see you in the dark

Today, Saturday, March 28, lights out from 8:30 to 9:30pm., and we'll be together again.

The light of our mindfulness will shine, and it shall be not Plum Village, but "Plum World"...

To learn more please refer to:
http://www.earthhour.org/about/

both sides, now

this post is dedicated to my dear friends Matthias Hammerl, my best dj, and Arnold Novak, dear Dharma brother -- this song has never been as beautiful as when in Plum Village Arnold sang it and Ed played it on the guitar, never so simple and sweet -- the version to be heard here is by Joni Mitchell herself, recorded a few years ago.
Thank you for the love, joy and support -- Happy Continuation!

to watch the video of this version, please go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ

photo: ocean moon ©lakewentworth; to see more:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/roome/2370001916/in/set-72157604303324854/

may I be a bed for all who wish to rest

18
May I be a protector for those without one,
A guide for all travelers on the way;
May I be a bridge, a boat and a ship
For all who wish to cross (the water).

19
May I be an island for those who seek one,
And a lamp for those desiring light,
May I be a bed for all who wish to rest
And a slave for all who want a slave.

20
May I be a wishing jewel, a magic vase,
Powerful mantras and great medicine,
May I become a wish-fulfilling tree
And a cow of plenty for the world.

21
Just like space
And the great elements such as earth,
May I always support the lives
Of all the boundless creatures.

22
And until they pass away from pain,
May I also be the source of life
For all the realms of varied beings
That reach unto the ends of space.



Shantideva

excerpt from Chapter III – Full Acceptance of the Awakening of the Mind, in A Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, translated by Stephen Batchelor, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala, 1979/2007

freer

If we have been trying for years to attach our hose to this or that faucet, and each time have discovered that it wasn’t enough, there will come a moment of profound discouragement. We begin to sense that the problem is not our failure to connect with something out there, but that nothing external can ever satisfy the thirst. This is when we are more likely to begin a serious practice. This can be an awful moment – to realize that nothing is ever going to satisfy. Perhaps we have a good job, a good relationship or family, yet we’re still thirsty – and it dawns on us that nothing really can fulfill our demands. We may even realize that changing our life – rearranging the furniture – isn’t going to work, either. That moment of despair is in fact a blessing, the real beginning.

[…]

Christians call this realization the “dark night of the soul”. We’ve worn out everything we can do, and we don’t see what to do next. And so we suffer. Though it feels miserable at the time, that suffering is the turning point. Practice brings us to such fruitful suffering, and helps us stay with it. When we do, at some point the suffering begins to transform itself, an the water begins to flow. In order for that to happen, however, all of our pretty dreams about life and practice have to go, including the belief that good practice – or indeed, anything at all – should make us happy. The promise that is never kept is based on belief systems, personally centered thoughts that keep us stuck and thirsty. We have thousands of them. It’s impossible to eliminate them all; we don’t live long enough for that. Practice does not require that we get rid of them, but simply that we see through them and recognize them as empty, as invalid.

[…]

It’s useful to review our belief systems in this way, because there’s always one that we don’t see. In each belief system we hide a promise. As for Zen practice: the only promise we count upon is that when we make up to our lives, we’ll be freer persons. If we wake up to the way we see life and deal with it, we will slowly be freer – not necessarily happier or better, but freer.


Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special – Living Zen (HarperCollins, 1993)

our fellow-servant

This transient flower,
if we bring all our heart
in contemplating it
is our fellow-servant
in Buddha’s abode



Jien (Jichin-daikasho, 1155-1225), A Hundred Poems on the Essential Texts of the Lotus Sutra, as translated into English by Jean-Noel Robert

photo ©Chikache; to see more from this wonderful set of photos please refer to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chikache/404067463/in/set-439295/

the key is to wake up

It is as if we had looked around to find out what would be the greatest wealth that we could possibly possess in order to lead a decent, good, completely fulfilling, energetic, inspired life, and found it all right here.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are. This is why we talk so much about making friends with ourselves, because, for some reason or other, we don’t feel that kind of satisfaction in a full and complete way. Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.


Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape (Shambala Publications, Boston/London, 2001)


Illustration: Wake up! ©Ed Boxall, to see more from this artist please refer to:
http://edboxall.co.uk/

do not pretend

Master Linji, Teaching 7

The master came into the Dharma Hall and said, “Someone is standing on a towering peak alone. There is no path from the peak. Someone else is standing at the crossroads but cannot advance. Of these two, who will come first and who after? Do not pretend to be Vimalakirti or play the role of the great master Fu. Farewell.”



Commentary on this teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh:

We’ve all been in this situation. It’s very dangerous when there’s no place to advance or retreat. We might feel as if we’re going to die. There is no way out and we’re frozen. How do we survive? The Master warns us not to be like Master Fu or Vimalakirti, two very eloquent lay Buddhist practitioners. He warns us no to try and talk or think our way out of our predicament.

So how do we escape? We can’t. all we can do in the situation is surrender and be in the moment completely without trying to pretend we know the way out. In this contradiction, we find the truth. Once we surrender to the situation, we see the path. Where before we were caught, now we are liberated.


Thich Nhat Hanh, Nothing to do, Nowhere to go - Waking up to who you are, Parallax Press, 2007


Illustration: painting by Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817-18, Oil on canvas, 94,8 x 74,8 cm,
Kunsthalle, Hamburg; to see more paintings by Caspar David Friedrich please check:
http://www.allpaintings.org/v/Romanticism/Caspar+David+Friedrich/

the more he loves

He is with his love the way a child is with his ball in front of a wall. He throws his utterance, the ball of radiant utterance, the I-love-you rolled up on itself; he throws it against a wall that is separated from him by the distance of all the days he has left to live. Then he waits for the ball to bounce back. He throws thousands of balls. None of them ever comes back. He continues, always smiling: the game is its own reward, love is its own answer.

Well, yes, he does say a bit more. He says: I love you and I am sorry to love you so little, to love you so badly, to not know how to love you. The closer he gets to the light, the more he discovers himself full of shadows. The more he loves, the more he recognizes himself as unworthy of loving. The fact is, there is no progress in love, no perfection that one might someday attain. No love is adult, mature, and reasonable. In relation to love there are only children – there is only a spirit of childhood that is abandon, carefreeness, a spirit of letting go of spirit. Age adds up. Experience accumulates. Reason constructs. The spirit of childhood is always new, always starts afresh at the beginning of the world, with the first steps of love. The man of reason is an accumulated man, a heaped-up man, a constructed man. The man of childhood is the contrary of a man added on to himself: a man subtracted from himself, continually reborn in every birth of everything. He is an imbecile playing ball. Or a saint talking to his God. Or both at the same time.


Christian Bobin, The secret of Saint Francis of Assisi (Shambala Publications, 1997)

it is love

It is love that makes hearts rotate. If there weren't any love, the Earth would just freeze.

Rumi

happiness is what

A sign-board at the parting of roads, for instance, indicates directions, and it is left the wayfarer to tread along the way watching his steps. The board certainly will not tek him to his desired destination.

A doctor diagnoses the ailment and prescribes; it is left to the patient to test the prescription. The attitude of the Buddha towards his followers is like that of an understanding and compassionate teacher or a physician.

The highest worship is paid to the best of men, those great and daring spiritd who have, with their wide and penetrating frasp of reality, wiped out ignorance, and rooted out defilements. The men who saw Truth are true helpers, but Buddhists do not pray to them. They only pay reverence to the revealers of Truth for having pointed out the path to true happiness and deliverance. Happiness is what one must achieve of oneself; nobody else can make one better or worse. "Purity and impurity depend on oneself. One can neither purify nor defile another".

[...] Though we can call the teaching of the Buddha 'Buddhism', thus including it among the 'isms' and 'ologies', it does not really matter what we label it. Call it religion, philosophy, Buddhism or by any other name you like. These labels are of little significance to one who goes in search of truth and deliverance.


The timeless message, by Ven Piyadassi Thera, in Gems of Buddhist Wisdom, The Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation, 1996

incovenience

Once you know that the purpose of life is simply to walk forward and continually to use your life to wake you up rather than to put you to sleep, then there's that sense of wholeheartedness about inconvenience. (...) Comfort orientation murders the spirit. Opting for coziness, having that as a prime reason for existing, becomes a continued obstacle to taking a leap and doing something new, doing something unusual, like going as a stranger into a strange land. (...) But in wholeheartedly practicing and following that path, this incovenience is not an obstacle. It's simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life. (...) It's like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don't know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.



Pema Chödrön

in The Wisdom of No Escape, Shambala Publications, Boston-London 2001

in the midst of winter

In the midst of winter
I find in myself at last
Invencible summer


Soen Nakagawa


in Endless Vow - The Zen Path of Soen Nakagawa, Shambala Publications, 1996


To see more photos from thıs set please refer to:
outdoors.webshots.com/photo/10574353550008942...

the Buddha eye

This is the story of Plum Village: how to transmit the Buddha eye, not build a big institution and become famous


Thich Nhat Hanh

in Twenty Years of Plum Village Life, Parallax Press (May 2003)

around the mind

mindlessness
mindfulness

less mind
ness mind
full mind
single mind
empty mind
beyond mind
no mind
never mind

mindlessfulness


Kazuaki Tanahashi, Brush Mind, Parallax Press, 1990


above, one-brush paint by Kazuaki Tanahashi; to see more from this artist please refer to:
http://www.brushmind.net/kaz.html

the mirror

How grateful he was, after all, to his visitor's! -- for each of them left him something to clarify his situation. He was choosing, yes, and treading back through the woods, welcomed by the calls of unseen birds and the gestures of unnamed plants, he sought for some further choice, some addtional dismissal with which he could atone for the night's parasitic ecstasy. He smashed the mirror. He held it squarely above the hearthstone, so the last thing it reflected was a slice of blue zenith, and let it drop. The fragments he swept up and buried in a place far from the house, covering the earth with leaves so he could not find the spot again. But from that sector of woods, for a while, he felt watched, by buried eyes. The sensation passed in daylight but persisted at night, when it gave his sleep depth, as had the knowledge when he was a child that an unknown hour his mother, though still downstairs, on her way to bed would come into his room and touch his forehead and tuck the kicked covers around him.

excerpt from The Hermit, short story by John Updike in The Music School, First Vintage Books Editions, 1980

a clod of earth

Upon Love's face gaze, that you may be considered a man.
Don't sit with cold people; their breath will chill you.

Seek from Love's face something other than beauty;
It's time you associated with a genuine friend.

A clod of earth, you'll not rise in the air
Unless you break and become mere dust.

If you don't break, he who made you will;
When death does, will you remain separate?

A fresh root makes green again a leaf that yellows;
So don't blame Love at your increasing paleness.

O friend,if you attain perfection among us,
This throne will be yours, your every desire gained.

But if you remain too long on this earth,
You will be as dice, passing from place to place.

If Shems of Tabriz, O Wild One! draws you to his side,
On your escape from gaol, you'll re-enter his orbit.


Rumi


in Rumi's Dıvan of Shems of Tabriz, a new ınterpretation by James Cowan

highest goal

[Buddhism] teaches us to serve others, to sacrifice our own comfort for the sake of suffering humanity, and to observe religious precepts or disciplines voluntarily, but not as commandments imposed by some unseen power. By observing such good principles according to our own conviction not only do we ge the chance to be perfect but we also help others to live in peace.

This perfection is the highest goal which a person must attain in order to gain his salvation. It cannot be obtained through the influence of any god or mediator.
[...]

That is why the Buddha always welcomes people to come and see His teachings but not to come and believe at once. He also advised people to choose a proper religion by considering, and investigating in various ways without accepting anything through emotion or blind faith. This is why Buddhism is called a doctrine of analysis.


Why Buddhism, by Ven. Dr. Sri Dhammananda, in Gems of Buddhist Wisdom

still

The winter tempest
Hid itself in the bamboos
And grew still


Basho

seek unity

In my mind’s eye I still have the image of my first night flight in Argentina. It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain.

Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Even the most unassuming of them, the flame of the poet, the teacher or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men...

We must surely seek unity. We must seek to communicate with some of these fires burning far apart in the landscape.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes, 1939), Penguin Classics

the man of God

The man of God remains drunk without wine,
The mand of God is replete without meat.

The man of God is distraught and confused,
The man of God is hungry and fatigued.

The man of God is a king in pauper's clothes,
The man of God is a treasure in a ruin.

The man of God is neither air nor earth,
The man of God is not fire nor water.

The man of God is a boundless ocean,
The man of God rains pearls on a clear day.

The man of God has countless moons and skies,
The man of God has unnumbered suns.

The man of God draws wisdom from truth,
The man of God learns without books.

The man of God is beyond belief and religion,
To the man of God right and wrong are the same.

The man of God has escaped from un-being,
The man of God is waited on in glory.

Wild One, the mand of God is in hiding,
You look for the man of God everywhere!


Rumi


ın Rumi's Dıvan of Shems of Tabriz, a new interpretation by James Cowan


this transcription is dedicated to Ihsan, a man of God

do this

The altruism of bodhichitta is the path of all beings of great potential. Therefore train yourself in the deeds of bodhisattvas, and do this on a grand scale! Shoulder the responsibility of freeing all beings from samsara. Of all the eighty-four thousand sections of the Buddha's teachings, none is more profound than bodhichitta.


Dudjom Rinpoche



in Counsels from my Heart, Shechen Publications, New Delhi 2004


above: Great Bodhisattva, Gupta period, Ajanta caves, Indıa

miracle of each moment

Let the thread appear and disappear.

Kazuaki Tanahashi, in Brush Mind (Parallax Press, 1990)

above, one-brush paint by Kazuaki Tanahashi; to see more from this artist please refer to:
http://www.brushmind.net/kaz.html

ah, when to the heart of man

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?



Robert Frost, Reluctance, from the book A Boy's Will (Published/Written in 1913); to read more of this poet please refer to:

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost#poems


Photo ©Richard&Joanne Friday

but it is

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

Tao Te Ching, chap. 11

as translated by Stephen Mitchell, quoted in Endless Vow: the zen path oh Soen Nakagawa, Shambala Publications, 1996


above, Sun ın an empty room, painting by Edward Hopper; to learn more please refer to:

dusty affairs

Looking for serenity
you have come
to the monastery.

Looking for serenity
I am leaving
the monastery.

Kwatz!

Stop running about seeking!

The dusty affairs of the world
fill the day,
fill the night.


Soen Nakagawa


ın Endless Vow - The Zen Path of Soen Nakagawa, Shambala Publıcatıons, 1996

that light

I asked a child, walking with a candle,
"From where comes that light?"
Instantly he blew it out.
"Tell me where it is gone - and I tell you where it came from".

Hasan of Basra



The Sufis, Idries Shah (Anchor Books, 1971/1990)

the knower and the knowledge are one

In meditation we learn to still the mind and the senses so that we can directly experience the inner reality of the heart. One friend had a dream that gave her a glimpse of the sweetness beyond the mind:

I am sitting with the group and the teacher silently speaks to me, saying, "I will show you what this meditation can offer you." The group begins to meditate and when I fall into meditation I hear the sound of the most beautiful chord of music whose notes become louder and whose vibration fills my whole being until its essence absorbs me in an intense sweetness and bliss which I can only describe as a glimpse of heaven. The notes cease as the meditation ends.

Such bliss is the substance of the Self which cannot be experienced on the level of the mind. The mind is known as the "slayer of the Real," for it separates us from spiritual Truth which is found within the heart. While the mind understands through duality, the differentiation of subject and object, Truth is always a state of oneness: the knower and the knowledge are one, the lover and Beloved are united. Meditation is a technique to take us from the world of duality to the oneness within the heart. Muhâsibî, a ninth- century Sufi from Baghdad, stresses its importance:

Meditation is the chief possession of the mystic, that whereby the sincere and the God-fearing make progress on the journey to God.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Sufi Meditation of the Heart; if youd' like to read more please refer to:
http://www.goldensufi.org/A-SufiMeditationHeart.html


Photo: Leaf on Concrete© http://www.rbhphotography.com/

of the soul

At dawn a moon appeared from the waves
And ascended, gazing down at me. Then,

Like a falcon snatching a bird in flight,
It snatched me up and flew away.

When I looked up I no longer saw myself:
Into that moon my body had eased, by grace

Of the soul in which I travelled, moon-driven
Until the secret of God's revelation halted me.

Nine spheres of Heaven had emerged in that moon;
And the sea washed over the slip of my being,

Breaking against me in waves. Again Wisdom's
Voice boomed; as it happens so it occurs.

At every foam-fleck of the ocean a figure
Emerged and slowly disappeared, just as

My foam-flecked body, receiving a sea-sign,
Melted within and slowly turned to spirit.

Without the regal power of Shems of Tabrız,
Holdıng the moon or becoming the sea are dreams.



Rumi


in Rumi's Dıvan of Shems of Tabriz, a new interpretation by James Cowan

reflecting my heart

Clearness!
sky and water
reflecting my heart.


Soen Nakagawa


(in Endless Vow - The Zen Path of Soen Nakagawa, Shambala Publications, 1996)

Photo: Shapes in shades of green, through the clear sea water close to Fethiye, Turkey - EfratNakash.com

your gaze commands

Your gaze
commands the sun
the tree, the river - Love
to rise, to grow, to flow
- to rise, to grow, to flow



dedicated to Richard and Ihsan, Dear Brothers on the Path of Love

we can write cantatas

I once stood by three countrymen at the deathbed of their mother. There was grief, of course. For the second time the umbilical cord was cut. For the second time, the knot that binds two generations was unfastened. Those three sons were discovering that they were alone, with everything to learn, with no family table now where they could meet at festivals, with no pole of self-recognition. But in that moment of severance I was also discovering that life can be granted for a second time. Each of these sons would in turn become the head of a family, a rallying-point and a patriarch, until the time when they would pass on the leadership to that little group of children now playing outside the door.

I looked at the mother, that old peasant with her firm and peaceful face, with her tight lips and her face that was now a mask of stone. And I saw it in the faces of the sons. That mask had served to mould their faces. That body had served to mould their bodies, those fine examples of men. And now she lay there broken, but like a matrix after the precious metal had been extracted. Sons and daughters in their turn would mould their children in the image of their flesh. No one died on that farm. The mother is dead, long live the mother!

There was grief, yes, but that picture of the lineage is so clear and simple. On its way it casts off those white-haired outer skins one by one, as it travels on towards its own unknowable truth, through all its metamorphoses.

[…]

What was thus being transmtited from generation to generation, at the slow pace of a tree’s growth, was life itself, but it was also consciousness. An ascension filled with mistery! From flowing lava, from the unformed substance of a star, from a miraculously germinated living cell we have emerged and have risen little by little until we can write cantatas and weigh galaxies.


Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes, 1939) Penguin Classics

give me freedom

Give me freedom to fly without a shadow,
Give me freedom to sing without an echo,
and to love without leaving traces.



This is the entrance page to The Golden Sufi site; to have access to it please refer to: http://www.goldensufi.org/

trying to become

When the wild ducks pass in the migrating season, they cause strange tides to rise in the lands beneath them. As if magnetized by the great triangular flock, the farmyard ducks try clumsily to leave the ground. The call of the wild has awakened some vestige of the wild within them, and for a moment they have turned into birds of passage. In those hard little heads normally filled with simple images of the pond, of worms and ot their roosting-house, now stretch vast continents, the taste of the ocean winds and the shape of the seas. The creature never knew until now that its brain could contain such marvels, and it beats its wings in contempt for seed and worms, trying to become a wild duck.


Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre de Hommes, 1939), Penguin Classics

reach the sea

When you arrive at the sea, you do not talk of the tributary.



Hakim Sanai, The Walled Garden of Truth


quotation by Idries Shah in The Sufis (Anchor Books 1990)

to lords and ladies of Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.



Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats, from The Tower, 1928


(*)Note: ok, I am not sailing to Byzantium, but actually flying to Istanbul -- and could think of nothing else to post upon my return to Turkey.
If you'd like to read more poems of W. B. Yeats, please refer to:
http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/poemsalpha.html


Image: Woman from Byzantium, by Mersad Berber (Bosnia and Herzegovina); if you'd like to see more fine works from this artist please refer to:
http://www.mersad-berber.com/eng/home.html

my flight

I leave no trace of wings in the air,

but I am glad I have had my flight




Rabindranath Tagore



If you like to read more about birds and flights from this author, please refer to:
http://www.poetseers.org/nobel_prize_for_literature/tagore/stray

the source

a poem by Rabindranath Tagore


The sleep that flits on baby's eyes
--does anybody know from where it comes?
Yes, there is a rumour that it has its dwelling where,
in the fairy village among shadows of the forest
dimly lit with glow-worms,
there hang two shy buds of enchantment.
From there it comes to kiss baby's eyes.



The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he
sleeps--does anybody know where it was born?
Yes, there is a rumour that a young pale beam of
a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud,
and there the smile was first born in the
dream of a dew-washed morning
--the smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps.



The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby's limbs
--does anybody know where it was hidden so long?
Yes, when the mother was a young girl it lay
pervading her heart in tender and silent
mystery of love--the sweet,
soft freshness that has bloomed on baby's limbs.





If you'd like to read more poems by this author, please refer to:
http://www.poetseers.org/nobel_prize_for_literature/tagore/tagores_poems

Photos ©karen glassford; more to be seen at:
http://adventures4god.blogspot.com/2007/08/india-land-bustling-with-beautiful.html

new life

"And when the body grows weak through old age, or becomes weak through illness, at that time that person, after separating himself from his members, as a mango, or fig, or Pippala-fruit is separated from the stalk, hastens back again as he came, to the place from which he started, to new life. . .

"Then both his knowledge and his work take hold of him and his acquaintance with former things.

"And as a caterpillar, after having reached the end of a blade of grass, and after having made another approach to another blade, draws itself together towards it, thus does this Self, after having thrown off this body and dispelled all ignorance, and after making another approach to another body, draw himself together towards it.

"And as a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, turns it into another, newer and more beautiful shape, so does this Self, after having thrown off this body and dispelled all ignorance, make unto himself another, newer and more beautiful shape. . .

"Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be: a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad. He becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds.

"And here they say that a person consists of desires. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.

"And here there is this verse: 'To whatever object a man's own mind is attached, to that he goes strenuously together with his deed; and having obtained the consequences of whatever deed he does here on earth, he returns again from that world . . . to this world of action.'[1]

"So much for the man who desires. But as to the man who does not desire, who, not desiring, freed from desires, is satisfied in his desires, or desires the Self only, his vital spirits do not depart elsewhere--being Brahman, he goes to Brahman.

"On this there is this verse: 'When all desires which once entered his heart are undone, then does the mortal become immortal, then he obtains Brahman.'"

* * *

"Now as a man, when embraced by a beloved wife, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within, thus this person, when embraced by the intelligent Self, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within. This indeed is his true form, in which his wishes are fulfilled, in which the Self only is his wish, in which no wish is left--free from any sorrow.

"Then a father is not a father, a mother not a mother, the worlds not worlds, the gods not gods, the Vedas not Vedas. Then a thief is not a thief, a murderer not a murderer, a Kandala not a Kandala, [2] a Sramana not a Sramana, [3] a Tapasa not a Tapasa.[4] He is not followed by good, not followed by evil, for he has then overcome all the sorrows of the heart."




[1] This is the law of karma.
[2] The kandalas were the lowest of all the pariahs, those without caste.
[3] A holy beggar.
[4] A person atoning for sins.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, from the translation by Max Mueller, The Upanishads, in Max Mueller, ed., The Sacred Books of the East, 50 vols. (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1879-1910), vol. 1, pp. 92, 104-105 and vol. 15, pp. 173, 175-177, 168-169 passim. Introduction and e-text copyright 2005 by David W. Koeller timemaster@thenagain.info. All rights reserved.


Photo ©Zeynep Kanra; to see more photos by Zeynep Kanra please refer to:
http://www.zeynepinyeri.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeynepk/

constant flux

Buddhism holds that everything is in constant flux.
Thus the question is whether we are to accept change passively and be swept away by it, or whether we are to take the lead and create positive changes on our own initiative...


His Holiness The Dalai Lama


Photo and quotation from Rick Gunn's travel journal, that has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement to me, to be read at:
http://www.rickgunnphotography.com/project.php

a simple path

Today I would like to share a video with S. N. Goenka lecturing about his Vipassana method, so that you have an idea of the retreat I have just undertaken. This is part 3 of the video entitled A Simple Path.



If you'd like to, you can watch part 1 by clicking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSxVYp3X6Yk

Part 2 is to be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAjFR4woOjg

Thank you.