Gardening
"It is right here in this garden that one can see how trivializing and irrelevant are the notions of property and property rights. This garden feeds me; it yields up life that I might have life. I am joined to this garden by an urgent interdependence. The best any gardener can do is to harmonize his will to that of the earth. It is a teaching learned in humility and gratitude; it has no rights to press."
— Uncovering the Wisdom of the Heartmind
Learning How to Do Nothing for Peace
"And then, in the fall of 2004, with the war in Iraq entering its second year, I began sitting daily peace vigils on the streets of Chico, California, in protest. Wanting to do something for peace, I discovered I first had to learn how to do nothing for peace — which is harder to learn than it might seem. But I increasingly felt it was essential to give bodily witness to the practice of nonviolence. Peace, as it turned out, was less a matter of something you do than one of something you are — and I soon learned that the ends I sought required of me more than simply sitting protest on the sidewalks of my hometown.
"What's more, I came to see that peace isn't a fixed condition of any sort but rather a continual open-hearted adjustment to shifting circumstances, a living response to be renewed again and again. There on the street, I saw that peace wasn't something right you get once and for all. I took to the streets to advocate for peace, an activism that turned out to be primarily a matter of learning how not to act and when not to interfere so that peace could be its own advocate."
— Pavement
Sitting in Silent Witness
"I don't imagine that my sitting here on a sidewalk in a small rural town on the west coast of the United States has prevented even a single bomb from dropping into the lives of people thousands of miles away in Iraq. Nonetheless, this morning I sit in silent witness for all the little Iraqi girls and boys who won't be attending school today or any day ever again. If my presence here can touch the heart of even one of my townspeople with the sorrow of such a loss, if I can bring anyone at all to disavow the violence of war, my sitting will be to some avail. If not, I must trust that peace will someday, somehow, find me — indeed find all of us — right here."
— Pavement
I'll Be Back Tomorrow to Remind Us Again
"I love my townspeople, and I love you, my countrymen and fellow humans. I will sit right here on the pavement, and offer you the visible presence of my dismay and grief over the brutality our nation is engaged in. I offer my rejection of our country's claim that it is acting on our behalf, yours and mine. And so I've brought my protest to the very place where you come to shop or get a cup of coffee. You may acknowledge me or ignore me as you see fit, but I am here, nevertheless, to remind us both, you and me, that something has gone drastically wrong in our nation, and I'll be back tomorrow to remind us again."
— Pavement
The Sacred Fool
"The sacred fool, Shibayama explains, is the one who takes on tasks that are certain to fail. Like trying to empty the sea with a teaspoon or convince humans to give up violence. When everyone else aspires to climb to the mountaintop, the sacred fool heads downhill. He descends into the valley where he sweeps floors, washes supper dishes, mows lawns, takes the kids to soccer practice, and rides the bus to work like all the rest of us. There's nothing elevated or rarified in what he does. In his spare time, perhaps, he volunteers at the hospital or hospice, or he helps feed the homeless at the town shelter, or does prison support work, or stuffs envelopes at the Environmental Council — or sits peace vigils on Chico sidewalks in the vain hope that doing so will somehow redeem some of the violence in the world."
— Pavement
We Need to Hear the Cries of the Vanquished
"The cries of the vanquished reach us from the aftermath of every war that was ever fought. From the smoldering rubble of the New York World Trade Towers, you can hear cries that shatter the mind like splintered glass: the anguished voices of office workers, janitors, mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives, sweethearts, friends. You can hear as well the bewildered and stunned outcry of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Dresden and Frankfurt, and that of a seven-year-old Vietnamese girl running in horror from a napalm bombing with her hair and dress aflame and her skin burned away. You can hear the dismay of Israeli parents whose children have died in a disco bombing, the rage of Palestinians whose entire village has been razed with even the village orchards and kitchen gardens laid waste. You can hear the anguish of an Afghan father wandering blindly in the aftermath of a U.S. bombing raid, calling hopelessly for his wife and children.
"We need to hear these cries. Our humanity depends upon it. If we don't, we are merely brutes divested of the natural sympathies we were born with. If we could just for once learn to love something beyond the confines of our own skins, we'd lose our taste for gleeful victory. If we could perform this simple, natural act of love, we'd belong to the earth once more and know the peace for which we were intended."
— Pavement
Having Fun
"I also think that having fun is naturally antithetical to anger and violence. Any lapse into humor or amusement can save us from our more reactive and serious selves, who are usually intent on trying to control circumstances that are inherently uncontrollable. An appreciation of fun in our lives could even conceivably dissuade us from going to war, which is never any fun."
— Pavement
Love and Doubt
"The person of right and wrong for whom right is always right and wrong is always wrong lays waste to his surroundings. What's offered us in the place of moral certainty is doubt and love, which are, ultimately, so intertwined as to be nearly synonymous. Doubt wears the hard edges off right and wrong, turning the soil where love sprouts like spring flowers. The old masters placed the site of ethics within the inward, instantaneous grasping of circumstances in their entirety, a living truth not divisible into categories of right and wrong. Truly, we can know things most directly when we lay no claim to knowing anything at all."
— Pavement
When the Body is Taught to Bend, the Mind Bends With It
"The practice of nonharming is the overriding social ethic of the Buddha Way, and bowing is an expression of this. I've learned that when the body is taught to bend, the mind will bend with it and the earth is spared injury.
"Bowing receives the world's injuries into the soft core of itself. Bowing, undertaken anywhere, under any condition, witnesses only to its own presence, exerting no willful control over anything else. Bowing leaves the world to itself, a quality so rare that it serves to explain the unlikely power it has to calm even the most frantic situation. Bowing is like that one calm person in an angry crowd whose quiet steadiness draws all the others toward a state of calm."
— Pavement
Wants and Needs
"Now as an adult, I've adopted a Buddhist economic heritage characterized by modesty and restraint. It's an economy that distinguishes between 'need' and 'want.' The needs of any one person, household, or township are finite, while wants are without limit. Wants reside in the mind, a product of thought, while needs are of the body, consisting of such reasonable necessities as food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. A simple analogy makes the distinction more tangible: wanting to eat is eating when you feel like eating; needing to eat is eating when you're hungry. It's a distinction upon which the survival of earth's delicately balanced ecosystem relies."
— Deep Down Things
Dreams and Roots
"Our highest aspirations, like the highest tips of the tallest trees, must of necessity remain rooted in the ground below. It's natural to look upward as well as down, to reach for the heavens while depending on the earth. We humans live a see saw sort of life, going up only to come down again, going down in order to push back up. It's an intricate cooperation between rise and descend, and, while the going up is good and the heights are grand, it's essential to come back to earth again, back to our roots."
— Deep Down Things
A Buddhist Values the Intimate
"A Buddhist values the intimate and the small, measuring time not in years and weeks and days but in the moment at hand, measuring space not in miles nor yards but in the step now taken.
" The proper scale for human endeavor is that of the household. It's within the intimacy of a household that we first learn to interact with other people and it's in our own backyard that we learn to interact with earth. We move from the center outward, comprehending the large in terms of our knowledge of the small. If we evolve at all from members of a single household to members of a global household, we do so by preserving the qualities of the smaller context within the larger. Our capacity to accept and include others depends on this vital connection."
— Deep Down Things
The Heart of a Runaway
"Within the structure of every conformity, every confinement and restraint, dwells the heart of the runaway. It is a being spare, swift, original. It speaks words of its own telling, sings songs of its heart's consent, runs unhindered in fields of its choosing. It is the unimpaired body and voice of an irrepressible freedom. And it refuses to be forgotten."
— Bad Dog!
Lightness and Darkness
"One of the great Zen scriptures, 'Taking Part in the Gathering,' was written in the eighth century by the Chinese Zen Master, Shitou Xiqian. Within Xiqian's scripture are these lines (as translated by Zen masters John Tarrant and Joan Sutherland):
"The darkness is inside the bright,
but don't look only with the eyes of the dark.
The brightness is inside the dark,
but don't look only through the eyes of the bright.
Bright and dark are a pair
like front foot and back foot walking.
"Shitou Xiqian's verse is about awakening to the realities of human existence, an awakening Xiqian insists is not a matter of looking to the bright side of life, but rather a matter of seeing life through the eyes of darkness as well. 'Bright and dark,' this ancient master tells us, 'are a pair.' We cannot be whole, which is to say we cannot be human, if we try to live by light alone and refuse to enter the darkness. To shun the darkness is like trying to walk with only one foot. Darkness often represents states of suffering — pain, anger, fear, sorrow, and so forth. Light, on the other hand, represents various states of happiness — security, comfort, joy, love. In this context, we hope for as much light as we can get and consider the darkness of our lives to be a misfortune. Anyone in his right mind wants to be happy and avoid suffering if he can. What this viewpoint misses is the redemption darkness offers. And what the darkness redeems is the very quality of happiness one seeks."
— Bad Dog!
Every Object is Buddha
"When students have asked various Zen masters 'What is Buddha?' — a question tantamount to asking 'What is God?' or 'What is Tao?' — the answers have invariably pointed to the most mundane possible circumstances:
"Yunmen said, 'A dried shitstick.'
Ma-tsu said, 'This very mind.'
And a mature Chao-chou lived to say,
'The oak tree in the courtyard.'"
"An old story tells of a Zen master who was harvesting flax when a monk asked him this question. The master held up a handful of flax, showing the questioner that a handful of flax, the dirt under one's feet, or even one's soiled gloves is the living body of the Buddha. My teachers taught me to give to all my surroundings the same care and respect I might give to the temple altar. Every object you or I touch is Buddha, and every house — including a homeless shelter or a prison complex or the downtown mall with its sprawling parking lot — is the exact place where the Buddha takes up residence. And we are all keepers of the Buddha's house. The proper labors of a Buddhist begin and end right here on our own familiar, native ground."
— Together under One Roof
We Are One Family under One Room
"The Buddha's household encompasses the whole universe yet manifests in its entirety in single neighborhoods and individual houses. The Buddha's household is no other than our own and the Buddha has taken up residence there — and in our collective body and mind as well. We are one family under one room sharing one mind."
— Together under One Roof
Leave the Earth Alone
"The proper defense of the earth is not found in protective custody but in relinquishment. What's needed most of all is the will to leave the earth alone and let it unfold in its own time and way. Ironically, wars — which are so often fought over who holds title to some disputed piece of land — are particularly destructive of land. In the aftermath of any modern war of sufficient scale, vast territories of countryside and city lie in ruins, poisoned by military ordinance of various sorts, and sometimes virtually uninhabitable for decades."
— Together under One Roof
Taking Sides
"Categorical words like ['felon' and 'terrorist'] support a simple dichotomy of good and evil, and encourage people to think in terms of a stark opposition between us and them.
"I take it as an obligation to resist such exclusionary terms, seeking instead a language that is inclusive and doesn't relegate others to a status of indifference and disregard. I further take the merciful and forgiving heart of the Buddha as a model of behavior. Surely if the Buddha could open his heart to the very one who'd come seeking his death, I should be able to find some degree of understanding and compassion for those who might threaten me with harm. It's an unfortunate habit of the human mind to take sides, dividing up society on the basis of arbitrary standards. It's a persistent habit that insinuates itself into language and spreads its influence by that means to others. To the degree that it's a habit of my own behavior, I'm determined to stop. Perhaps, if I succeed, others will be encouraged to stop too."
— Together under One Roof
Holding Place is a Frame of Mind
"While holding place is an act of body, it's a frame of mind as well. More precisely it's a mind without a frame. Every moment calls one into being anew. Holding place is the willingness to be born into that moment. Another way to put this is to say that the one who holds her place holds her question open. What would be best to do at this moment? She continually adjusts, not allowing her mind to settle on a fixed answer, knowing that it would draw her from her rightful place. In that sense, holding place is a continuing accommodation to present circumstance. Holding place is a practice of mindfulness, an awakening to the moment — but I want to acknowledge as well the concurrent sense of being bodily present in your life, trusting the body to hold its native ground."
— Together under One Roof
To Free Myself, I Must Let Go
"For the student of Zen, it's important to be skeptical of anything you regard as 'yours.' Everything from real estate to the living-room sofa to your toothbrush, right down to your very eyeballs and the air you breathe, is borrowed. Anything borrowed must be returned, and it is this attitude of return that informs the modesty and generosity of the Buddha Way.
"I hold my entire life on loan in common with everyone else. If I can dispel from mind the vanity of possession and relax my grip on things, passing on whatever comes to hand, I will come in time to know things for themselves and not as belongings of any sort. Ownership is anathema to Zen not because ownership is evil as such, but because ownership is an intrinsically divisive delusion that inevitably leads to grasping and coveting.
"To own something is to be owned by it. To free myself, I must let go."
— Together under One Roof
