Yong Maeng Jong Jin (to leap like a tiger while sitting)

Every morning I vow
not to waste another minute

Every minute my mind
wanders away

I don’t know whether to pity or envy the pigeons
endless fucking under the eaves of Gruber’s house

Sun begins another prostration
108 times 108 times 108 equals

Stone bodhisattva swallowing
all shadow, all light, bird song, birds

Where do they go?

KATZ!

Gruber’s cat cries at the dharma room door.

The Way of the Cloud

It is 4:50 a.m. in Kansas. We’re being soaked by another thunderstorm. I’ve been awake for hours, listening more to my thoughts than to the rain.

***
Earlier this week, my teacher and I were talking about the state of the world. I expressed confusion: here in Kansas it was a beautiful, warm, spring day, blue sky, white clouds, green everywhere, while over there, in Iraq, were explosions of unimaginable pain and violence. How can those things co-exist?

A couple of days later, Linc sent me this teaching:

from the Way of the Cloud

As soon as we understand that we live in
exactly the world that we deserve,
we shall recognize the faults of others as our own […]

It is our own Karma that we live in this imperfect world,
which in the ultimate sense is our own creation.

This is the only attitude which can help us […]
because it replaces fruitless negation by an impulse
toward self-perfection

which not only makes us worthy
of a better world, but partners in its creation.

***
I was a little surprised, because from a Zen perspective, there is no self and there is nothing to perfect. So I emailed back: "If I have no self, what is there to perfect?" He replied, "You are correct!"

But there was something else he was saying to me, something I needed to hear.

***
About 4:00 this morning the stream of my thoughts rushed toward the animals we share this planet with. First, I thought about our two indoor cats, safe with us. Then I thought about our outdoor cat, whom we put into the garage last night when the deluge started, keeping warm and dry. Then about the stray who has taken haven on our porch.

All these thoughts appeared in a moment, taking less time than a peal of thunder rolling across the sky.

And then, a quick as lightening, an image came into my mind of all the animals waiting out the storm, rabbits deep in their warren, squirrels high in the trees, raccoon and opossum, stray dogs and cats, birds shaken in the nest, snakes, foxes, bobcats. And I felt so much sadness for them—the flooded burrows, broken nests, suffering and death— that I began to cry.

That’s my humanity.

I began to weave my sadness into praise and self-congratulation, remembering the caterpillar I rescued once, the earwig I tried to saved, re-creating my small self in an image of wisdom and compassion, inflating my own goodness, losing track of reality: the night, the storm.

That too is my humanity.

Another burst of thunder, the inevitable flash of lightening.

***
A couple of weeks ago, the mealy moths started hatching in our kitchen. Everyday I kill two or three or five because if I don’t they’ll overrun our stored food and we’ll have to start throwing it out. I reckon that for every moth I kill, I spare myself the trouble of killing twelve. Sometimes I feel a pang of repentance and say, “I’m sorry.” But just as often I feel annoyance, even anger, especially with the ones that fly away, that won’t sit still and let me crush them.

Sadly, that’s also my humanity. That's how I am exactly like George Bush or any terrorist or a man beating a dog or a child.

***
It's 6 a.m, still dark. The street outside my house is flooded. Passing under the light cast from a neighbor’s security light, the water flows south: the way of the cloud.

In the Dharma,

Christina

On Suffering

Here is the text of a talk I gave today at an Interdenomiational Prayer Service, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS:

Hello. My name is Christina Hauck. I’m a dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen. I would like to share my perspective as a Buddhist on the terrible tragedy we have gathered to mourn.

The Buddha taught that suffering is a fundamental fact of existence. Every sentient being suffers, even animals. What makes human beings special is that we can understand our suffering has a cause and a cure. The cause of our suffering, as human beings, is our emotions, especially the emotions of desire, anger, and hatred. The Buddha taught that if we want to be cured, if we want to be liberated from our suffering, then we have to understand our own emotions. This is the purpose of meditation practice, to look deeply into our own minds and to see our own emotions. When we do this we discover, as the Buddha himself discovered, that our emotions are impermanent. They arise and pass away. They are like clouds that form in the sky. Sometimes the clouds are very big, and they mass together, and great storms occur. But those clouds always eventually dissolve and the blue sky re-appears. The Buddhists say that the blue sky is like our original mind, our mind before it is clouded by emotion. The goal of meditation is to watch our emotions closely until we see that they have no more substance than the thinnest wisp of a single cloud in the Kansas sky. When that happens, when our Original Mind, our Big Sky Mind appears, then we begin to see the suffering that is all around us, all the time. We begin to feel compassion for those who are suffering, and we begin to find ways to help them.

What happened in Virginia four days ago is that a human being whose mind was deeply clouded with anger and hatred lashed out and hurt a lot of people. I think we all understand that he hurt more than the thirty-three people he killed and the thirty people he injured. He hurt their friends and families. He hurt people far far away, people as far away as Kansas and Korea. So today we have set aside this time to acknowledge our interconnectedness. We can see so clearly how when one person is suffering, the whole world suffers as well.

Today, I am very very sad. I know that you are, too. As a Buddhist, I understand that my sadness will pass. But everyday it seems, the news gives me fresh opportunity to experience this sadness, sadness for those whose anger leads then to violence, sadness for their victims, sadness for the friends and families, sadness for us all. I believe that my job as a human being is to use this sadness to help others. So today I say, if you are deeply angry, please reach out to somebody who can help you. Please don’t let that anger overwhelm you and explode. If you are deeply afraid or deeply sad, please, reach out. You do not have to drown in your fear or your sadness. You are not alone. And if you see someone whose suffering, whose anger or sadness or fear appears to be completely overwhelming, please reach out them. Please don’t leave them alone.

Thank you.

Geese at Olcott (after Yeats)

“You say they have flown away, […] but all the same they have been here from the very beginning” D.T. Suzuki

I only saw them once.
I didn’t bother to count them.
Nor did I ask about their matrimonial habits.

But I liked them: the plump bodies,
The elegant almost arrogant rise of the necks
The way they kept a certain distance

Waddling faster and faster as I approached
Until inevitably they rose into low flight
That ended on the next patch of lawn.

Their consternation too was eloquent
A ceaseless cascade of disgruntled
Grunts and hisses and honks—

calling to mind their wild cousins who cross continents
North to south, south to north. Sometimes,
Hearing them, I’ll run outside to gawk—

Loving best the stragglers, the geese who fly late
At night, late in the season, high overhead—
Between us miles of clouds—

But still they call and still I listen—
Those loud lovely encouragers—
All I know of transcendence.

Christina Hauck
Wheaton, Illinois

Welcome to the Cave of Poison Grass

Somewhere I heard a story about how, if one wants enlightenment, one must enter the "cave of poison grass" and eat.

What does that mean? Our minds are like caves of poison grass. If we want enlightenment--if we want to attain our true selves and help this suffering world--then we must be willing to enter into our own minds and face whatever we find there without fear. In a way, we must be willing to die in the service of our practice.

Who or what dies? The death this metaphor refers to is not the death of the body. Even an enlightened person is subject to cause and effect. Entering into the cave of poison grass and abiding there is to incur the death of the small self, the ego, the I-my-me so often referred to in the teachings of my grandteacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn. To incur the death of the small self is to permit the Great Self to shine forth.

The great Zen Master Dogen put the matter something like this:

To study Buddhism is to study the self.
To study the self is to know the self.
To know the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to become one with all things.

Yours in the dharma,

Christina