Author: gnox

Ordinary buddha

All things arise from Tao.
They are nourished by Virtue.
They are formed from matter.
They are shaped by environment.
Thus the ten thousand things all respect Tao and honor Virtue.
Respect of Tao and honor of Virtue are not demanded,
But they are in the nature of things.

— Tao Te Ching 51 (Feng/English)

Buddhahood is actualized within essential nature; do not seek it outside the body. If your own nature is confused, you are an ordinary person; if your own nature is awakened, you are a buddha.

— Sutra of Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 3)

When you know the ordinary beings in your own mind, you see the buddha-nature in your own mind. If you want to see buddha, just know ordinary beings. It is just because of the ordinary beings that you lose sight of buddha; it is not buddha that loses sight of ordinary beings. If your own nature is enlightened, ordinary being is buddhahood; if your own nature is confused, buddhahood is ordinary being.

— Sutra of Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 78)

Back to the present

This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 103)

Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 83)

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.

— Shunryu Suzuki (1970, 21)

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 82)

Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment. The character the Chinese use for ‘mindfulness’ has two parts: the upper part means ‘now,’ and the lower part means ‘mind’ or ‘heart.’

— Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 64)

What has gone? How it ends?
Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend.
Forget, remember!

— Finnegans Wake, 614

Yet’s the time for being now, now, now.

— Finnegans Wake, 250

Old news

The Earth belongs not to us, we belong to the Earth.

— Black Elk

For we are fed of its forest, clad in its wood, barqued by its bark and our lecture is its leave.

— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 389

This is the Day whereon the earth shall tell out her tidings.

— Bahá’u’lláh (Gleanings XVII)

Euro-American humanism has been a story of writers and scholars who were deeply moved and transformed by their immersion in earlier histories and literatures.… Today a new breed of posthumanists is investigating and experiencing the diverse little nations of the planet, coming to appreciate the “primitive,” and finding prehistory to be an ever-expanding field of richness. We get a glimmering of the depth of our ultimately single human root. Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture.… The dialogue to open next would be among all beings, toward a rhetoric of ecological relationships.

— Gary Snyder (1990, 68)

If we can see (as we once saw very well) that our conversation with the planet is reciprocal and mutually creative, then we cannot help but walk carefully in that field of meaning.

— David Suzuki (1997, 206)

The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

— Thomas Berry (1999, 3)

Being humus

Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago.

— John Seed (1988, 36)

Everything is actually everything else, recycled.

— anon

Body structure is always involved in some processes, else it disintegrates. It is a structure from process, for further process, and only so.

— Gendlin (1998, I)

Ye are all created out of water, and unto dust shall ye return.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶148

This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns.

— Finnegans Wake, 18

Turning Life

mined leaf

Life as God and music and carbon and energy is a whirling nexus of growing, fusing, and dying beings. It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction in order to indefinitely forestall the inevitable moment of thermodynamic equilibrium— death. Life is also a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being.

— Margulis and Sagan (1995, 55)

Where there are humans, you’ll find flies and Buddhas.

— Kobayashi Issa

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 16)

The birth and death of the leaves are the rapid whirls of the eddy whose wider circles move slowly among the stars.

— Tagore, Stray Birds 92

Life is like an analogy.

— anon

It takes a long time to learn that life is short.

— gnox

The world

The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, God is here, and I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.

— Thomas Traherne, The First Century 31

The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.

— Kabir I.83 (Tagore 1915)

How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop!

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶107

The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them.

— G. Bateson

O ESSENCE OF NEGLIGENCE!
Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance in one speech, and myriads of hidden mysteries are revealed in a single melody; yet, alas, there is no ear to hear, nor heart to understand.

— Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words (Persian) 16

The adventure of the universe depends upon our capacity to listen.

— Swimme and Berry (1992, 44)

The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes as small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.

— Tagore

Nothing is hidden

Whatever i am saying now, it may be true or not, but there is no doubt that i am saying it.

Whatever you are seeing now, it may be real or not, but you are really seeing it.

The same goes for whatever appears in any way at any time to anyone.

This whatever appears was called by Peirce the phaneron. There is nothing hiding behind it; it does not signify something else; there is nothing else. It appears to none other than the primal person; there is no one else.

It may be called the buddha nature.

Thus, all are buddha nature. One form of all beings is sentient beings. At this very moment, the inside and outside of sentient beings are the all are of buddha nature.…

Buddha nature is immediate, and there is no second person, just as it is said, “Cut through the original person beyond knowing; action consciousness continues without ceasing.” Buddha nature is not the being of imaginary causation, because “Nothing is hidden in the entire world.”

“Nothing is hidden in the entire world” does not necessarily mean “The entire world is full of beings.” To say, “The entire world is self-existence” is a crooked view held by those outside the way. What is not hidden is not original beings, as it encompasses past and present. It is not an embryonic being, as it is not affected by even one speck of dust from outside. It is not a suddenly emerged being, as it is shared by all beings. It is not a beginningless being, as it is “What has thus come?” It is not an embryonic being, as “Everyday mind is the way.”

Know that in the midst of all are, sentient beings are hard to find. If you thoroughly understand all are, all are will be penetrated and dropped off.

— Dogen, SBGZ ‘Bussho’ (Tanahashi 2010, 234-5)

Kabir on Presence

For the sake of concord among religions, let us agree that the Creator is beyond our understanding.

Let us also agree that the Creator is not remote from us, but is a Presence in our lives.

15th-century Indian poet Kabir addressed these remarks to a sadhu (religious ascetic who has renounced the worldly life):

Kabir says: “O Sadhu! hear my deathless words. If you want your own good, examine and consider them well.
You have estranged yourself from the Creator, of whom you have sprung: you have lost your reason, you have bought death.
All doctrines and all teachings are sprung from Him, from Him they grow: know this for certain, and have no fear.
Hear from me the tidings of this great truth!
Whose name do you sing, and on whom do you meditate? O, come forth from this entanglement!
He dwells at the heart of all things, so why take refuge in empty desolation?
If you place the Guru at a distance from you, then it is but the distance that you honour:
If indeed the Master be far away, then who is it else that is creating this world?

— Kabir III.63 (Tagore 1915)

Everything that is hath come to be through His irresistible decree.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶7

All things proceed from God and unto Him they return. He is the source of all things and in Him all things are ended.

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶144