Get to Work
Work on reducing your likes and dislikes, not only in personal relationships but in everything….Try this with jobs and responsibilities: the nagging little things you have to do but just don’t want to. It’s…
Category: China
Mirrors
CLEANSE THE MIRROR OF YOUR HEART AND YOU WILL SEE GOD. –Neem Karoli Baba, in Ram Dass, Miracle of Love, 249 The heart-mind of the ordinary person is like a dirty and stained mirror. One…
The Golden Rule
Tzu-Kung asked saying, Is there any single saying that one can act upon all day and every day? The Master said, Perhaps the saying about consideration: ‘Never do to others what you would not like…
Closer than Your Jugular Vein
“Look not for my reality in the realm of appearances or in the Void. Seek it in your own mind. There only it resides.–Kuan Yin, in John Blofeld, Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of…
Sangha of Poets
Dear Friends, As we are reading Nhat Hanh’s poems for our June session, I thought I’d share a few poems by other Zen poets in the weeks ahead. Here is one by Han-Shan, who lived…
Su Tung P’o, Traveling at Night and Looking at the Stars (NPM, 4.25.22)
Heaven high above, the night air chill,ranged stars crowd the sky, all in proper places,big stars darting rays back and forth little stars busy as boiling water.Heaven and humans don’t meddle with one another —what does…
Not Flustered, Not Melancholy, Not Anxious
James Laughlin, Ezra Pound’s publisher, observed that “Pound’s translations of Confucian texts, beautiful as is their language, are seldom applauded by Sinologues.” But we common readers may appreciate such versions from the Analects, when they…
Quit Complaining!
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T’ang Poet Han-shanTranslated and with an Introduction by Burton Watson I first learned of Han-shan 30 years ago when reading Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums, which starred Japhy…
Taking Refuge in Po Chü-i
Enough already of Useful Idiots, Counterpunch, flare-ups at The Intercept Political yammering by self-appointed soothsayers This Friday night I fade far away from news of assorted American Psychos And am welcomed by Po Chü-i Who…
Gratitude/555
I give thanks for translators whose labors allow me to meditate on the teachings of sages throughout time, like David Hinton’s work with Confucius’s Analects… 1.16 The Master said: “Don’t grieve when people fail…