world to what is going on around us. The non-mental world lacks senses, desires, craving for seeing and knowing. The reality of the mind changes into a reality having nothing to which it could relate to, since there are no words (concepts) that could be used to experience it on a mental ground. At such a stage concepts such as relative, absolute, phenomena, essence, etc. make no sense. If one thinks of such reality as approaching the image of the emptiness in its manifestation one is still far away from understanding what emptiness means. The understanding of emptiness becomes undemanding if one thinks of the universe in Gods terms, as being nothing but an intertwined web of subtle information that is present in every single speck of the infinite void and therefore present and manifested in every mind-body also. The work to awaken mind is like a process in which that web in unwoven until suddenly - the insight kicks the entanglements of mind out of ones body revealing the nomind state of the original world. As in any other mystical experience the knowledge of this original world takes various paths and forms, some that acknowledge that mind is the originator of what it is revealed, others asserting that what is seen is beyond mind and thus resorting to intuition to assume the role of the mind when mind is mind no more. To achieve this merge state with the original universe one has to follow certain practices with strictness, correctness and constancy be it prayer, meditation, recitation of verses or mantras, singing, dancing, getting intoxicated. Almost all practices deny common values of the living such as reasoning (desires, pleasures, perception, thinking, understanding and their ordinary outcome) which is considered misleading to knowledge and therefore far from the truth. Every mind allows reality to be sensed and arranged in a particular way. What would mean for a mind to get rid of this particular way? First of all mental processes are internal and therefore there is no such a thing as out of body experience (not even when awakening occurs) if mind is witnessing it. By removing the dualistic view of the world and equating mind-body-self with the whole universe an illusion gets born: it looks like a passage towards something out of the ordinary that as far as life is concerned has
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only negative predicates: it is still, it is frozen, it could be conceptualized as no-life and by the will of the mind could be called essence, One, ultimate truth, original face, etc. At that moment, the body that just before the awakening experience was conceived as a conglomerate of atoms, molecules, parts with characteristics and functionality becomes a big particle, a chunk of flesh drown in a scoop of a thought a single, macro thought that annihilates the mind and so reduces to zero the brains comprehensive ability. It is as though mind gets integrated as a piece of a puzzle that fits perfectly the cosmic design. There is no magic in it if we presume that mystical is not magic per se but a matter of physics and philosophy that sublimate and so convert a body-mind functioning into a one for all a coherent spin that obeys the universal spin. At that moment it is still hazardous to consider that during a short moment of awakening - one can abolish the motion of space and time and so assert the emptiness as what is then seen as It due to the fact that awakening seen image is still perceived (perception) by the awakened (observer) and so the experience is a mind construct. Though the bases of such an experience seems unnatural one may doubt that de-rationalization of the mind is not the work of the mind itself. One may presume that the work of awakening modifies the manner in which the brain is wired so that the phenomenal world is awakened, turned down, diffused, blurred and eventually pushed away - leaving in its place an empty space to be filled by what mind carries as transcendental. Even though such a state occurs when the rational gate of the mind is closed and the thinking is grounded, yet, it enables the transcendent to present itself to the reminiscent mind, namely the mind that arises from the intuition. That unified view of the universe that is given to the awakened mind is still mind for there is no such a thing as cosmic underlying intelligence operating in ones mind. Is the awakening experience proving that there is such a merge, that the underlying intelligence can operate in certain circumstances in ones mind? As long as we review with our mind any truth submitted to us there is always this idea that what we think about differs from the truth, that there is more to it, a subtle and ineffable truth that we cannot discriminate. If we talk about the underlying intelligence as being a real presence rather than a mental subterfuge any utterance about it gets a mystical color. Though, as I already mentioned earlier, I cannot see how without an underlying intelligence the universe and the thinking mind could exist. Not even a complete chaos could exist since as such a thing is conceived it becomes organized on an intelligent (mental) ground. The problem we are facing is how to connect the
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cosmic underlying intelligence with mind in order to get some philosophical base to work upon. If we start by affirming that without the underlying intelligence the reality, the existence and mind would not be conceivable this is not enough. With no underlying intelligence there is neither reason to see the living existent emerging nor the mind becoming a product of the living existent. Why? First because of our rationality at fault here that sees the evolution of life following a certain plan. Did dinosaurs think of any planning? No. Humans do. There is a certain level of consciousness in every being that has the capacity to perceive, reflect, learn and acquire cognition about the surrounding reality. But only the human mind could see the relationship between cause and effect as one of the universal laws that govern the existent and the nonexistent. As opposed to the human mind that is limited, the underlying intelligence is vast and permeates every particle of the objective reality. The underlying intelligence is the cause of the whole evolution in which mind is its most marvelous effect. How mind could emerge from the underlying intelligence? Since God is taboo to Zen one cannot lend to such intelligence animated qualities. People who are poised to look at the universe by using rigorous scientific lenses could not object that intelligence is a characteristic that belongs not only to the human mind but to the whole universe in transformation. Some prefer to call the underlying intelligence differently. For instance they translate it as the underlying field of information in order to make it sort of a computerized entity and so escape from the burden to prove that such underlying intelligence would have to be sort of a living layer of the universe. Scientists also may not object that this information field consists of laws based on a thesaurus of original information that evolves and gets altered as it seeks to reflect the dynamic (global state) of the universe. For physicians the underlying field of information is stored in the quantum matter that evolved during the development of the universe and got recorded as knowledge that got inherited by the next level of the cosmic universe in transformation, and so on and so forth. This process of recording laws inherited in the evolution process is basic to matter (quantum physics) and to living world as well (DNA). Moreover this process of recording the inherited laws is not random but implemented with the direction of evolution in mind. The recorded information gets upgraded with new aspects of the old laws so that new versions of the laws could be followed in the evolution process. The relief that comes with this interpretation is that no mystical thought could emerge from it, such as that all laws-tocome were already contained in the original source of information. One may even argue consistent with this view that if the information field would be originally designed and so act as a supervisor of
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progress as planned such an evolution mishap as dinosaurs era would not exist. It is thus true that the universe evolves through trial and error and that ultimately it would correct itself in order to attain the product that fulfills the informational fields ability to know itself through the other. Though the informational field is infinitely complicated it gets partially understood and known through its phenomenal manifestation. In order to decipher the information fields equations humans use language and math to infer the truth of the reality they clothe. The assumption is that these laws implemented by the underlying informational field are meant to be recognized. If one says that reality as is and the underlying intelligence cannot be cognized directly, nobody could say that reality does not exist. Of course, as we see and explain reality there is this thought that we use the mind constructs to build a reality that would best serve our pragmatic needs. We do the same with the information field although because of its abstract and unsubstantial nature we know that such a field cannot be perceived or contained by a thinking mind. To look for some evidence that the informational field exists one has to make the field part of consciousness, since the consciousness is tolerant on regard to any concept that is presented to it as abstract hypothesis.
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Books on Zen to be published in this series: The little orange book on Zen of the Realization Realm The little pink book on Zen of the Appearance The little red book on Zen of the Cutting Realm The little green book on Zen of the Direct Pointing Realm The little white book on Zen of the Benefiting Others Realm The little black book on Zen of the Dynamic Connection Realm The golden book on Zen of the Great Awakening
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I think, therefore I am not! Buddha Dharma everywhere

Little Blue Book Zen Peter Jalesh

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Little Blue Book Zen Peter Jalesh

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I think not, therefore I am am!

Buddha Dharma everywhere

The little blue book on

The little blue book on Zen

Other books authored ___________________

On sale at Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.com and selected book stores

The little blue book on

The little blue book on Zen

The little blue book on Zen

CONTENTS _________________________ Preface

Prolegomena to Zen of the Realization Realm

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The capping phrases

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The Koan and the capping phrases makeup

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Notes, aphorisms, capping phrases

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A tree bows, Buddha picks a fruit

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69. 70. 71.

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The embarrassment from judging right from wrong

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142. 143. 144.

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155. 156. 157.

160. 161. 162.

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178. 179. 180. 181. 182.

183. 184. 185.

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231. 232. 233.

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