The Heart Sutra

There is no practice, way, or path,
No future place, no lingering past,
Nothing is real, and nothing dream;
Everything that is, just seems,
and is connected but still free
to think with selfish vanity
That by itself it came to be.

What folly, to imagine this
and seek elsewhere for endless bliss
That is already here and now
Without your discipline or vow.
Each breath you take is sacred space
Transcending time, and self, and place.
You are already where it’s at,
And gone beyond. Imagine that!

24 AUG 2024


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Bodhisattva

There is no trying:
Either you are a Buddha
or you are not One.

Once past duality
there is no more “in training”;
linear time ends,

and everything is
connected as Everything.
There is nothing else.

Just you and the breath,
this moment right here and now:
being Bodhisattva.

22 AUG 2024

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The Shadow

Does the Shadow know
what evil lurks in our hearts,
how deep our vileness?
To plumb to our bitter core
takes piercing light, not darkness.

Besides, evil grows
in our mind, our thoughts of self;
not in the heart’s realm.
We think up lines in the sand
and imagine us and them.

Why is there such need
to point our finger outward,
carving up the world?
Why waste so much precious time
dividing up all the blame?

13 AUG 2024

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More Pretend

You choose a place and time to take a stand,
although you realize, to some degree
that at the moment you first make said plan,
it’s already missed opportunity.

You take a breath and calculate the cost
with all the tools at hand, with all your skill;
the balance between what is won or lost,
the trade-off between wanting and your will.

What is this mad charade of pick and choose,
that interrupts just being here and now,
and in the end, is just yesterday’s news,
the dust of what some fantasy allows?

It’s all the same, beginning and the end;
fight, flight, and freeze are only more pretend.

29 JUL 2024

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Be Here Now, Or Don’t Be

Think about this, now:
being here right here, there is no
being somewhere else.
What you “want” doesn’t matter;
wish in one hand, as they say.

If you choose elsewhere
as the place where you must be,
you’re not here at all.
And where does that choice leave you?
Just where did you leave yourself?

Take a minute to check:
you’re either right here and now,
or you’re not, at all.
If you think too long about it,
you’ve wasted another now.

25 JUL 2024

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Zazen

Breathing in and out
Isn’t just for the cushion;
It’s the entire thing.
If you practice just sitting,
This moment is everywhere.

Try to stop breathing,
And your attention can’t last;
You are mind and body.
Pretending at something else
Requires a lot of thinking.

Everything you do
Requires breathing in and out;
It’s all important.
So everything is sacred,
And that is also empty.

21 JUL 2024

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Salt Dolls and Other Temporal Measures

In a dharma talk given July 15th for the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (as part of their Summer 2024 Commit to Sit program), Zen teacher Norman Fischer said something quite interesting and profound. He was discussing the viewpoint and attitude toward life of Zen master Tongen Harada Roshi, who although Japanese was of the same generation as Norman’s father (and my father, as well) born in the late 1920s. He observed that each generation, each culture, each country, has their own unique way of defining and understanding what it means to be human – and that once everyone from that generation is dead, there is no one who really understands that point of view and how it affected and influenced the lives those people led, the choices they made, or the way they looked at relationships, religion, spirituality, friendship, love, conflict, or any other profound lens for the human experience. Norman, now in his late 70s, also noted that his own generation, those who grew up in the 1960s and experienced that whole counter-culture, e.g., hippies, free love, exposure to Eastern religions, the anti-war movement, the Kennedy assassination, the “birth” of television, etc., would soon suffer the same fate. Likewise, each of us living now – my own Generation X, across continents, countries, and cultures, for example. It made me think that ultimately, that inability to really understand another generation’s “definition of human” was the real failing of the “hard” sciences of anthropology, archaeology, and history. After all, the truth of my humanity is not defined in what I write down, or the long-lasting artifacts I create. It’s something much more ephemeral: a feeling, a notion, a sense of ennui, angst, fear or hope that pervades how I think, who I think I am, what I think is important, and who I include or exclude. To think that we understand the “mind” of Julius Caesar by reading his battle journals, or Sigmund Freud by his technical interpretation of dreams, is an illusion. Perhaps a useful illusion, but given that it’s filtered through our own judgment and definition of humanity, hardly a “true” and “accurate” grokking of reality. Makes you wonder. We THINK we know so much. We BELIEVE the world is the way we think it is. We have no idea, really. And the more fractured we become in our own time and place, the more that bucket of water you draw from the ocean that you believe to be the wholeness of everything and true representation of the sea, seems so small, separate, distinct, and alien to the bucket of water I draw from the shore just a few miles further down the coast. Neither is the whole ocean.

18 JUL 2024

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