Zen Tree Quotes

Preoccupied with a single leaf you won't see the tree.

Zen is a present state of mind where one honors the task they are partaking of, even if the task is sitting still and doing nothing. Zen is engrained in the Japanese way of life. You can see it everywhere: when a sushi chef delicately slices a piece of raw fish, when a retired man watches an autumn leaf fall from a tree in the park, when a mother prepares and places a cup of tea before her child. When actions and thoughts are done with mindfulness, being fully present in the moment, the person performing the action or thought gives honor to the food, an idea, a task, a person, etc.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

The tallest and oldest trees that seemed to have just have casually always been there, hold the greatest love: as it nurtures love for others: providing shade for two lovers, becoming home for birds to build a nest, and giving food to the squirrels whom scurry upon it.

Give yourself freedom to grow through love, as love is the most natural direction for humans to grow, just as every tree grows upward towards the sky. Don’t try to control the way that love moves, as any attempt will be futile, for love grows like the branches, wildly growing by the laws of nature, rather than by human rational. Let love grow by her own nature.

Love is a seed that we diligently plant and requires tender care and watering in order for the tree to ever grow. Just as we cannot foresee the future and what is to become of this love later in life, the tree cannot tell what the weather will be like in the future. The strongest of winds and pouring rain may befall on the tree, however as long as the foundation and roots remains strong, love is able to exist.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

At times we will be asked to let go of things that we have always wanted to keep for ourselves, or things that we would never have thought that we would to have to let go of, such as the loss of a loved one or the betrayal of a dear friend. A tree never hesitates to shake off her leaves during fall, and so we must take another lesson given to us by the nature: let go when it is time. Although such losses can be difficult and painful, rise above this suffering. Focus within your mind, the image of the Lotus prospering above mud. We are the lotus; rise above.

A great tree develops over time and can tell stories not only those of happiness, but also those that contain pain from what it has seen over the years, and as a result is the wise ancient tree that it is today. As the seasons change, the tree naturally goes through changes as well: where the leaves turn yellow and orange in the fall, falling by the Winter, returning in the Spring, and with full set of new leafs by the Summer. Love is no different in that there will be times when we are fully naked in the Winter, and left to wonder about Spring when it seemed so easy to love, yet the wise tree knows that no winter will last forever no matter how cold it may be.

My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into a tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is anther force operating here as well-the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

Dad?" "What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. "What should I be when I grow up?" The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say.

To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, he’s unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then *it* will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it *is* all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret. Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

When you look at a tree, se it for its leafs, its branches, its trunk and the roots, then and only then will you see the tree

You are just as connected to the Universe as a finger is to a hand, or as a branch is to a tree. The entire cosmos is expressing itself through your being.

even before trees rocks I was nothing when I'm dead nowhere I'll be nothing

I was like an old leafless tree until we met green buds burst and blossom now that I have you I'll never forget what I owe you

The mind is the root from which all things grow if you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like the root of a tree. All a tree’s fruit and flowers, branches and leaves depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies. Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort.

leaves glow under a haze of sunlight, and hang still on a windless day

What a thing a bad death was. It made a mythology that caught up in its wake old trees and young women alike, the violence of it reverberating through the years.

Life is very simple. Just sometimes put your head away, sometimes behead yourself, sometimes look with no clouds in the eyes - just look. Sometimes sit by the side of a tree - just feel. By the side of a waterfall - listen. Lie down on the beach and listen to the roar of the ocean, feel the sand, the coolness of it, or look at the stars, and let that silence penetrate you. Or look at the dark night and let that velvety darkness surround you, envelop you, dissolve you. This is the way of the simple heart.

[W]e have endless opportunities to forget the self – in planting a tree for future generations; in creating a poem, a meal, a vessel of clay;

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

When a flower blooms, the butterfly naturally finds it. When trees have blossomed, birds flock to the branches on their own, and when the leaves wither and fall, the birds scatter. Relationships with people aren’t so different.

When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

Why are trees green? Because of Chlorophyll. But why is that green? Because it absorbs all light except green. But why? Why has no answer. Just wonder how and stay in the state of wonder. Accepting an answer of why kills the wonder of how.

Someone once asked me, “Soen Sa Nim, do you believe in God?” I said, “Of course!” The person was very shocked. “You are a Zen teacher. How can you possibly believe in God?” “I believe my eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind—why not believe everything? I believe this green tree, the blue sky, a barking dog, the smell of incense—why not believe in Buddha or God?” So, you can believe in everything. Believing in everything means realizing that you and everything are never separate.

Pine trees rise through cloud soar up into the blue skies, bush clover spangled with dewdrops sways in the autumn breeze; As I dip cold, pure water at the edge of the stream, a solitary white crane comes lolloping my way.

You want to know my name? --a hill, a tree. An empty drifting boat.

Examples of fractals are everywhere in nature. They can be found in the patterns of trees, branches, and ferns, in which each part appears to be a smaller image of the whole. They are found in the branch-like patterns of river systems, lightning, and blood vessels. They can be seen in snowflakes, seashells, crystals, and mountain ranges. We can even see the holographic and fractal-like nature of reality in the structure of the Universe itself, as the clusters of galaxies and dark matter resemble the neurons in our brain, the mycelium network of fungi, as well as the network of the man-made Internet.

We fail to see the oneness of all things, and because of this, we unknowingly cause a lot of harm to ourselves. We pollute the Earth that we live on, cut down the trees that produce our oxygen, destroy the ecosystems of nature and the animals that maintain them, and we mistreat and harm each other, thinking that these destructive actions will not have a direct effect on us.

Interbeing: If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

HOW TO CLIMB THE TREE OF LIFE, THROW ROCKS AT YOURSELF, AND GET DOWN AGAIN WITHOUT BREAKING YOUR BONES OR YOUR SPIRIT A PREFACE WITH A TITLE NOT MUCH LONGER THAN THE BOOK

When I think of Tao, I think of the artist Bob Ross and his famous painting techniques. I can hear him say, “It’s your tree, you can make it look any way you want to.

A pine tree’s branches are pliable, so they will flex downward rather than snap under the weight of accumulating snow. This is Strength through Flexibility.

Dad?” “What?” A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. “What should I be when I grow up?” The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don’t know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say.

To detach from your character, you should first know it fully -the dark side as well as bright side. It doesn’t mean that you should try everything in the world. To know itself, a tree doesn’t need to get hit by an axe at every inch of its being. The air around it can make it feel how far its branches go. When you are in a position to do something and do it, you only get to know one side of you. When you don’t do it, you get to know two sides of you -the one that wanted to do it and the other that didn’t.

even before trees rocks I was nothing when I'm dead nowhere I'll be nothing all the bad things I do will go up in smoke and so will I if there's nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost on the way?

After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No,” I say. “Why not?” “Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.” The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter,” I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.” The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course,” I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too.

When a leaf falls from a tree, when a river flows to the sea, when a bee flits from flower to flower, it happens without "action" or "doing." Nature is simply being. In the same way, human beings should simply be.

I see that this body—made of the four elements—is not really me, and I am not limited by this body. I am the whole of the river of life, of blood ancestors and spiritual ancestors, that has been continuously flowing for thousands of years and flows on for thousands of years into the future. I am one with my ancestors and my descendants. I am life manifesting in countless different forms. I am one with all people and all species, whether they are peaceful and joyful or suffering and afraid. At this very moment I am present everywhere in this world. I have been present in the past and will be there in the future. The disintegration of this body does not touch me, just as when the petals of the plum blossom fall it does not mean the end of the plum tree. I see that I am like a wave on the surface of the ocean. I see myself in all the other waves, and I see all the other waves in me. The manifestation or the disappearance of the wave does not lessen the presence of the ocean. My Dharma body and spiritual life are not subject to birth or death. I am able to see my presence before this body manifested and after this body disintegrates. I am able to see my presence outside this body, even in the present moment. Eighty or ninety years is not my life span. My life span, like that of a leaf or of a buddha, is immeasurable. I am able to go beyond the idea that I am a body separate from all other manifestations of life, in time and in space.

[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.

A mountain shrouded in mist is not hiding anything profound. There is no more wisdom on top of that mountain than there is anywhere else. It is just as sacred as a nap below the bough of a tree, washing the dishes, the sun fading over a meadow, belly laughter, a walk down a narrow path.

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

Along with the greening of May came the rain. Then the clouds disappeared and a soft pale lightness fell over the city, as if Kyoto had broken free of its tethers and lifted up toward the sun. The mornings were as dewy and verdant as a glass of iced green tea. The nights folded into pencil-gray darkness fragrant with white flowers. And everyone's mood seemed buoyant, happy, and carefree. When I wasn't teaching or studying tea kaiseki, I would ride my secondhand pistachio-green bicycle to favorite places to capture the fleeting lushness of Kyoto in a sketchbook. With a small box of Niji oil pastels, I would draw things that Zen pots had long ago described in words and I did not want to forget: a pond of yellow iris near a small Buddhist temple; a granite urn in a forest of bamboo; and a blue creek reflecting the beauty of heaven, carrying away a summer snowfall of pink blossoms. Sometimes, I would sit under the shade of a willow tree at the bottom of my street, doing nothing but listening to the call of cuckoos, while reading and munching on carrots and boiled egg halves smeared with mayonnaise and wrapped in crisp sheets of nori. Never before had such simple indulgences brought such immense pleasure.

When lightning is obviously about to strike a certain tree, one must consider sitting under another.

A tree is a fantastic example of beauty, but who has time to look at a tree?

It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

Most people, when they hear 'No-mind', think it means to become unfeeling, like a rock or a tree. [...] No-mind means not to fix the mind anywhere.

But there are times — my favorite climbs — when it doesn’t feel as if I’m climbing. Instead, the cliff or tree or wall seems to be lifting me, higher and higher.

The phenomenon moon-in-the-water is likened to human experience. The water is the subject, and the moon the object. When there is no water, there is no moon-in-the-water, and likewise when there is no moon. But when the moon rises the water does not wait to receive its image, and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out the moon does not wait to cast its reflection. For the moon does not intend to cast its reflection, and the water does not receive its image on purpose. The event is caused as much by the water as by the moon, and as the water manifests the brightness of the moon, the moon manifests the clarity of the water. Another poem in the Zenrin Kushu says: Trees show the bodily form of the wind; Waves give vital energy to the moon.g

You are not accidental. Existence needs you. Without you something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it. That’s what gives you dignity, that the whole existence will miss you. The stars and sun and moon. The trees and birds and earth – everything in the universe will feel a small place is vacant which cannot be filled by anybody except you. ― OSHO, OSHO ZEN TAROT

how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

We do not "come into" this world, we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves", as the universe "peoples". Every individual is an expression of the realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

WU WEI flow of Life governed by Tao flow of change spontaneous natural effortless acting through non-action connecting with Earth and Moon and Sun through being not inert or lazy or passive but swimming swiftly within the current merging Life with Tao quiet and watchful not-interfering receptive alert directly connected acting without action trusting detached without desire spontaneous natural effortless Living

We are the expression of millions of prior circumstances that have all come together to shape us in the present moment. Our economic and social background, our past associations and conversations, our culture, our family history, our genetics—they’ve all had a profound role in creating the person we are today. Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn calls this “interbeing.” If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent upon the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close.

When we look at a tree, we do not see the tree for what it really is. We see how it appears to us on the surface, and we dismiss it as being just another form in the Universe. We fail to realize that the tree is connected to the Universe on every level; that all of nature is expressing itself through that single form. There can be no tree without the earth that it grows from, the sun that gives it energy, the water that nourishes its growth, and the millions of fungi and bacteria fertilizing its soil. Looking deeply into anything in nature, we realize that it is connected to the whole. We see that nature is one seamless web, and the notion that things have an existence of their own is merely an illusion.

They fill the bottom with nuts and whatever else monkeys like to eat. In the night, a monkey climbs out of the trees and slips his hand down the long neck. He grabs the sweets and his hand makes a fist. That means it’s too big to get back up the narrow neck and he’s trapped. In the morning the villagers come around and hit him on the head.” He looked at me for a moment. “It’s a Zen story, of course,” he said, smiling again. “The point is—if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

When we see a part of the moon covered by a cloud, or a tree, or a weed, we feel how round the moon is. But when we see the clear moon without anything covering it, we do not feel that roundness the same way we do when we see it through something else.

It’s like chopping down a huge tree of immense girth. You won’t accomplish it with one swing of your axe. If you keep chopping away at it, though, and do not let up, eventually, whether it wants to or not, it will suddenly topple down. When that time comes, you could round up everyone you could find and pay them to hold the tree up, but they wouldn’t be able to do it. It would still come crashing to the ground…. But if the woodcutter stopped after one or two strokes of his axe to ask the third son of Mr. Chang, “Why doesn’t this tree fall?” And after three or four more strokes stopped again to ask the fourth son of Mr. Li, “Why doesn’t this tree fall?” he would never succeed in felling the tree. It is no different for someone who is practicing the Way. —ZEN MASTER HAKUIN

There is a Zen story about a student who felt he hadn’t really received the deepest essence of his master’s teaching, and so he went to question him. His master replied, “On your way here, did you see the cypress in the courtyard?” Perhaps the student was not yet very mindful. The master was saying that if, on the way to see our teacher, we go past a cypress tree or a beautiful plum tree in blossom and we don’t really see it, then when we arrive in front of our teacher, we won’t see our teacher either. We shouldn’t miss any opportunity to really see our cypress tree. There are wonders of life we walk past every day, and yet we haven’t truly seen them. What is the cypress tree on the path you take to work every day? If you cannot even see the tree, how can you see your loved ones? How can you see God?

Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It's like the Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot be leave a mark, do they exist?

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world. Why not learn about the senses of smell and hearing? Your characters must sometimes use their noses and ears or they may miss half the smells and sounds of the city, and all of the sounds of the wilderness still loose in the trees and on the lawns of the city.

you are meant to grow into a true human being. Right now you are to a human being what an acorn is to an oak tree. A good start, that’s all. You’ve got a long way to go, baby, and you’re not going to grow into your full potential sitting in front of the laptop, bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in one hand, dick in the other, anime porn boring a hole in your corneas and consciousness. Just a thought.

A Wood in Sound The pine tree sways in the smoke, Which streams up and up. There's a wood in sound. My legs lose themselves Where the river mirrors daffodils Like faces in a dream. A cold wind and the white memory Of a sasanqua. Warm rain comes and goes. I'll wait calmly on the bank Till the water clears And willows start to bud. Time is singed on the debris Of air raids. Somehow, here and now, I am another.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

Because earth, grass, trees, walls, tiles, and pebbles in the world of phenomena in the ten directions all engage in buddha activity, those who receive the benefits of the wind and water are inconceivably helped by the buddha's transformation, splendid and unthinkable, and intimately manifest enlightenment.Those who receive these benefits of water and fire widely engage in circulating the buddha's transformation based on original realization.

This (liberation) isn't something I can help you with. I can tell you what you need to do, but you have to do it. In the beginning, teachers can help a lot. But the deeper you go, all they can do is point, and clarify, and tell you what you need to do. Only you can take this step. Nobody can push you into this place. It's like Buddha's final night under the Bodhi tree. What did he do when confronted with this? He reached down and touched the ground and said, „I will not be moved.“ Finally – when everything that could be thrown at him was thrown, and he was still unmoved – it was done. He never looked back. (p. 99)

What is the difference between Zen and Tao? Roshi - "Look at this perfect peach. This must be Zen." Sensei - "If so, then see this wondrous tree here who gave us our peach, it is the Tao." Roshi - "Then look to the Earth from where the tree emerges. that is Zen. Sensei - "Then look to the sky whose wind blows through the leaves and whose clouds bring it the water of life." it is the Tao. Roshi - "Then look to the silent witnessing stars spanning through infinity they are so very Zen" Sensei ~ "Yet look at the space between all these stars, that must be the Tao." Then they smiled broadly and laughed hysterically "look at our many words they are like the dead leaves of this tree. What a bonfire we can now make.

He hadn't encountered a single soul on his run. This wasn't a popular part of the wood. You could probably die here and not be found for weeks. If ever. The same was true for a tree, he supposed. If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one to hear it, did it make a sound? Although it sounded like a Zen koan (yes, he knew the word "koan"), really it was a scientific question, to do with vibration and air pressure and the physiology of the ear. If a man fell in the forest--? He went flying, tripping on a tree root that had been waiting in hiding to ambush him and exact revenge for his ignorance. More punishment for his knees. At least there was no one around to see his pratfall, although if he listened carefully Jackson thought he could hear the sound of one hand clapping.

For a long time I felt cut off from the world, a billiard ball in a Cartesian space, and a gulf separated me from the fish, animals, trees, and people—my mind was not content or whole. There were symptoms, such as having more thoughts than I could possibly use at any given moment, and clumsiness with people, but probably the main symptom was of being shut out of the magic in things. I worried at the problem, studying animals and plants and noticing that all the steps I took did not help. Then one day the gap wasn’t there anymore. After the gap disappeared, I could let a situation tell me what it was about, let people reveal themselves to me, without finding a problem. Sometimes wholeness is just given. It has to be given actually, because effort leads to effort, not to wholeness.

Quality is the response of an organism to its environment’ [he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory]. An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, ‘This environment has poor quality.’ If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus ‘understand’ it. “In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it. “Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.” I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words “All of it.

The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here.” What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years - I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue. My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well - the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents. He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take. To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here.” What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

Although he always talked about technology and Oracle with passion and intensity, he didn’t have the methodical relentlessness that made Bill Gates so formidable and feared. By his own admission, Ellison was not an obsessive grinder like Gates: “I am a sprinter. I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.” Ellison had a reputation for being easily bored by the process of running a business and often took time off, leaving the shop to senior colleagues. One of the reasons often trotted out for Oracle’s success in the 1990s was Ellison’s decision to hire Ray Lane, a senior executive credited with bringing order and discipline to the business, allowing Ellison just to do the vision thing and bunk off to sail his boats whenever he felt like it. But Lane had left Oracle nearly eighteen months before after falling out with Ellison. Since then, Ellison had taken full control of the company—how likely was it that he would he stay the course? One reason to be skeptical was that Ellison just seemed to have too many things going on in his life besides Oracle. During the afternoon, we took a break from discussing the future of computing to take a tour of what would be his new home—nearly a decade in the making, and at that time, still nearly three years from completion. In the hills of Woodside, California, framing a five-acre artificial lake, six wooden Japanese houses, perfect replicas of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century originals in Kyoto, were under construction. The site also contained two full-size ornamental bridges, hundreds of boulders trucked in from the high Sierras and arranged according to Zen principles and an equal number of cherry trees jostling for attention next to towering redwoods. Ellison remarked: “If I’m remembered for anything, it’s more likely to be for this than Oracle.”3 In the evening, I noticed in Ellison’s dining room a scale model of what would become his second home: a graceful-looking 450-foot motor-yacht capable of circumnavigating the globe. Already the owner of two mega-yachts, bought secondhand and extensively modified (the 192-foot Ronin based in Sausalito and the 244-foot Katana, which was kept at Antibes in the South of France), Ellison wanted to create the perfect yacht. The key to achieving this had been his successful courtship of a seventy-two-year-old Englishman, Jon Bannenberg, recognized as the greatest designer of very big, privately-owned yachts. With a budget of $200 million—about the same as that for the Japanese imperial village in Woodside—it would be Bannenberg’s masterpiece. Bannenberg had committed himself to “handing over the keys” to Ellison in time for his summer holiday in 2003.

What would happen if we looked at ourselves like the nun looked at that tree? What would happen if we treasured our imperfections in the same way that the priest treasured the tree’s gnarled branches? I think our lives would be better as a result. More than that, I think it’s incumbent on us to see the perfection of our imperfect souls.

From Scott Russell Sanders: Since birth, my children have been surrounded by images of the earth as viewed from space, images that I first encountered when I was in my twenties. Those photographs show vividly what in our sanest moments we have always know- that the earth is a closed circle, lovely and rare. That is one pole of my awareness; but the other pole is what I see through my window. I try to keep both in sight at once. I find a kindred lesson in the words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: “This spot where you sit is your own spot. It is this very spot and in this very moment that you can become enlightened. You don’t have to sit beneath a special tree in a distant land.” There are no privileged locations. If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere. All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look; and the influence of the universe converges on every spot.

As for the world of phenomena, we are inclined to believe that it is illusory, separate from reality. And we think that only by ridding ourselves of it shall we be able to reach the world of True Mind. That, too, is an error. This world of birth and death, this world of lemon trees and maple trees, is the world of reality in itself. There is no reality that exists outside of the lemon trees and the maples.

The object of sitting in meditation is not to think, reflect, or lose oneself in the realm of concepts and discriminations; neither is it remaining immobile like a stone or a tree trunk. How must these two extremes of conceptualization and inertia be avoided? The solution is to remain in the midst of the experience of reality, under the lamp of awareness of being. Direct experience and awareness of this direct experience constitute the whole problem. The words seem to be complicated, but the thing is so simple!

Zen certainly derives from Buddhism, but a form of Buddhism that belongs to a geographical zone influenced by the Chinese culture. The Chinese Zen tree, transplanted in Japan, in Vietnam, and in Korea, has grown well and greatly. Zen Buddhism, in each of these countries, differs with certain nuances from that practiced in China. One can, however, easily recognize its identity.

In the use of the materials, natural or artificial, which are the common possessions of the Brotherhood, the monks are taught to be scrupulously careful about not wasting or abusing them. Water is everywhere obtainable in this part of the earth, especially in the mountain monastery; but they are strictly instructed not to use it too freely, that is, beyond absolute necessity. An attendant monk to a Zen master was one day told to change water in the wash-basin as it had stood too long in it. The attendant carelessly threw it out on the ground. The master was indignant and said, "Don't you know how to make it work usefully?" The monk confessed ignorance, whereupon the master advised him to pour the water around the root of a tree which was evidently in need of moisture.

In the hot climate of South Asia both food and clothing are no problem, since one can sleep almost naked under the trees and sustain oneself by eating wild fruit. In the severe climate of North Asia this is impossible. As the priests in South Asia do not do any manual labor, they are able to make do with only one meal a day, but in China this system is impossible. Even in the collection of regulations of the Zen sect written in the Tang dynasty (618–907) by the Chinese Zen master Pai-chang, provision is made for two daily meals: breakfast, consisting of rice gruel, and lunch, consisting of vegetables and rice. Later on, even an evening meal known as yaku seki (baked sone) came to be tacitly permitted.

The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

what is it about the sky on cold wintry nights in the morning there was dew on trees.

When even for a moment you sit upright in samadhi expressing the buddha mudra [form] in the three activities [body, speech, and thought], the whole world of phenomena becomes the buddha mudra and the entire sky turns into enlightenment. At this moment, all things actualize true awakening; myriad objects partake of the buddha body; and sitting upright, a glorious one under the bodhi tree, you immediately leap beyond the boundary of awakening. Then you turn the unsurpassably great dharma wheel, and expound the profound wisdom, ultimate and unconditioned.

A heron swoops the water. A princely, primitive bird, each of its enormous slate-blue wings unfolds effortlessly as a chaise longue. The heron foot-drags the stream. Then it sails aloft and, turning, reveals the silhouette of a pteranodon. I like to divine the lasting essence of this place. I like to feel intimations of something akin to those tutelary spirits—near at hand, beyond spectrum of the visible—to whom Celts built menhirs and dolmens; spirits the pagan Romans called genii loci. Thracian shepherds would have known Duck Run inhabited by potamids, nymphs of rivers and streams. Shinto worshippers in Japan paid homage to divine spirits of leaves, to sacred life coursing through roots and bodies of trees, the kami spirits of wind and water. I like to feel what they felt. I like to hear what they heard: the land improvising always—in zephyr, in freshet—its oracular speech, its earth-jazz, its wild glossolalia.

Shakyamuni sat down beneath a bodhi tree on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month. He was an advanced yogi and could sit for a long time in pain. But as he sat there, various demonic forces came to challenge him and tempt him to move. One of the demons said, “Who do you think you are, to sit by your own power and realize the way?” This brought some doubt to his mind, and he thought, Maybe I’m being arrogant. I’ll check with the Earth to see if I’m doing this on my own or together with the great Earth. So he touched the Earth with the fingertips of his right hand, and asked the Earth, “Do you witness and support my sitting still?” The Earth shook six ways, and a great roar came up from the Earth like a thousand voices saying, Yes, young man, you do not have to move from this spot.

Although the body and mind are undefiled, there is the truth of cleansing the body and there is the truth of cleansing the mind. Not only does it purify the body and mind, but it purifies even the land and the trees. Lands have never been covered with dust and dirt, yet it is the desires of Buddhas to cleanse them. Attaining the fruit of Enlightenment they still do not retreat or abandon. Such a supreme principle is difficult to comprehend. Ritual conduct is the supreme principle. The realization of the Way is ritual conduct.

Shakyamuni Buddha recommended that his monks plant and see to the care of five trees during their lifetimes. Throughout the Buddhist world the practice of reforestation and revegetation has been followed around many temples and monasteries.

For Dogen, the “mountains and rivers of the immediate present are the manifestation of the path of the ancient buddhas.”2 We care for everything in the natural and human-made world with utmost respect and devotion. Dogen had a deep veneration for and adamant protectiveness of the great and small trees in the mountains that surrounded Eiheiji (Monastery of Eternal Peace), and he resisted all unnecessary logging there.

Only by practicing wholeheartedly according to the literal meaning of the precepts can we fully experience the limitations and frustrations of the conventional approach. The conventional approach is flawed in its design, because it is based on the fundamental human delusion that we exist separately from all other beings, from the mountains and rivers, and from the trees and grasses of the great Earth. The literal meaning of the precepts can never be realized by separate personal effort. In fact, the attempt to practice these bodhisattva precepts by yourself is always at odds with their liberating significance. Ultimately, we realize that practicing with this conventional dualistic perspective is one continuous mistake.

When we perceive joy, anger, happiness, and sorrow as enriching our lives, just as rocks and tree roots and water spray embellish nature, then we are able to accept whatever happens and live like flowing water, without clinging to anything.

The path dips down to Gal Vihara: a wide, quiet, hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. The vicar general, shying away from "paganism." hangs back and sits under a tree reading the guidebook. I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more "imperative" than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no "mystery." All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything: it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it. The whole thing is very much a Zen Garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. The rest of the "city", the old palace complex, I had no time for. We just drove around the roads and saw the ruined shapes, and started on the long drive home to Kandy.

You must raise up your original motivation and aspiration, plant yourself with fearlessness in the unity of mind and body, and cut through obstructions using your koan, using the breath counting, using whatever your method is. In this training, you may have confidence that all the awakened beings of the ten directions support you; all the myriad things—the earth with its trees, mountains, and rivers, all creatures and people, the sky, sun, and moon and extending to the most distant galaxy—all of these ceaselessly proclaim the Buddhist teaching.

I’ve never felt anything like this. A lot of the things I do for pleasure—swimming, running—are meant to calm me down. Put me in a zen state. This is the opposite. I feel enlightened. I feel alive. I feel terrified and exhilarated and thrilled, all at once. I can see every golden hair on Penny’s smooth coat, every blade of bright green grass, every bird soaring overhead. I can smell the trees and the grass and even Raylan’s skin more acutely than ever.

No Loving-Kindness There was an old woman in China who had supported a monk for over twenty years. She had built a little hut for him and fed him while he was meditating. Finally she wondered just what progress he had made in all this time. To find out, she obtained the help of a girl rich in desire. "Go and embrace him," she told her, "and then ask him suddenly: 'What now?'" The girl called upon the monk and without much ado caressed him, asking him what he was going to do about it. "An old tree grows on a cold rock in winter," replied the monk somewhat poetically. "Nowhere is there any warmth." The girl returned and related what he had said. "To think I fed that fellow for twenty years!" exclaimed the old woman in anger. "He showed no consideration for your needs, no disposition to explain your condition. He need not have responded to passion, but at least he should have evidenced some compassion." She at once went to the hut of the monk and burned it down.

Yet, as the Zen philosopher Alan Watts liked to point out, it makes just as much sense to say that we come out of the world: that in the same way a tree blossoms, the universe ‘peoples.’ We are expressions of it. Our very being is inseparable from our context, or as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we ‘inter-are’; my existence would be wholly impossible without countless people and things I standardly think of as separate from myself. Perhaps the ultimate expression of our finitude is the fact that we are irrevocably of the world, whether we like it or not. If so, then maybe our responsibility isn’t to get our arms around it, nor to justify ourselves before it, but to embody as completely as possible the momentary expression of it that we are.

The past exists in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore unreal. Any intellectualy conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization process takes place. There is no other reality.” ~ from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Sit Quietly This is the most important Zen practice.   It is the classroom for living a wise and kind life.   Sit anywhere and be quiet: on a couch, a bed, a bench, inside, outside, leaning against a tree, by a lake, at the ocean, in a garden, on an airplane, in your office chair, on the floor, in your car. Meditation cushions are okay too.   Sit at any time: morning, night, one minute, three years.   Wear what you've got on. Loosen your waist so that your belly can move with your breath.   Sit as relaxed as possible. Relax your muscles when starting and during sitting.   Sit with your back straight but not stiff. Keep your head upright with your ears level.   Respect all medical conditions. Only take a posture you can. All postures are okay.   Do what you can do.   Keep your eyes slightly opened and out of focus. Closing them will make you sleepy and sometimes busy. Opening them wide will keep you busy.   Breathe naturally through your nose. Enjoy breathing. Feel your breath. Watch your breath. Become your breath.   Be like a cat purring. Follow your breath like ocean waves coming in and out.   When you get distracted, come back to the simplest and most basic experience of being alive, your breathing.   That's it. No belief. No program. No dogma.   You do not have to be Buddhist. You can be of any faith, religion, race, nationality, gender, relationship status, or capacity.   Just sit quietly, connect with your breath, and pay attention to what happens. You will learn things.   Do it when you want. You decide how much is enough for you. If you do it daily, it will get into your bones.   Please enjoy sitting quietly!   The only way to learn sitting quietly is to do it.

I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is “easier” than empiricism. That struck a nerve, and provoked a response I shall be candid enough to report. Mr. Wilson: When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monastery, sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only three and one-half hours of sleep each night until sleep and dream deprivation bring on a temporary psychosis (my own nondescript self); When you have attended four “rains retreats” at the Insight Buddhist Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, for a total of one complete year of no reading, no writing, no speaking, and eyes always downcast (my wife); When you have almost died from the austerities you underwent before you attained enlightenment under a bo tree in India; When you have been crucified on Golgatha; When you have been thrown to lions in the Roman coliseum; When you have been in a concentration camp and held on to some measure of dignity through your faith; When you have given your life to providing a dignified death for homeless, destitute women gathered from the streets of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), or played out her counterpart with the poor in New York City (Dorothy Day); When, Mr. Wilson, you have undergone any one of these trials, it will then be time to talk about the ease of religion as compared with the ardors of empiricism.

Zazen is the dragons roar. This dragons roar is the wind passing and whistling through a hollow tree. This can be a metaphor for your Zazen practice and or even your life. If you can let go, greatly let go, this dragons roar can manifest through you. It is much bigger than the individual.

15. Nature and her Lesson. Nature offers us nectar and ambrosia every day, and everywhere we go the rose and lily await us. "Spring visits us men," says Gu-do,[FN#277] "her mercy is great. Every blossom holds out the image of Tathagata." "What is the spiritual body of Buddha who is immortal and divine?" asked a man to Ta Lun (Dai-ryu), who instantly replied: "The flowers cover the mountain with golden brocade. The waters tinge the rivulets with heavenly blue." "Universe is the whole body of Tathagata; observed Do-gen. "The worlds in ten directions, the earth, grass, trees, walls, fences, tiles, pebbles-in a word, all the animated and inanimate objects partake of the Buddha-nature. Thereby, those who partake in the benefit of the Wind and Water that rise out of them are, all of them, helped by the mysterious influence of Buddha, and show forth Enlightenment."[FN#278]

the flowers of the morning glory. They bloom and smile every morning, fade and die in a few hours. How fleeting and ephemeral their lives are! But it is that short life itself that makes them frail, delicate, and lovely. They come forth all at once as bright and beautiful as a rainbow or as the Northern light, and disappear like dreams. This is the best condition for them, because, if they last for days together, the morning glory shall no longer be the morning glory. It is so with the cherry-tree that puts forth the loveliest flowers and bears bitter fruits. It is so with the apple-tree, which bears the sweetest of fruits and has ugly blossoms. It is so with animals and men. Each of them is placed in the condition best for his appointed mission. The

To be the ruler of things we have first to shut up all our senses, and turn the currents of thoughts inward, and see ourselves as the centre of the world, and meditate that we are the beings of highest intelligence; that Buddha never puts us at the mercy of natural forces; that the earth is in our possession; that everything on earth is to be made use of for our noble ends; that fire, water, air, grass, trees, rivers, hills, thunder, cloud, stars, the moon, the sun, are at our command; that we are the law-givers of the natural phenomena; that we are the makers of the phenomenal world; that it is we that appoint a mission through life, and determine the fate of man. 3.

4. The Third Step in the Mental Training. To be the lord of mind is more essential to Enlightenment, which, in a sense, is the clearing away of illusions, the putting out of mean desires and passions, and the awakening of the innermost wisdom. He alone can attain to real happiness who has perfect control over his passions tending to disturb the equilibrium of his mind. Such passions as anger, hatred, jealousy, sorrow, worry, grudge, and fear always untune one's mood and break the harmony of one's mind. They poison one's body, not in a figurative, but in a literal sense of the word. Obnoxious passions once aroused never fail to bring about the physiological change in the nerves, in the organs, and eventually in the whole constitution, and leave those injurious impressions that make one more liable to passions of similar nature. We do not mean, however, that we ought to be cold and passionless, as the most ancient Hinayanists were used to be. Such an attitude has been blamed by Zen masters. "What is the best way of living for us monks?" asked a monk to Yun Ku (Un-go), who replied: "You had better live among mountains." Then the monk bowed politely to the teacher, who questioned: "How did you understand me?" "Monks, as I understood," answered the man, "ought to keep their hearts as immovable as mountains, not being moved either by good or by evil, either by birth or by death, either by prosperity or by adversity." Hereupon Yun Ku struck the monk with his stick and said: "You forsake the Way of the old sages, and will bring my followers to perdition!" Then, turning to another monk, inquired: "How did you understand me?" "Monks, as I understand," replied the man, "ought to shut their eyes to attractive sights and close their ears to musical notes." "You, too," exclaimed Yun Ka, "forsake the Way of the old sages, and will bring my followers to perdition!" An old woman, to quote another example repeatedly told by Zen masters, used to give food and clothing to a monk for a score of years. One day she instructed a young girl to embrace and ask him: "How do you feel now?" "A lifeless tree," replied the monk coolly, "stands on cold rock. There is no warmth, as if in the coldest season of the year." The matron, being told of this, observed: "Oh that I have made offerings to such a vulgar fellow for twenty years!" She forced the monk to leave the temple and reduced it to ashes.[FN#238]

Suppose that one and the same reality exhibits one aspect when it stands in relation to another object; two aspects when it stands in relation in two different objects; three aspects when it stands in relation to three different objects. The reality of one aspect never proves the unreality of another aspect, for all these three aspects can be equally real. A tree appears to us as a vegetable; it appears to some birds as a shelter; and it appears to some worms as a food. The reality of its aspect as a vegetable never proves the unreality of its aspect as food, nor the reality of its aspect as food disproves the reality of its aspect as shelter. The real tree does not exist beyond or behind the vegetable. We can rely upon its reality, and make use of it to a fruitful result. At the same time, the birds can rely on its reality as a shelter, and build their nests in it; the worms, too, can rely on its reality as food, and eat it-to their satisfaction.

Mind is pure and bright in its essence. It is always free from passions and mean desires, just as the sun is always bright, despite of cloud and mist that cover its face. Therefore one must get an insight into this essential nature of Mind, and realize that one has no mean desires and passions from the first, and also that there is no tree of Bodhi nor the mirror of Enlightenment without him, but they are within him. Perhaps

Why do we prize changing organism more than inorganic matter, unchanging and constant? If there be no change in the bright hues of a flower, it is as worthless as a stone. If there be no change in the song of a bird, it is as valueless as a whistling wind. If there be no change in trees and grass, they are utterly unsuitable to be planted in a garden.

In the eye of simple folks of old, mountains, rivers, trees, serpents, oxen, and eagles were equally full of life; hence the deification of them. No doubt it is irrational to believe in nymphs, fairies, elves, and the like, yet still we may say that mountains stand of their own accord, rivers run as they will, just as we say that trees and grass turn their leaves towards the sun of their own accord. Neither is it a mere figure of speech to say that thunder speaks and hills respond, nor to describe birds as singing and flowers as smiling, nor to narrate winds as moaning and rain as weeping, nor to state lovers as looking at the moon, the moon as looking at them, when we observe spiritual element in activities of all this.

This mysterious Mind," says Kwei Fung (Kei-ho), "is higher than the highest, deeper than the deepest, limitless in all directions. There is no centre in it. No distinction of east and west, and above and below. Is it empty? Yes, but not empty like space. Has it a form? Yes, but has no form dependent on another for its existence. Is it intelligent? Yes, but not intelligent like your mind. Is it non-intelligent? Yes, but not non-intelligent like trees and stone. Is it conscious? Yes, but not conscious like you when waking. Is it bright? Yes, but not bright like the sun or the moon.

Tathagata (another name for Buddha) gives life to all beings, just as the lake Anavatapta gives rise to the four great rivers." "Tathagata," says the same sutra, "divides his own body into innumerable bodies, and also restores an infinite number of bodies to one body. Now be becomes cities, villages, houses, mountains, rivers, and trees; now he has a large body; now he has a small body; now he becomes men, women, boys, and girls." 5.

The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored. The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

The letters of the alphabet, a, b, c, etc., have no meaning whatever. They are but artificial signs, but when spelt they can express any great idea that great thinkers may form. Trees, grass, mountains, rivers, stars, moons, suns. These are the alphabets with which the Zen Scripture is written. Even a, b, c, etc., when spelt, can express any great idea.

Why not, then, these trees, grass, etc., the alphabets of Nature when they compose the Volume of the Universe? Even the meanest clod of earth proclaims the sacred law. Hwui

Universal Spirit may fitly be likened to the universal water, or water circulating through the whole earth. This universal water exists everywhere. It exists in the tree. It exists in the grass. It exists in the mountain. It exists in the river. It exists in the sea. It exists in the air. It exists in the cloud. Thus man is not only surrounded by water on all sides, but it penetrates his very body. But be can never appease his thirst without drinking water. In like manner Universal Spirit exists everywhere. It exists in the tree. It exists in the grass. It exists in the ground. It exists in the mountain. It exists in the river. It exists in the sea. It exists in the bird. It exists in the beast. Thus man is not merely surrounded by Spirit on all sides, but it permeates through his whole existence. But he can never be Enlightened unless he awakens it within him by means of Meditation. To drink water is to drink the universal water; to awaken Buddha-nature is to be conscious of Universal Spirit. Therefore,

Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. Since all intellectually identifiable things must emerge from this preintellectual reality, Quality is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.

The entire world is understood as a living interrelated and interactive system. Thus, if a tree outside of the zendo is damaged, I am also damaged. Just so, if I am damaged, so too, the Universe.

I thank god for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirit of trees and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.” ~e.e. cummings

Because I exist, you exist. Because I exist, the pebbles and the distant clouds exist. If all of these don’t truly exist, how can I? - The existence of a speck of dust makes everything else possible. If dust does not exist, neither does the universe, nor you, nor I.” I am happy to be on this earth. --The river reflects everything in herself. Thanks to the river’s flow, the flux of life is possible. And death lies within life, because without death there could be no life. Let us welcome the flow. Let us welcome impermanence and non-self. -- Thanks to impermanence and non-self, we have the beautiful world praised by Zen poets — the sheen of banana trees, the tall and perfumed areca trees reaching to the sun. -- The earth is filled with dust. Our eyes are filled with dust. There is no need to seek a Pure Land somewhere else. We only need lift our heads and see the moon and the stars. --The essential quality is awareness. If we open our eyes, we will see. I am sure that heaven has areca, starfruit, lime, and grapefruit trees. -- I laugh when I think how I once sought paradise as a realm outside of the world of birth and death. It is right in the world of birth and death that the miraculous truth is revealed.

We are like blades of grass or trees of the forest, creations of the universe, of the spirit of the universe, and the spirit of the universe has neither life nor death. Vanity is the only obstacle to life.

Before my head hit the pillow that night, I thought of these concluding words by Desmond Tutu: “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Hope is that last act of faith when we feel the least like being faithful. Hope is the connection shared between the memory of was and the freedom of giving it space to be – even if that means consciously letting go when we truly just want to hold on…hopeful that things will stay the same. We’ll know that we have reached healing when we look back upon the experience, and we thank the experience through our sincere feelings of gratitude for helping us to become more courageous of heart. That’s usually when we realize that the only limitations of life are moments when we had a small mindset…or in the words of an old Zen saying: “We don’t find the answers. We lose the questions.” Let the questions flow past the banks where the fever tree grows, as we scoop up waters of hope, and hold onto that until it trickles through our fingers and back into the source of all change, the river of hope. The same place that houses our deeper thinking and commitment toward higher living just like the strength of the fever trees, an embodiment of hope. Bright green hope…the fever tree way.

blue red yellow flowers, flies picking through a deer's fur until bone

hands full of wrinkled sunlight and shadow

Autumn Psalm To understand a fraction of what they mean. The writings in the world’s most spoken language across from one that can barely get a minyan. Sick of lanzmen, the yidden are trying to engage the guys across the aisle in some conversation: How, for example, do you squeeze an image into so few words, respectfully asks Glatstein. Wang Wei, at first, doesn’t understand the problem but then he shrugs his shoulders, mumbles Zen ... but, please, I, myself, overheard a poem, in the autumn rain, once, on a mountain. How do you do it? I believe it’s called a psalm? Glatstein’s cronies all crack up in unison. Okay, groise macher, give him an answer. But Glatstein dons his yarmulke (who knew he had one?) and starts the introduction to the morning prayer, Pisukei di zimrah, psalm by psalm. Wang Wei is spellbound, the stacks’ stale air suddenly a veritable balm and I’m so touched by these amazing goings-on that I’ve forgotten all about the autumn staring straight at me: still alive, still golden. What’s gold, anyway, compared to poetry? a trick of chlorophyll, a trick of sun. True. It was something, my changing tree with its perfect complement: a crimson vine, both thrown into panic by a Steller’s jay, but it’s hard to shake the habit of digression. Wandering has always been my people’s way whether we’re in a desert or narration. It’s too late to emulate Wang Wei and his solitary years on that one mountain though I’d love to say what I set out to say just once. Next autumn, maybe. What’s the occasion? Glatstein will shout over to me from the bookcase (that is, if he’s paying any attention) and, finally, I’ll look him in the face. Quick. Out the window, Yankev. It’s here again. Part 2

That's how behind we were, one employee said. We were killing a lot of trees in the digital age.

Zen is eminently practical in seeing nature as a model for human behavior to learn and practice the way of the dharma. For example, the pine trees weathering the harsh winter storms teach a lesson in the value of dedication and determination in pursing the path to enlightenment; bamboo branches that sway but are not broken by the breeze teach flexibility and the need to overcome stubborn one-sided or partial views; and evaporating dew, which accepts its brevity and inevitable demise, shows the demise, significance of adjusting and abandoning resistance to the impermanence of reality. These natural images, which are used extensively in the Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions, frequently enter into various styles of Zen verse and prose, not just as rhetorical flourishes but as indicators of inner spiritual transformation.

I allowed my mind without restraint to think of what it pleased, and my mouth to talk about whatever it pleased; I then forgot whether ‘this and not-this’ was mine or others’, whether the gain or loss was mine or others’; nor did I know whether Lao-shang-shih was my teacher and Pa-kao was my friend. In and out, I was thoroughly transformed; and then it was that the eye became like the ear, and the ear like the nose, and the nose like the mouth; and there was nothing that was not identified. As the mind became concentrated, the form dissolved, the bones and flesh all thawed away; I did not know upon what my frame was supported, or where my feet were treading; I just moved along with the wind, east or west, like a leaf of the tree detached from its stem; I was unconscious whether I was riding on the wind, or the wind riding on me.

HEARING THE VOICE OF THE VALLEY STREAM THE WATER OF THE VALLEY STREAM is always flowing. It races on, not pausing for even an instant. Its sound, to me, is the sound of time. The water of time glistens on the riverbed of the universe. Though theirs is a much slower flow, stones, trees, houses, and towns are flowing too. Human beings and all things that have life flow. Thought and culture, too, flow. That all these appear to be unchanging is but illusion.

I love to flyfish. Over the last 30 years, I’ve found that if I want to get into a “zen” state just put me on a stream for a day and before I know it the day has gone blissfully by. If I am fishing by myself, I’ve gotten into the habit of spending 15 minutes watching the stream before making my first cast. I’m sure if a passerby would observe me during these first 15 minutes, I would look like just another guy staring at a stream. But these 15 minutes are the most critical part of my day. These first 15 minutes have more to say about my success than the most perfectly executed cast all day long. I watch the water for how it flows. I look for seams of fast- and slow-moving water knowing that fish lay in the slow-moving water to save energy while waiting for food in the faster water. I watch for any movement on top of the water to see if there are any insects hatching that might signal a particular food supply for that stream. One way to know an experienced fly fisher from a beginner is the experienced fly fisher only decides what fly to use after watching the water for a while. I watch for underwater flashes of color that might reveal an actively feeding fish on the stream bottom. I review the streambed and determine the best place to start without increasing the chances of spooking any fish. Lastly, I take in the environment around me and make note of obstacles I need to be careful to avoid: a tree branch in my back cast, a logjam that creates faster moving water, or a steep bank indicating deeper water. I take note of the weather and where my shadow is and where it will be as I enter the water. I even think about how I might land a fish if I hook one, and where it would be easiest to net them. Every detail counts and most of what is important is determined in those first 15 minutes. Listening is a lot like those first 15 minutes of fishing. You are taking in information. You are sensing what is going on around you. You are actively observing everything there is to be observed. You are focused and intentional. You are not only hearing and seeing and feeling, but you are understanding and extending this understanding to make a difference in your life when the time does come to act.

listening to the sound of a bell Bells are used in many cultures around the world to help people come together, to create harmony within oneself and harmony with others. In many Asian countries, every family has at least one small bell in their home. You can use any kind of bell that makes a sound you enjoy. Use the sound of that bell as a reminder to breathe, to quiet your mind, to come home to your body, and to take care of yourself. In Buddhism, the sound of the bell is considered to be the voice of the Buddha. Stop talking. Stop thinking. Come back to your breathing. Listen with all your being. This way of listening allows peace and joy to penetrate every cell of your body. You listen not only with your ears, not only with your intellect; you invite all the cells in your body to join in listening to the bell. A bell doesn’t take up much space. You could surely find room on a table or a shelf somewhere, no matter where you live, even if you share a small room. Before you invite the bell to come home with you, you must make sure that the sound of the bell is good. The bell doesn’t need to be big, but the sound should be pleasant. Prepare yourself each time to listen and to receive the sound of the bell. Instead of “striking” the bell, “invite” the bell to sound. Look at the bell as a friend, an enlightened being that helps you wake up and come home to yourself. If you wish, you can set the bell on a small cushion—just like any other bodhisattva doing sitting meditation. As you listen to the bell, practice breathing in and releasing all the tension that’s built up, releasing the habit of your body, and especially your mind, to run. Although you may be sitting down, very often you are still running within. The bell is a welcome opportunity for you to go back to yourself, enjoy your in-breath and out-breath in such a way that you can release the tension and come to a full stop. The bell, and your response to it, helps stop the runaway train of thoughts and emotions racing through you all throughout the day and night. In the morning, before you go to work or before the children go to school, everyone can sit down together and enjoy breathing for three sounds of the bell. That way you begin your day with peace and joy. It’s nice to sit there, to breathe, either on your own or with your family, and look at a meaningful object in your home or a tree outside your window and smile. This can become a regular practice, a reliable refuge right there in your house or apartment. It doesn’t take a long time, and it’s richly rewarding. It is a very beautiful practice, the practice of peace, presence, and harmony in the home. breathing room Dedicate a room or a portion of a room for meditation.

On the withered tree, a flower blooms.

In the Soto sect, however, the issue of kensho (seeing one’s original self-nature) is seldom discussed for it is already evident in Shakyamuni’s enlightenment attained under the bodhi tree. The content of his enlightenment later developed and was incorporated into Buddhist teachings. In view of this fact, everything should be correctly perceived in samadhi by all Buddhists. Therefore, in the Soto sect, one is expected to sit in zazen, not out of necessity for seeing one’s true self, but for the sake of discipline in enlightenment. All one is expected to do is to forget and abandon both mind and body, throw them into the house of Buddha and act as Buddha in every move of one’s hands and in every step of one’s feet.

They're kidding themselves, of course. Our sky can go from lapis to tin in the blink of an eye. Blink again and your latte's diluted. And that's just fine with me. I thrive here on the certainty that no matter how parched my glands, how anhydrous the creek beds, how withered the weeds in the lawn, it's only a matter of time before the rains come home. The rains will steal down from the Sasquatch slopes. They will rise with the geese from the marshes and sloughs. Rain will fall in sweeps, it will fall in drones, it will fall in cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. And it will rain a fever. And it will rain a sacrifice. And it will rain sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. Rain will primitivize the cities, slowing every wheel, animating every gutter, diffusing commercial neon into smeary blooms of esoteric calligraphy. Rain will dramatize the countryside, sewing pearls into every web, winding silk around every stump, redrawing the horizon line with a badly frayed brush dipped in tea and quicksilver. And it will rain an omen. And it will rain a trance. And it will rain a seizure. And it will rain dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain will pour for days unceasing. Flooding will occur. Wells will fill with drowned ants, basements with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics will roam the dripping peninsulas. Moisture will gleam on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their rest in dead tree trunks, will clack their clamshell teeth in the submerged doorways of video parlors. Rivers will swell, sloughs will ferment. Vapors will billow from the troll-infested ditches, challenging windshield wipers, disgusing intentions and golden arches. Water will stream off eaves and umbrellas. It will take on the colors of beer signs and headlamps. It will glisten on the claws of nighttime animals. And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world. Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in the electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes, and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs. And it will rain a miracle. And it will rain a comfort. And it will rain a sense of salvation from the philistinic graspings of the world. Yes, I am here for the weather. And when I am lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE, AND HE WAS GLAD!

The Fourfold Wisdom consists of the Wisdom of a Big Round Mirror, the Wisdom of Equality, the Wisdom of True Perceiving, and the Wisdom of True Working. These may be thought of as the four aspects of the workings of wisdom. The first, Wisdom of a Big Round Mirror, pertains to the primal wisdom which is bright and clear all over like a big round mirror. It may be deemed as the essence of the mind, in which Heaven and Earth are one with us as in the phrase “the light of the great, round mirror brimming with black.” It alludes to the oneness of myriads of things. The second, Wisdom of Equality, is the wisdom in which it can be seen that all things in existence possess a nature that is equal. This kind of wisdom alludes to the mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, and all things as equally embodying the wisdom and virtues of Tathagata. The third, Wisdom of True Perceiving, is said to be the wisdom which makes one observe the delicate operations of all beings by means of the analysis of their ways of existence, their structures, their forms, their actions, and so forth. The fourth is the Wisdom of True Working. It is the wisdom capable of making our sense perception function properly, as in the case of the eyes seeing and the nose smelling. The operation of this kind of wisdom for universal salvation points to the integration of enlightenment and action, namely, the oneness of knowledge and conduct.

morning mist on the hillside pine trees

veiled in the mountain mist pine trees tranquil

in the morning mist pine trees on the hillside tranquil

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?”.

To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be ‘here.’ What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos. I am reminded of a friend who said that when she found out her husband couldn’t fill her needs, she changed her needs;

In his poems and in his teaching of other poets, Bashō set forth a simple, deeply useful reminder: that if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. “To learn about the pine tree,” he told his students, “go to the pine tree; to learn from the bamboo, study bamboo.” He found in every life and object an equal potential for insight and expansion. A good subject for haiku, he suggested, is a crow picking mud-snails from between a rice paddy’s plants. Seen truly, he taught, there is nothing that does not become a flower, a moon. “But unless things are seen with fresh eyes,” he added, “nothing’s worth writing down.” A wanderer all his life both in body and spirit, Bashō concerned himself less with destination than with the quality of the traveller’s attention. A poem, he comments, only exists while it’s on the writing desk; by the time its ink has dried, it should be recognized as just a scrap of paper. In poetry as in life, he saw each moment as gate-latch. Permeability mattered more in this process than product or will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find their lives would vanish under us without a trace.

Sutras are spread throughout fields and cities and written on rocks and trees. Dirt preaches sutras and so does plain old empty space.

Actualization is not just the manifestation of your individual experience of the truth; it is your life interconnected with a tree’s life, a bird’s life, water’s life, spring’s life, autumn’s life, and the life of the whole universe.

Time Time like a lake breeze Touched his face, All thought left his mind. One morning the sun, menacing, Rose from behind a mountain, Singeing -like hope- the trees. Full awakened, he lit his pipe And assumed the sun-inhaling pose: Time poured down - like rain, like fruit. He glanced back and saw a ship Moving towards the past. In one hand He gripped the sail to eternity, And stuffed the universe into his eyes.

Trees everywhere, and buds About to burst in sunlight, Which makes a river of the snow.

There is nothing that cannot be overcome. Unless you make it into something.

After finishing their main course and dessert, she and Cady prepared her extra dish. Sophia had decided to make the girls' favorite dinner- beef tenderloin with peppercorn sauce. Soon enough they were plating and rushing back and forth to the huge banquet table set up in the courtyard. Pouring wine and adjusting garnishes and offering smiles to the judges. The ambience of this meal was Sophia's idea of romance. The table was draped with ivory linen and topped with glass jars of flowers. Bouquets of Rosa rugosa and Queen Anne's lace were nestled among votives and bottles of wine. The local glassblower had provided an assortment of pottery dishes and hand-blown goblets. Strands of white lights dangled from the surrounding trees. She and Elliott and the girls plated together, having reached some sort of exhausted Zen state. Emilia scooped the risotto, Elliott placed the salmon on top, Sophia added the three tiny sides shaped with a round cookie cutter. Elliott drizzled his sauce onto the final product. He brushed his shoulder against Sophia each time, needing that physical connection. The plates looked exquisite, artistic. Perfect. She tried to ignore the overwhelming stress of the moment and focus on the food. Cady and Emilia added garnishes- fresh herbs and flowers. And Cady had a whole sheet of candied violets ready to sprinkle on their dessert. It made Elliott laugh and tease them all about being a family of garden sprites. When they finally got to the head of the table and faced a sea of critics, Sophia felt confident about their choices. They'd prepared a beautiful meal that successfully showcased Elliott's love for Scottish tradition, local Vermont products, and the Brown family's love of fresh vegetables and herbs. All the components meshed together into one cohesive meal.

We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics.… We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter—grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.8 This passage is part of the “Haudenosaunee Address to the Western World,

the light reveals that your roots are connected to every other tree, to every state, condition, time that trees have ever been. You get it: There is only one tree.

When we are dreaming we take the mountains, rivers, flowers, trees, roads, houses, and people we see to objectively exist, but when we wake, we realize that they were all products of our minds. In the same way, as long as unenlightened beings remain deep in the dream of delusion, they will only see things in the world as objectively existent, no matter what we might say to them. But once they awaken to their True Self, they realize that the entire universe is the brilliant light of the self.

In the words of Hung Tzu-ch'eng: "If the mind is not overlaid with wind and waves, you will always be living among blue mountains and green trees. If your true nature has the creative force of Nature itself, wherever you may go, you will see fishes leaping and geese flying." Ts'ai-ken T'an, 291.

A man left his mountain village in search of enlightenment. He traveled far, studied with wise teachers, meditated in silent temples, and sat for years in contemplation. One day, he awoke with a deep and unshakable realization. At last, he understood. He returned to his village, walking with the calm of one who has seen beyond the world. An old friend greeted him at the gate. “You’ve returned,” the friend said. “What have you learned?” The man smiled. “Everything is clear now.” His friend nodded. “Good. We need more firewood.” The man picked up an axe and walked into the trees. The wind rustled the leaves. The blade met the wood. Somewhere, water flowed down the mountain.

The dust rose in thick clouds as the horse galloped down the dirt path. Its rider, a young man named Jiro, clung tightly to the reins, his heart pounding with the rhythm of hooves against the earth. The wind tore through his hair. His body swayed with every jolt. Faster. Faster. Faster. But something was wrong. Jiro wasn’t steering. His hands gripped the reins, but he wasn’t the one choosing the direction. The horse was moving on its own—charging forward as if possessed by something greater than itself. He swallowed hard, glancing at the unfamiliar trees rushing past. Where was he going? Ahead, an old farmer stood at the edge of the road, watching. As Jiro approached, the farmer cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Where are you going?” Jiro barely had time to think before the words tumbled out: “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” The farmer’s laughter rang out behind him as Jiro disappeared down the path. The road stretched on. The horse didn’t slow. The landscape blurred. Jiro gritted his teeth. He had been riding for so long—so fast—that he had never stopped to ask himself: Had he ever been the one leading? Slowly, he loosened his grip. He took a deep breath. And for the first time, he pulled the reins—not out of panic, not out of habit, but with intention. The horse hesitated. Jiro pulled again. This time, the horse slowed. The dust settled. The trees no longer rushed past in a blur. And as the world came into focus, Jiro realized: the horse had never been in control. He had just never tried to stop it.

SMALL BUT CERTAIN HAPPINESS; Murakami described this small but certain happiness with specific examples: "tearing a piece off a loaf of warm, freshly baked bread and popping it into your mouth; listening to Brahms' chamber music while watching the afternoon sun trace shadows through the tree leaves; a drawer full of neatly folded and stacked underwear." People often think of happiness as something that can only be achieved in the distant future, or after accomplishing a grand goal. In contrast, the idea of small but certain happiness suggests that we should look for joy and happiness in little things that we do every day.

The Wise Tree In an ancient Zen temple, there grew a magnificent ancient tree, known as the "Wise Tree." It was tall and majestic, with dark green leaves and deep roots. The temple monks believed that the Wise Tree possessed wisdom and spiritual power. One day, a young monk named Ren approached the Wise Tree. He was eager to learn the true nature of wisdom. He knelt before the tree and said, "Wise Tree, I beseech you, teach me wisdom. Tell me the secret to finding the truth." The Wise Tree, of course, remained silent. But Ren was determined to receive an answer. He decided to meditate under the tree for days, hoping that, with enough patience and dedication, he would attain enlightenment. After many weeks of meditating under the Wise Tree, Ren was still without answers. He began to doubt his effort. An old monk from the temple, named Master Kenzo, noticed the young monk's agitation. Kenzo approached Ren and said, "Ren, you have dedicated much time and effort to seeking wisdom from the Wise Tree. But you have forgotten one important thing." Ren, confused, asked, "What have I forgotten, Master Kenzo?" Master Kenzo smiled and said, "You have forgotten that wisdom cannot be found externally. It is a treasure hidden within you. The Wise Tree can inspire you, but true wisdom must emerge from your heart." Master Kenzo's words illuminated Ren's mind. He understood that there was no riddle to solve, no answer to seek externally. Wisdom was within him, in every breath, in every thought, in every gesture. From that day on, Ren ceased to seek answers outside of himself and began to explore his inner world. He found wisdom not in the silence of the Wise Tree but in the stillness of his own mind.

Student: Master, a large tree is threatening to encircle our temple building. Shall I cut it down? Master: You've misunderstood. A beautiful tree is being disturbed by our temple building. Demolish the temple! We can rebuild the temple in 3 months, but we can't create this tree in 30 years!