Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

The Hidden Lamp

‘Once a monk on pilgrimage met an old woman living alone in a hut. The monk asked, “Do you have any relatives?”
She said, “Yes.”
The monk asked, “Where are they?”
She answered, “The mountains, rivers, and the whole earth, the plants and trees, are all my relatives.”‘

In Florence Caplow’s commentary (all of which is worth reading), she says, ‘The Zen stories are quite clear: if you want to truly meet a teacher, you have to ask a question… You must understand that is is the asking that matters, not the answer. Because every real asking, every real meeting comes from the place where the Buddha glimmers in the depths. In the asking is the answerer, and in the answer is the asker. And in the meeting of the two, there are mountains, rivers, and the whole earth.’

A post from the early days.

Responses

  1. ZenJazz Avatar
    ZenJazz

    A question that arose this morning is “Wild, as in ‘wild animals,’ doesn’t mean no rules. So what does wild mean?”

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    1. shundo Avatar
      shundo

      The first thought that came up for me was unconstrained by niceties.

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  2. ZenJazz Avatar
    ZenJazz

    shundo, WordPress didn’t keep the paragraph breaks in my comment. Trying again. If this one has paragraph breaks, please delete the previous version and this preface. Thanks.

    shundo, perhaps I misunderstand what you wrote. Without constraints, why not be nice?

    The question was the result at least in part of the following (quoting online search results):

    The Bob Dylan song with the lyric “Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?” is ” Ballad in Plain D,” found on his 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’. The line appears in the final verse as a philosophical reflection on the nature of freedom.

    “Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life” by Natalie Goldberg is a practical and inspirational guide to writing, building on her popular “Writing Down the Bones” method, which uses Zen-inspired techniques to unlock creativity.

    In the Zen story of “Baizhang’s Fox,” Hyakujo taught that enlightened beings do not ignore or escape the laws of nature (cause and effect).

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    1. shundo Avatar
      shundo

      Thank you for the thoughts and inspirations.
      I find niceties in a different place to nice. Perhaps we could leave it at unconstrained (as I was also thinking of “no second-guessing.”)
      Dogen would tell Dylan that only a bird can see the traces of a bird.

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