Samsara/entropy

She spreads a scrap of drape
chalks a white line to follow
wonders at the collision
of Buddha with Euclid

 

Here be fallacies and contradictions; but let us muddle on.

 

For about a year, I have been too out of it to sew, not to mention my eyes are not what they have been. But my health has unexpectedly improved in the last month or so.

 

I needed an envelope for a new rakusu, so I've revisited a neglected practice. The first stitches were horrible, but perseverance uncovers muscle memory. 

I intend the stitches to follow the more or less straight line of chalk. The thread wanders, sometimes above, sometimes below, the line as conceived. 

 

Even if to my eye the stitching were to go straight, a hand lens would disabuse me of that notion. 

 

At first I was aggravated by my lack of skill, but the gap between skill and sufficiency can never be fully closed, and you have to know when to punt. I've become tolerant of deviation.

A Euclidean object exists at most as a pattern (concept) across a substrate of neurons in our brains. 

 

Its expression into physical form is approximate (map vs. territory). For example, there are no true spheres in nature.

 

If you look at the surface of a bubble closely enough (under, say, an electron microscope), you find it is a polygon or polyhedron, or not even that, because the atoms found at the vertices are in flux.

 

There is no there there.

 

Buddha chose "anatta" as the core of his teaching. He was telling the Brahmins their concept of the everlasting soul is only a concept. 

An axle/wheel said to have gone "out of true" was called, in Buddha's culture, dukkha: when the deviation from the concept reaches the point of inconvenience to the task.

 

Skill may create a functional wheel, but not a perfect one. We know and can live with that. The skilled wheelwright creates a wheel that is within tolerance; no more is asked by the wise.

 

Insistence that our experience match our imaginings will give rise to dissatisfaction. 

This is what is meant by samsara. We are "running around in circles," chasing our delusions, which consist in expecting that idealism will bring us this supposed happiness: that there will not be entropy.

 

-- shonin 

Unless you consult particulars you cannot even know or see. 

--William Blake, Annotations to Reynolds.

 

In Place 56

 

Bright windows prove helpful

old eyes look for a needle's next

plunge. Where will it come out?

Every time, it seems to surprise

  

Her teacher tells her she is a nun. She begins sewing a black robe. It's too hot for that, so she pokes a hole in the wall, to run a fan. For a break, she sits in the shade of the cottonwoods, sipping switchel. Quail run across her legs, one by one.

Let go of emptiness and come back to the brambly forest.
Riding backward on the ox, drunken and singing;
Who could dislike the misty rain
pattering on your bamboo raincoat and hat?
In empty space you cannot stick a needle.
-- attr. Dongshan Liangje, The Five Ranks tr. Leighton in
Cultivating the Empty Field, 77

In Place 51

 

Home-dyed blue muslin and cranberry thread

stubby fingers advance a millimeter

something something Shakyamuni

eyes cloud over, hands shake

 

Promising, with thin fabric, to make promises to herself, she takes up the unaccustomed needle. Sew a straight line to represent walking a straight path.

 

Though there is no space even for needle to enter,
Yet it controls all the mountain peaks around.
It is not unusual for a tiny particle to contain the whole world.
Mt Sumeru enters into a mustard seed and becomes one with it.

-- Songs of Preceptor Naong (1320–1376) tr. Whitfield and Park