#zen

op eigen kracht

Gepubliceerdop dec 8, 2017

Once you merge your tracks into the stream of Zen, you spend your days silencing your mind and studying with your whole being. You realize that this Great Cause is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you enhance your clarity of mind.

Your potential for enlightened perception is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times. What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate through freely in all directions and arrive at peace and security free from doubt and attain the stage of great potential and great function.

This work is located precisely in your own inner actions. It is just a matter of being in the midst of the interplay of the myriad causal conditions every day, in the confusion of the red dusts, amid favorable and adverse circumstances and gain and loss, appearing and disappearing in their midst, without being affected and “turned around” by them, but on the contrary, being able to transform them and “turn them around.”

When you are leaping with life and water cannot wet you, this is your own measure of power. You reach an empty, solidified silence, but there is no duality between emptiness and form or silence and noise. You equalize all sorts of wondrous sayings and perilous devices and absolute perceptions; ultimately there is no gain or loss, and it is all your own to use.

When you go on “grinding and polishing” like this for a long time, you are liberated right in the midst of birth and death, and you look upon the world’s useless reputation and ruinous profit as mere dust in the wind, as a dream, as a magical apparition, as an optical illusion. Set free, you pass through the world. Isn’t this what it means to be a great saint who has emerged from the dusts of sensory attachments?

Yuanwu (1063-1135)

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a day without work, is a day without food

Gepubliceerdop nov 30, 2017

净食 ALMS  – Alms is a cinematic tour through a remote mountain Chan/Zen Buddhist monastery in Southern China. Audiences are guided by the community’s Head Chef (典座 dianzuo) as he explains the traditional cultivation, distribution and ritual offering of food in this traditional Buddhist community. We follow the gathering of local fuels and farmed vegetables, and witness how living members of this community work in harmony with elements of their surrounding naturalenvironment to provide the supportive infrastructure surrounding the Meditation Hall (禪堂 Zendo/Chantang), where a group of cloistered monks devote themselves to meditation practice. – a film by Edward A. Burger (2010), commonfolks.com

film kijken | watch alms

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als een kikker

Gepubliceerdop nov 30, 2017

Sengai said, “If frog,” you know, “if someone can be a buddha, I – maybe I can be a buddha too.” [Laughing.] Frog was sitting like this [probably gestures] [laughs, laughter]. “If people can be a buddha by practice of sitting, then I can be [laughs] – soon I will be a buddha” [laughs]. For the people who knows what is actual practice, you know, even though they don’t experience enlightenment experience, if he sees someone who, you know, who is sitting to attain enlightenment [laughs], we think he is like a frog sitting [laughs]. …

if you understand what Sengai is feeling when, you know, you see a picture of a frog, you are already, you know, Zen – you have already understood what is Zen. There [is a] lot of humor in it, and there is good understanding of our practice. Even though our practice is – is not better than frog, you know, we will continue to sit. And we can accept a frog as our good example of practice.

I think that is a kind of enlightenment, but if – you should know how you, you know, actually understand a frog. Sengai, you know, drew – after, you know, practicing pretty long time [laughs], you will, you know, partly laugh – laugh at someone who is involved in wrong idea of practice, and partly you will, you know, laugh at yourself [laughs] who is sitting always [laughs] without doing anything – without making not much progress. You will laugh at yourself. When you can laugh, you know, at yourself, humorously, then there is, you know, enlightenment. But still, your zazen is beginner’s zazen or sometimes worse than beginner’s zazen [laughs].

Shunryu Suzuki

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eindeloos

Gepubliceerdop nov 26, 2017

The Goal

Gray Wolf made one of her rare visits to the circle, and after a talk by Raven she remarked, “The goal of practice seems to be just more practice.”
Raven bobbed his head. “Well?”
Gray Wolf hesitated, and then asked, “So there’s no end to it?”
Raven hopped down from his perch to a little hummock beside
Gray Wolf, put his beak to her ear, and murmured, “Thank goodness.”

Robert Aitken Rōshi

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veerkracht: spiritueel links in de USA

Gepubliceerdop nov 19, 2017

De nieuwe documentaire Veerkracht over spiritueel links in de VS is te zien op npo.nl. Mensenrechten staat onder druk in het huidige politieke klimaat van Amerika. Hoe kan het boeddhisme een bijdrage leveren aan de oplossing van de enorme identiteitscrisis waarin het land verkeert? In de documentaire worden Amerikanen gevolgd die vormgeven aan een groeiende beweging die staat voor het eind van white supremacy, theologisch kolonialisme en seksueel machtsmisbruik. – docu van Babeth M. VanLoo

documentaire kijken

Met o.a. angel Kyodo williams Sensei, oprichter van het Center for Transformative Change in Berkeley, California, en zenleraar bij het Brooklyn Zen Center, over antiracisme en spiritueel activisme; Robert Thurman, schrijver en professor op Columbia University NY, bepleit een sensitivity revolution in plaats van de huidige haat-revolutie; Charlene Carruthers, van Black Youth Project, over de LGBT-beweging en de bevrijding van de (zwarte) vrouw; Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, een 17 jarige native American milieuactivist en hiphop-artiest, over indigenous rights en het recht van de mensheid op schoon water; Lucia Rijker, actrice, coach, over het breken met de verslaving aan televisienieuws; Patrick Ferris, zanger/tekstschrijver van de band The Americans, over het rouwproces na de verkiezing.

het leven zoals het is omarmen

Gepubliceerdop nov 10, 2017

If we’re open to embracing the surprises as they arise, then there will be inconceivable joy. If we fuss and fume and say, ‘This isn’t what I expected,’ then there will be inconceivable misery. Just to welcome your life as it arrives moment after moment, to meet it as fully as you can, being as open to it as you can, being as ready for whatever arises as you can, and meeting it wholeheartedly, this is renunciation – this is leaving behind all of your preferences, all of your ideas and notions and schemes. Just meeting life as it is.

Zenkei Blanche Hartman

Blanche’s dharma name, Zenkei, means inconceivable joy.

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zen, kunst en vrede

Gepubliceerdop nov 6, 2017

Zen Brush Mind is een portet van zenmeester, schilder, kalligraaf, schrijver, vertaler en vredesactivist Kazuaki Tanahashi. De film van Babeth M. VanLoo onderzoekt de drijfveren achter zijn internationale activisme en zijn dialoog tussen Oost en West.

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de rust van de Boeddha

Gepubliceerdop nov 3, 2017

Mijn rust is de rust van de Boeddha, mijn ziel is peilloos diep;
noch golven van vreugde, noch golven van leed
kunnen haar bereiken.		 The bottom of my soul has such depth;
Neither joy nor the waves of sorrow can reach it
Nishida Kitarō

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kauwen op bruine rijst

Gepubliceerdop nov 2, 2017

Wat vind je van zazen? Ik denk dat het beter is te vragen wat je van bruine rijst vindt. Zen is zo’n zwaar onderwerp. Bruine rijst is goed genoeg. Veel verschil is er trouwens niet.  … Leegte is niet iets dat je kunt begrijpen door een ruimtereis. Je kunt leegte begrijpen als je helemaal opgaat in het kauwen van bruine rijst. Dat is echte leegte.

Shunryu Suzuki

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