The reflection of the moon in a deep lake is not disturbed by the echo from the sound of a bell on a quiet night; and though it appears to remain unscattered when in contact with large and small waves, still it is on the riverbanks of life and death.
Hsuan-sha Shih-pei (835–908)
(meer…)
Tegenover het vallen uit de vrijheid, door angst en verlamming, staat een totaal ander soort vallen, een vallen in de vrijheid door geloof en overgave. …
Dit andere vallen, een bevrijdend vallen wordt prachtig geïllustreerd door het zenverhaal van de vlinder die opgesloten zit in een bronzen klok. De vlinder blijft zich wanhopig en uit alle macht te pletter vliegen tegen de harde wand. Uiteindelijk moet hij de pogingen om er op eigen kracht doorheen te breken opgeven en laat hij zich vallen. En dan valt hij vanzelf in het licht, in het leven en in de onbegrensdheid.
Eigenlijk is dit een heel bevrijdend beeld: een bodemloze afgrond waar je niet uit kunt vallen en waarin je niet te pletter kunt vallen. En vergeet niet: dit bodemloze vallen is dan ineens ook geen vallen meer, maar bewegen, eindeloos stromen in een leven zonder grenzen. Dat is de stroom van prajna paramita (wijsheid voorbij alle wijsheid).
Kakuzan Shido (1252 – 1305) “created the ‘mirror Zen’ practice to address women’s interest in their physical appearance.” Women have been and still are oftend told that their looks are their greatest asset and women can “excercise power by seducing or influencing powerful men.” Mirror zen was meant to encourage nuns to “see through their feelings and attachments to physical form by meditating in front of a mirror. Instructions were to look deeply into one’s nature and ask: ‘Where is a single feeling, a single thought, in the mirror in which I gaze?”
Kakuzan used Huineng’s teaching on the mirror to instruct her students as follows:
Since not a thing
takes lodging in the mind,
it is untainted:
To speak of polishing
is itself illusion.
“Zen aims to expose and dissolve the ego’s toxic grip of self-clinging. Self-clinging may look very different in women than it does in men. Self-clinging for women may look like a dependency, a need to please others and to seek approval, a reluctance to show initiative, and a general feeling of inferior ability. Self-clinging in men more often takes the form of pride, arrogance, and a sense of power, control or even invincibility. Convents have developed training techniques for women aimed specifically at overcoming societal conditioning that fostered obidience, docility, and servitude to their families of origin, husbands and other institutional bodies that instilled ‘ladylike’ behavior.” – Grace Schireson
An example of a training technique for women is the ‘mirror Zen‘ of Kakuzan.
body, speech and mind in perfect oneness
I send my heart along with the sound of the bell,
may the hearers awaken from forgetfulness
and transcend all anxiety and sorrow.
May the sound of this bell penetrate deeply into the cosmos
In even the darkest places, may living beings hear it clearly
So that understanding comes to their heart, and without hardship
They transcend the cycle of birth and death
Listening to the bell I feel the afflictions in me begin to dissolve
My mind becomes calm, my body relaxed, and a smile is born on my lips
Following the sound of the bell, my breath guides me back to the safe island of mindfulness
In the garden of my heart the flower of peace blooms beautifully.
“There’s nothing in sitting except maintaining awareness. Our ability to do that grows over time. You can call that progress if you want, but basically we are just returning to what we’ve alway been. There’s really nothing special about it. So any idea that there’s something special about sitting, that we have to get into some spiritual state, or some wonderful state, that’s not it.
As you’re sitting, if you really maintain awareness, which you probably won’t, but if you do, it feels so different from what we ordinarily do that we may think we’ve done something special, but we haven’t really.
I want to emphasize that sitting is not about shutting out your thoughts, its about seeing them as thoughts of no importance whatsoever. But I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t think his or her thoughts are of some importance, including me sometimes. We definitely don’t see our thoughts as little energy blips that for whatever reason are set off. (meer…)
Je leven waarderen is een documentaire uit 2008 over de Japanse zenmeester Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931-1995). Hij was één van de grote pioniers die het boeddhisme naar het Westen brachten.
