In Place 36

Atop her desk, "one who listens

to the cries of the world" rests

in emptiness, yet serves to salve 

inner and outer wounds 





A friend donated a statuette of Avalokiteshvara, or Guanyin (Jp. Kannon), the bodhisattva who “hears the cries of the world.” It’s evidently a mass market copy of the great (2m height) Song Dynasty Guanyin currently on display in the National Museum of China, Beijing. The pose is Royal Ease, and Guanyin appears to be teaching while holding a lotus-flower wish-fulfillment jewel. Above the statuette on the wall there is a framed copy of the Heart Sutra; to the left there is a framed enso or empty circle from one of the series of the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (Ox and Ox-Herd Both Gone Out of Sight)." To the right is a framed photograph of the memorial statue of Mugai Nyodai (1223-1298), first abbess in Japanese Zen, who is said to have burned her face with a hot iron in order to be accepted to live and study among male monks.

With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita, and thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear.
-- Avalokiteshvara in the Heart Sutra.

 

In Place 35

Sun slants across the room

differently each day; sometimes her

young friend (who points to the earth) shines

but sometimes darkness holds him





Sun strikes the young man on the altar mostly in winter. At the height of summer he reposes in shade. There is no hindrance; light and its absence require each other to make one universe.

In darkest night it is perfectly clear; in the light of dawn it is hidden.
It is a standard for all things; its use removes all suffering.
Although it is not constructed, it is not beyond words.
Like facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other.

-- Dongshan, "Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi" in Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (1924-33) reprinted in Hongzhi, Cultivating the Empty Field, 2000, tr. Leighton and Yi Wu

 

In Place 34

The waterfall that runs in Autumn

runs, fills the hut with white noise;

to air dark corners, old woman

slides a window open -- bang!





The waterfall’s music begins usually in late October or early November and in late May or early June it stops; though in 1993 it ran all year.

So many years spent idly contemplating
The immense white layer on the mountains;
This winter, all of a sudden,
I see it for the first time as a snow-mountain.

-- Dogen (tr. Stephen Heine)