T27 - Zen - C 7
Zen. It's a word that conjures up mystical understanding in the minds of people. It seems completely unfathomable to many, even practitioners. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of books have been written on the topic. Many of them are quite accurate, quite analytical, insightful and even educational. The best ones contain poems some of which are structured with seventeen beats or emphases. These are called Haiku. They're traditional and there's as much meaning in the beats and pauses are there are in the words. It's these poems which best express the spirit of Zen and which offer the best path to comprehension. Of course comprehension is the wrong word. All words are the wrong word. Zen is wordless. So, you see why there is such mystery surrounding what is essentially an utterly simple thing?
There are many paths to Zen.
There's the slow way, the fast way, the upside down way,
The book way, the teacher way, the way of meditation.
Follow the moon, follow nature, follow the rainbow.
All will get you there.
posted by Russ | 4:39 AM
3 Comments:
Ron from Sapporo, Japan
That’s not Haiku. Re-reading it several times I detect different numbers of beats, all more than seventeen. But then you didn’t actually state that your poem WAS Haiku although it’s implied in context.
Anyway, Zen is an absence of nitpicking.
Jerry from El Paso
Suzuki said that all his books about Zen were silly but he had to earn a living.
Ellen from Nantucket
The feeling of being grateful does not have to have an object towards which we direct our gratefulness. We can just have the feeling. Not directing it towards an object (God, another person, fate, etc.) creates an expansive, unobstructed mind which is Zen-like in its clarity.
In Western culture we are taught subject-object thinking. That’s nice, but incomplete. We don’t have to be grateful TO anything. Just have the feeling.
In the West we are taught that whatever power or whatever thoughts we have, we must DO something with it. We don’t have to. We can just sit quietly with it. Take gratefulness for example.
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