Calligraphy

Myozan Dennis Keegan (See Myozan) explains the characters on the beautiful scroll that the Empty Hand Zen Center received from Shodo Harada Roshi (原田 正道 Harada Shōdō?, c. 1940) in memory of Jion Susan Postal (see Happy Birthday, Susan). The calligraphy says "empty hand temple". Lovely, lovely gift (thx, Jon and Jeff and Harada Roshi).

Wise Words IV: Wendell Berry

And, finally, Wendell Berry. This from The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture:

"We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in strip-mining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. They will pride themselves on their "sacrifices" for "our standard of living". They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists". And they will have their justificaitons in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of moden adults."

And, once again from Zen master Yunmen:

Medicine and sickness heal each other. The whole world is medicine. Where do you find yourself?

[NOTE: My last four post are shared for the inherent wisdom they convey. Not as harangues to generate anxiety, or resignation, or a sense of helplessness. Rather, more as pointers toward The Great Work that we so desperately need to start].   

Wise Words III: Thomas Berry

[NOTE: Go here for a brief explanation of what this series of posts is about].

And now for Thomas Berry. From The Dream of the Earth:

"We have before us the question not simply of physical survival, but of survival in a human mode of being, survival and development into intelligent, affectionate, imaginative persons thoroughly enjoying the universe about us, living in profound communion with one another and with some significant capacities to express ourselves in our literature and creative arts."

"This description of personal grandeur may seem an exxageration, a romantic view of human possibilities. Yet this is the basis on which the human venture has been sustained from its very beginning! Our difficulty is that we are just emerging from a technological entrancement. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowist confines it has experiences since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement."

"The human community is passing from its stage of childhood into its adult stage of life. We must assume adult responsibilities."

I recommend this book to all members of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens (Latin: "wise man"). We need to hear and carefully reflect on these words.   

Wise Words II: Susan Murphy

And then Dr. Susan Muphy Roshi. From Finding the Earth, Mending the World: Zen and the Art of Planetary Crisis:

"...we are all caught in a ridiculous posture right now. The posture of living 'normally' as we destabilise climate, trash seas and earth and atmosphere and decimate species, while chanting a mantra of perpetual growth and unrestrained human population increase and watching all these accelerate in a runaway chain reaction. It is ridiculous to pretend it is not happening, and almost equally ridiciulous to mention it, since no one can personally hope to change its course, and no one much wants even to hear about it. Our position as a species is now so untenable that it verges on rudeness to mention it in polite company".

"The crisis facing us all right now is a tremendous koan set for us by the earth, speaking to us plainly but in words we cannot yet fully comprehend, caught as we are in the frame of the past that cannot conceive of this emergency. To respond we need to free ourselves from a too narrow sense of self and an unquestioned assumption of self-entitled priority as a species." 

"Medicine and sickness heal each other. The whole world is medicine. Where do you find yourself?
 – Zen Master Yunmen, 9th century China".

Lovely, lovely book. [NOTE: I have been working with Murphy Roshi (thx, Susan) since January of this year on Case 1 from The Gateless Gate: Joshu's Dog, aka "the Mu obstruction" (see Mu, and then start carrying this koan around with you 24/7)].

Wise Words I: Gary Snyder

So let's start with Gary Snyder. From The Practice of the Wild: 

"Thoreau says “give me a wildness no civilization can endure.” That’s clearly not difficult to find. It is harder to imagine a civilization that wildness can endure, yet this is just what we must try to do. Wildness is not just the “preservation of the world,” it is the world. Civilizations east and west have long been on a collision course with wild nature, and now the developed nations in particular have the witless power to destroy not only individual creatures but whole species, whole processes, of the earth. We need a civilization that can live fully and creatively together with wildness. We must start growing it right here, in the New World."  

"The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them. No expectations, alert and sufficient, grateful and careful, generous and direct. A calm and clarity attend us in the moment we are wiping the grease off our hands between tasks and glancing up at the passing clouds. Another joy is finally sitting down to have coffee with a friend. The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home."  

Yeah, probably my favorite book in the whole world. [NOTE: Image shows my dog-eared copy of The Practice of the Wild. Has accompanied me to Hawaii, Myanmar, and Laos].

Our Current Situation As A Species

The four books listed in the right sidebar under "Amazon Associate" are insightful analyses of our current situation as a species. I am a huge fan of all four of these books, and view them as foundational in my own process of trying to figure out how best to respond to what comes next. I have previously posted on each of the authors (see Gary Snyder at 83, Earth Consciousness, Zen and the Art of Planetary Crisis, The Dream of the Earth, Distant Neighbors, and Happy Birthday, Wendell Berry), and what I would like to do now is to offer a brief selection from each book, each day, for the next four days. Like food for thought. Or tapas. And, of course, if you would actually like to purchase any of these seminal works, the links in the right sidebar work really well for this (thx).  

[NOTE: True-color image shown above from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is a combination of data from two satellites. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument abourd NASA's Terra satellite collected the land-surface data over 16 days, while NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) produced a snapshot of the Earth's clouds. Just so you know.].

The Dream of the Earth

It's Friday, and it seems like an appropriate time to share (finally) some Thomas Berry. Berry (1914-2009), who was a Catholic priest, cultural historian, ecotheologian, cosmologist, geologian, and deep ecology advocate, is the author of the seminal work, The Dream of the Earth. This amazing treatise, first published by the Sierra Club in 1988, provides an intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity. 

Such a fantastic universe, with its great spiraling galaxies, its supernovas, our solar system, and this priviledged planet Earth. All this is held together in the vast curvature of space, poised so precisely in holding all things together in the one embrace and yet so lightly that the creative expansion of the universe might continue into the future. We ourselves, with our distinctive capacities for reflexive thinking, are the most recent wonder of the universe, a special mode of reflecting this larger curvature of the universe itself. If in recent centuries we have sought to collapse this larger creative curve within the horizons of our own limited being, we must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world about us. The greater curvature of the universe and of the planet Earth must govern the curvature of our own being. In the coincidence of these three curves lies the way into a creative future.

- From the Introduction, The Dream of the Earth

This book is a foundational volume of the ecological canon. Timely words for troubled times. Highly, highly recommended. [NOTE: Just so you know, today is my birthday].

Moon Over Uppatasanti

Forgot I had this image from the Uppatasanti Pagoda (ဥပ္ပါတသန္တိစေတီတော်) in Naypyidaw. We went back to the pagoda (see Uppatasanti Pagoda) after dinner to look at the relics (see Buddha's Tooth), and there was the moon in a cloudless, starry sky. [NOTE: Ready to go back, and am currently working on a proposal to fund continuing work in Myanmar. More later].

Everest: A Tribute to the Fallen

"Imagine a 1500 ft tidal wave of snow, rock and debris headed straight towards you. This was our reality on April 25th, 2015 at Mt. Everest basecamp when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake triggered a massive avalanche at Mt. Everest Basecamp that claimed 16 lives and critically injured 50+ men and women". A short documentary by award-winning filmaker, Elia Saikalay.  

Bodhisattva's Embrace

Hozan Alan Senauke has been in residence at the Empty Hand Zen Center for the past few weeks (deep bow of gratitude, Alan). I have been reading through his book The Bodhisattva's Embrace: Dispatches from Engaged Buddhism's Front Lines as part of his class on Dogen's essay Bodaisatta Shishobo (Four Embracing Dharmas) from Shobogenzo.

As Vice-Abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center, leader of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, founder of the Clear View Project, and advisior to the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, Alan has a unique and global perspective on socially-engaged Buddhism as a force for positive change. And the clarity of this view comes through in his writings. This is a wonderful book. [NOTE: Click here to download a translation of Bodaisatta Shishobo. Read slowly. Repeat. Conscientiously apply in your life and become a Bodhisattva].