Yunmen quoted, “‘People all have a shining brightness.’ When you look for it it appears dark, dim, dim. Where do you start to see your shining brightness?”
He answered himself, “The place where you eat and sleep is the triple gate”
He added: “A good thing is not as good as no-thing”
There is a no-position genuine person. She is always going in and out of the face that you show. If you haven't seen her yer, take a look!
Chiyono's awakening poems ca. 1280
The bucket catches the stream water
and holds it,
And the pure moon through the pines
appears in the water.
(and, a year later)
Though in every way I tried to save it,
By chance or design,
The bottom fell out;
No water in the bucket,
No moon in the water
There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. - Zora Neale Hurston 1934
Audio Meditation with Rachel Boughton and a very nice bell.
The koan is: You can't miss, even if you try.
Stream music and playlists with SoundCloud and wow your visitors with your tunes.
Meditation with the beginning of the story of the donut maker:
Yu worked in town as a donut-maker. She used to visit a Zen temple and listen to talks and ask questions with the other students. The teacher gave her the koan, “There is a true person of no rank.”
Meditation with the koan "the stone woman gives birth in the middle of the night"
The great way (Tao) is not difficult, you just can't pick and choose.
The enlightened person is standing at the top of a 100 foot pole. You have entered the way, but it's not yet real to you. You must take a step from the top of the pole and the world in the directions will be your complete body.
The koan goes like this: Step by step in the dark, if my foot's not wet, I've found the stone.
A meditation with a story from the Lotus Sutra, about an 8 year old Dragon Princess who helps awaken the whole world.
May all beings be at ease, may they be happy, may they be safe, may they be free.
From Ursula le Guin's version of the Tao Te Ching verse 45. What's perfectly whole seems flawed, but you can use it forever...
10 minutes of meditation where you don't have to do anything. More interesting than it sounds!
A five minute meditation with the koan
Heart unclouded,
Heart clouded,
Standing up
or falling down,
It is still the same body.
- Princess Yodo, Abbess of Tokeiji 1350
How to respond to chaos and difficulty by first listening to the sound of the rain. Rachel reads aloud from a piece she wrote not long after the 2016 elections.
A five minute meditation with the koan: The heart-mind turns in accord with the 10,000 things. The pivot on which it turns is very deep.
Rachel talks about how we are saved by things that are evanescent.