Daily Zen : clothing , splendour and seat of tathagatha

The splendor of the tathagata
Is the compassion that dwells
At the center of all minds. 

The clothing of the tathagata
Is the gentleness and patience
That dwell in every mind. 

The seat of the tathagata
Is the emptiness of all phenomena.

- Lotus Sutra

2 Doors to Dharma

The dharma of one mind has two doors.
What are those two?
The first is the door of the tathagata
And the second is the door of
Phenomenal change.
Together these two doors are
The summation of all dharmas.

- Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana

Obstacles in Training Zen

Within the Way there are no obstacles at all, not even a pinpoint of obstruction. 

There are, however, obstacles in training. 

These are all self-created and due to the grasping nature of our practice. 

The coarse obstacles we create are doubt, fear, and taking the Way to exist objectively. 

The more subtle are the concepts of attainment and various levels. 

The Way avoids nothing at all, so we may be grateful even for obstacles. 

Apart from obstacles, there is no training.

- Anon

Daily Zen 21.Feb.2012

Zen-sitting has nothing to do with the doctrine of "teaching, practice, and elucidation" or with the exercise of "commandments, contemplation, and wisdom." 
You are like a fish with no particular design of remaining in the sea. Nor do you bother with sutras or ideas. 
To control and pacify the mind is the concern of lessor men. 
Still less can you hold an idea of Buddha and Dharma. 
 If you attempt to do so, if you train improperly, you are like one who, intending to voyage west, moves east. 
You must not stray. 

- Meiho (1277�1350)

(Daily Zen) Training for manifestation

To train in the fullest sense of the word, one needs an awareness of the impermanence of all phenomena, including our own lives, 

and an eye that isn't blind to cause and effect;

 emotionally speaking, great compassion and courage on behalf of all beings; 

practically speaking, a firm faith in the Way and a firm resolve to actualize the Way through practice. 

 If there is even a speck of any one of these present when beginning to train, that is enough.

All will then become manifest through practice.

- Anon

Watching U @ ur very worst

When you can listen to your thoughts
without becoming lost in what you hear;
 
when you can hear them
without adding or subtracting,
without editing; 

when you can remember the
very worst without cringing,
without even an eye blink of the mind,
it's then your life will turn.

- Journeys on Mind Mountain

The Bystander

While everyone else



Is so busy striving,


The lone traveler


Is at ease by himself.


He's been living outside of convention


For a long time now;


In his pouch there is nothing at all.


When he walks,


He takes a cane for a companion;


When he talks,


He has the rocks for an audience.


If you ask him what his religion is,


When hungry it's a bowl of rice.










- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

Labels & Slogans

Because you grasp labels and slogans, 
You are hindered by those labels and slogans, 
Both those used in ordinary life and those
Considered sacred. 
Thus they obstruct your perception of objective truth, 
And you cannot understand clearly. 

 - Linji (d. 867)

Big Bank & dark matter

Even as a modern creation myth, Big Bang is awe-inspiring: imagine a moment before the birth of Time, when Space was nothing, when the Universe was not even a seed inside a Singularity. Then, with a mighty surge, all heaven broke loose. 

That was nearly 13.7 billion years ago. Since then, the universe has been expanding and cooling, and within the expanding universe, massive clouds of gas have been pulled together by Mother Gravity to form stars and galaxies. The material for this - from giant planets to tiniest diatoms - is embedded in a sea of dark matter which can only be detected by the gravity that helped in the creation by pulling things together. 

If all this sounds like a most unlikely coincidence on a truly cosmic scale, it is! As the visionary theorist Fred Hoyle pointed out, if gravity had been slightly weaker, it might never have been able to crush the Sun's core sufficiently to ignite the nuclear furnace that creates sunlight. 

Had it been wee bit stronger, the Sun might have burnt off all its fuel billions of years ago. Plants and people could never have risen on the planet. 

Such a chain of reasoning led to Hoyle's carbon coincidence or cosmic connection: all the heavy elements in our body, ranging from carbon to iron, were forged inside distant stars in an exquisitely orchestrated process; we were literally the children of stars! 

Sceptics like Victor Stenger, however, like to pick holes in the fine-tuning argument. Different conditions might have spawned completely different forms of Goldilocks and her bears. But we still don't know why.

The Bucket List, things to do before U kick the bucket !

A 'bucket list' is a list of things you want to do before dying. The term refers to the Rob Reiner movie by the same name in which two terminally-ill men go on a road trip to do the things they most wanted to do before they kicked the bucket. Things like going skydiving, climbing the Pyramids, dining on the French Riviera, visiting the Taj Mahal, riding a motorcycle on the Great Wall of China, etc.

By contrast, bucketlist.org is a non-profit networking site that encourages people to upload their personal items to complete before they too die. It's based on the John Lennon premise that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Sample wishes: swim with a dolphin, be an extra in a film, send a message in a bottle, teach an illiterate person to read, experience weightlessness, let someone feed you peeled seedless grapes, etc. 

http://www.bucketlist.org

Knowledge Accumulation : Futility

What a pain, these people with so much wisdom!
Even the Buddhas have trouble converting them.
They keep the sutra pages turning,
But never turn their mind;

Ten thousand volumes cram their bookshelves,
All for nothing!
They've sunk into the pit of fame and profit,
Day and night a prey to disquiet and fear.
Their hearts in the end care nothing for sincerity
But moment to moment plot some clever scheme.

- Gensei (1623-1668