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Copyright © 2020 Wide Ocean
ISBN: 978-1-925952-75-9 (ebook edition)
Published by Vivid Publishing
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Western Australia 6959
www.vividpublishing.com.au
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Avalokitesvara
Bodhisattva of universal love
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Verses
Early Period
1. The Road Back Home
2. No Need to Go to T’ang
3. Interpenetration
4. The Truth of Emptiness
5. It’s Right Here
6. A Single Particle of Dust
7. Prayer to Avalokitesvara
8. No Traces of Buddhas
9. No-mind Is True Mind
10. What Is Zen?
11. Transmission
12. TNo-mind Is the Way
13. Why Make Things Difficult?
14. Floating Between Peaks
15. Like a Bubble on Water
16. Turning the Mind Around
17. Seeing the Self-nature
18. Not Noticed
19. No-mind
20. By the Old Pond
21. Birth and Death
22. Gate Open to the Wind
23. Never Alone Here
24. Reputation
25. Circus
26. Troubles Forgotten
27. Emptiness Is Full
28. No Footprints
29. The Way There
30. No Need to Look for It
31. Nothing to Do with Zen
32. Flower to Flower
33. Already Complete
34. What Difference Would It Make?
35. Sixty Years Gone
Middle Period
36. The Clear Wind
37. The Song of Endless Joy
38. Intoxicated
39. Let the Light Shine Through
40. The Original Face
41. Few Bother to Come Here
42. When the Dream Ends
43. The Wind that Blows
44. Mosquito
45. A Thousand Faces
46. What Shall I Call It?
47. These Precious Moments
48. Don’t You Want to Rest a While?
49. Free to Do as I Please
50. The Real Aspect
51. A Solitary Boat
52. In the Infinity of Space
53. Flowers Smile
54. Uncertain
55. Spring Is Out
56. Completely Alone
57. Done with It
58. Worthless Paper
59. Just this One Thing
60. If You Let Go
61. Snow on a Hot Stove
62. Grasping at Illusory Things
63. Neither Hasty nor Slow
64. Pear Blossom Flakes
65. Magic Show
66. Idling
67. Old Age
68. Eighty Years
69. The Mountain Path
70. Evening Smoke
71. The Wind Is Silent
72. Parting
73. Moonlight
74. The Reason for It All
75. Why Wear Yourself Out?
76. Ties to the World
77. The Same Thing
78. Almost Time
79. One Step Over
80. Both Joy and Sadness
81. Red Dust
82. Fame and Fortune
83. Walking All Day
84. Never Apart from It
85. With a Single Eye
86. The Sound that Can’t be Heard
87. The Eternal Melody
88. Even when I Dream
89. Past Reason’s End
90. Nothing More to Do
91. Both Forgotten
92. More of It
93. A Waste
94. Passing a House of Pleasure
95. Skipping Lightly
96. What a Shame!
97. Clouds
98. Sadness on Parting
99. Slow Zen
100. Tears
101. Sorrow
102. Chasing a Bee
103. So Cold
104. Only a Fool
105. After I’m Gone
106. What’s Left?
107. Dream Stuff
108. Chuang-tzu’s Dream
109. End of Spring
110. Evening Prayer
111. No one Knows Me
112. How Much Further?
113. Nothing to be Done
Late Period
114. A Mad Wind
115. An Ox with no Nostrils
116. Forgot to Go Back
117. Confusion
118. Too Busy
119. Seen It All Before
120. Loafing
121. A Shallow Man
122. What Is This?
123. A Drunken Priest
124. Moon of a Thousand Years
125. A Circle of Brightness
126. At the Peak
127. Sweet Talk
128. Evening Sun
129. Gain and Loss
130. The True Nature of Emptiness
131. Shadow
132. No Inside or Outside
133. This Matter Cleared Up
134. Not Apart from It
135. Mysterious
136. In the Cold Dawn
137. Freedom and Peace
138. Night Lifted
139. A Half Day’s Walk
140. Not a Single Thing
141. Poetry and Wine
142. Snowflakes
143. A Broken Bowl
144. Emptiness not Empty
145. Unfathomable
146. Buddha’s Enlightenment
147. Face the Moon
148. A Sixth Finger
149. Here all Along
150. All Is Clear
151. What’s the Point?
152. Water Flows
153. Reasoning Things Out
154. Seen Through
155. Moon Shines Bright
156. Emptying Space
157. Not How You Imagine It
158. The World You Make
159. The Ocean Seal
160. Samsara and Nirvana not Two
Biographical Sketches
Glossary
Notes
Preface
A long time ago, in what seems like another existence, life took me to the Zen halls (sonbangs) of Korea as well as to a number of Zen temples in Japan to practice Zen. Back then Korea was not a well-known destination and in rural areas very few people even spoke English. Foreigners were scarce. Children stopped and stared at you in the street.
The Korean Zen1 and Japanese Zen styles are quite different. Some have said that life in the Japanese zendo is harsher. There is no heating and you are more exposed to the elements. In the winter it is bitterly cold. In the summer you might be bitten all over by mosquitoes during the night. In the Korean Zen hall you sit on the floor, unlike in the Japanese zendo where you sit on a wooden platform. In the Korean Zen hall, in the winter, the floor is heated from underneath. It is perhaps more humane. But it does allow for longer and more sustained periods of practice.
It was already familiar to me when I arrived. Perhaps the continuation of a love affair that had started before I was born. The mountains, the ancient temples, prayer halls that had stood for a thousand years propped up by wooden columns hewn from great trees centuries ago. Even now sometimes in the early hours of the morning I can still hear the morning bell resounding in my ears. And in the mid-morning of a winter’s day I can smell the wood fire stoked up cooking the rice for lunch.
Between practice seasons there was the freedom to go from temple to temple. To wander through the mountains and down remote dusty rural backroads. Taking slow trains along now closed branch lines and jumping on worn out old diesel buses that spluttered and rattled their way along dirt roads almost impossible to traverse. In summer to walk between verdant green rice fields accompanied by the humming of cicadas and to come upon tiny rural villages in valleys that time had forgotten. To travel as a nobody from one remote nowhere to another. To meet old priests from a bygone age now vanished. To be greeted open heartedly with warmth and smiles. To wander from here to there but to go nowhere. It gave you time to think. Time to observe. Time to just be. Time to step out of time. It was all Zen. Not just the sitting in the Zen hall.
I always thought that I would stay much longer than I did. And it seems that I was there much longer than I probably was. In fact, time is a relative thing which seems to bear no relationship to the depth with which certain experiences are etched into the heart. A moment can be a lifetime. A decade can pass in a day. In the end it was other matters that took me away. I had always planned to return but I never did. Yet in another sense I never left.