*To a Korean friend:

‘The old man of the village
called us back
to drink three cups
beneath the crooked mulberry.

Mankind is small
but this drunkenness is wide and great–
where now is Japan, where is your Korea?’ *

Just thought- lines in the shifting sand
drawn in the mind by the wind-fingers of karma…
Yet in identifying more with one side
it’s as though we see through just one eye…
and define and reify with the other

And a deeper sense of fragmentation
with agitation and polarisation
occurs through biased interpretation
of the contra-distinction of conceptualisations

Yet… all this mental activity comes to naught
for what is really made by thought?
Where does it take us to ?
Nowhere –
still here,
but not quite simply being

See how, with just a little space…
‘Nowhere’ becomes ‘Now here’ …
my little joke : )
… opening to our potential
**to live in equanimity, calmly and contentedly

free from all care, acting naturally and reasonably
Not striving to avoid delusion nor seeking after the truth…
…knowing delusions as baseless and truth as ourself**

So… may dualistic tensions be recognised as baseless … and dissolve in the deep peace of their origin… May we and all beings fully realise how we actually are…

This plant, without my glasses on, looked dead… so I was about to take down its drying stems and leaves…
but on closer inspection noticed what looked like buds and so left them, and instead watered the
pot…
and was surprised by flowers in January!

Will there be flowers from new growth…maybe…
Will there be flowers from old stems ?…maybe…

Botanically… the potential for flowering may be present but it is latent, unless and until the necessary
causes and conditions are in place…

If the bud’s not fully developed then it cannot not open to the warmth of the sun’s rays…and the viability of the plant itself depends upon so many factors…
activity in the stem and leaves and roots,
survival of the greenfly onslaught, fertility of soil, nutrition, freedom from disease…sufficient watering… space… and light

Dharmically… our potential to realise how we are is ever-present…and although realisation is not a product of conditions…
dharma ‘re-conditioning’ can bring about a softening and loosening …
easing out from fixity and rigidity…to more spaciousness and lightness…

Perhaps we had some presents to unwrap at Christmas…
but we already have so many riches –
all we need to help us unwrap from the beliefs which constrict own potential.

We currently have ‘on loan’… and (ahem…) we don’t know how long the lease is!
~ this human body, along with the faculties and freedoms which allow us to appreciate and connect with the stream of dharma we’ve encountered…
~ access to so many of James’ and others’ clear dharma explanations… with the opportunity to ask questions to clarify our understanding of what we’ve read and seen and heard…
from this, and also from example…
~ connection with compassion which arises from openness… free of assumption and appropriation, free from the objectification of dualising consciousness

All this… as movements of the mind… which is not on-loan…but ‘the chief’…. a given and enduring treasure…
can evoke the scents of ease and freshness and act as a catalyst for the realisation of our own
potential freedom.

Inviting that slight, yet deep adjustment, from being not quite here…
to being fully present as presence…
so we too may flower from openness,
unconditioned… 

A bit more on connectivity to follow …but this, is plenty long enough!

* from William Wray’s Sayings and tales of Zen Buddhism

** from the Sutra of Wei Leung

Buddhists have made tsa-tsas imbued with prayers… sometimes placing them in stupas and other holy places… for centuries.
Over the last few years many of James’ students and those connected with them have being doing this around the world… and following the invitation and instructive help of others… and linked with the Earth Healing group, I’ve also made quite a few.
Sometimes making them on my own, sometimes with others…sometimes placing them on my own, sometimes with others…Sometimes others have placed them locations meaningful to them…
all these connections have been delightful!

Tending towards perfectionism, I spent a while checking out different types of clay…where it can be purchased….and fired (though that’s not essential)…
This brought me into connection with Devon potters and others…
but in the end a local ‘decorate and make your own pot’ shop cum café offered the solution for me.
The friendly lady who runs it gave me a large tub of clay for very little cost and fired the tsa-tsas destined to be buried in the earth pots free of charge…and I happily enjoyed her cooked breakfast! : )

It’s a soothing activity in itself to work with clay…and the image formed in the process is imbued with prayers for the most profound welfare for all. So the wisdom and beneficial capacity of the deity…and our own latent/ nascent potential…are clearly connected in the process.

Then the placement of these tsa-tsas takes us out into the world, into sites of beauty where, with the prayers we offer, we can see them as acting as ‘place-holders’, focal points of beneficial energetic radiance…and bringing healing into areas where activities arising from ignorance have despoiled land and sea… and the lives of those connected with such exploitation.

Many people are suffering through feeling isolated, disconnected, and impotent; we are very fortunate in having the practices that we do…
Being able to do what we can that’s beneficial, in a way that resonates with and for us, is such a blessing and as these tsa-tsas are placed across the world we can imagine a physical ‘web’ forming, infinitely illuminating the interconnectivity of our hearts and those of all sentient beings within the illusion of duality, with the infinite potential of emptiness…

Julie joined me in making some tsa-tsas a month or so ago and mine went up onto Dartmoor a little while later. The images above are of Julie’s …as they recently found their place… in Dartmouth.

On a gloriously sunny late-autumn afternoon and evening we did some prayers on the harbour wall… and then she gently lowered the flat tsa-tsa into the water… for its blessings to dissolve into the seas…

Later we found and followed some steps down to and old fort…part of the defence of the harbour and the prosperous town that grew up around it.
Now open to the sky it was quiet in the early evening and we could say prayers in the arched embrasure close to the water, where armed guards would once have kept look out ready to fire one of the two canons which covered the entrance to the port in case of attack.

Julie then placed the rupa in a niche, high up in the external wall …disguising it with jasmine, ferns and daisies…and, with the dedicating prayers…there it remains, transitioning… as the rain washes it, particle by particle… into the sea

It was indeed a beautiful evening…

…
So if this connective activity takes your fancy, Hanna Holtbernd is kindly offering two days of opportunity to connect with each other around this 17 Nov. and 15 December. You’ll find the details on the Simplybeing website

If write ‘above you’ll see my neighbours tree’…well would I lie to you?

That saying ‘seeing is believing’ is so often what we do … but the believing is deceiving… and it confounds the seeing!

Looking with wider eyes, is there just a tree?… – no sky, no clouds or sun?’
Okay… so maybe there is a tree and sky and sun and clouds in front of me…

Or maybe not…

Are there simply dots… showing variation of colour on the screen…
(mostly back or white)
which I take to show defined and separated shapes
quickly pattern-matched to words
with the easy familiarity of
of one steeped in human concepts…

Connecting these words creatively…
with echoes from the senses
from memory… and beliefs,
from ‘me’,
I weave an artificial-a-tree!

Although it seems that there
is, really, truly, something there…some self-existing ‘thing’
independent of the movements of my mind…
That’s a belief…a thought taken to be true, invested with certainty by the energy of another thought (or two, or three…or four or many more!)
Mum says to six month old tugging at what’s within it’s grasp from the back pack as we chat …that’s a tree! A silver-birch tree!!! it goes on and on from there…it’s a this…it’s a that…but whatever we call it that’s not what it is.

Then I could investigate further…this propensity to reify imaginings!
Does something similar happen when I’m out in the garden looking at ‘my neighbours tree’…
Do I separate dualistically, there’s me-subject and tree-object…do I interpolate a screen of interpretation between the tree and me?
Or do I see what’s there prior this activity…the radiance, light or energy of my mind showing as forms of emptiness…none which are ‘things’.

In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet he says ‘there’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.
But although it’s less poetic isn’t it more true to say thinking makes it ‘seem’ so, for the thinker…?
And we can also look deeper… to the possibility of realising that there are no self-existing things onto which such an attribution of value could be stuck…Thinking, believing, that there are!.. won’t make it so…
and closes the door to a vital question… regarding the nature of this confident labeller, the ‘sticker’ !

Adding concepts to light forms is the recipe for making samsara… a world of pseudo entities where, as we fall into reifying interpreting and identifying with arising thoughts… utilising them as the basis for our fabrications, the light of the mind seems obscured…
And as we feel more dense solid and certain about our existence as individuated things we forget how much we have in common…most profoundly the equality of the empty ground or basis of our manifestation.
It’s always there but ‘unseen’ by our way of looking… until we desist…and relax out of our hungry egoic fascination with any movement of the mind…in meditations which facilitate this realisation.


Can I relax out of my solidifying busyness enough to allow the showing of the energy, ‘the tree’ , to impact me, to open to it, relax into… allow myself to be at one with the tree?
Then maybe I’ll see that the dry and dehydrating concepts which I, as ego-self, might usually unwittingly apply …making it seem more interesting to me… are not only superfluous … but a distraction.
It’s a bit like putting a big wedding dress over it… you look so pretty! I say, relating to the dress/ing that I just added…I’m appreciating my creativity not what’s actually there.

Maybe you like Wordsworth’s poetry…and can kind of imagine the daffodils…but if really you want to ‘get’ a daffodil you’ve really got to be there, present..relaxed…soft gaze, absorbing, sniff… and put your face in it! Then…what can you say about that? …it’s ineffable! and more of life would be as that if we weren’t so quick to deaden it with our ‘knowing’ words


So, if you like, you can imagine me in the garden enjoying the display…

At eight a.m….morning tea,
blackbird looks out from the neighbour’s tree…
By nine…
both gone!

…sawdust… logs… and chippings…!!!

Is there a gap in what I see… a hole left in the mind by the missing tree?…Happily not..it’s self-healing, always complete …

I appreciation of the tree I wrote:

For many years this full grown, vital tree
offered generous hospitality…
to birds and many beings

Nesting mating resting singing,
playing fighting shouting screeching
warming wings and preening feathers

shade and shelter from inclement weather,
the smaller from the big predator

In conversation with the soil; fungi bacteria and
all surrounding trees, and more,
the clouds… the sun and moon…
and stars

Drinking the rain and swapping gasses with the air
It swayed and danced and bent in gales,
and swished it’s branches in the breeze…

then suddenly…

first legs and arms, then head,
then trunk,

erased from view

chunk after chunk
like slow-mo etch-a-sketch…

Apparently…

my neighbour’s neighbour…
is troubled by needles!

Eh!!?… Oh!…
not the sharp and shiny ones
but the browny and piney ones
Riding the wind they sometimes fly from the tree
and, thoughtlessly,
some land…
in his gutters!

Laughing or crying…??? which to do ???
sadness and laughter both move through…

Illusions arise that we call ‘you’ and ‘me’
‘the bird’ ‘the chainsaw’ and ‘the tree’

but as they arise and we let them go free,
we can play in the play… with equanimity

Appearances – as experience shows –
Come as they come
and go as they go!

P.S For some reading this, it might be a first taste … You’ll find that the You-Tube Videos of the recent retreat James gave ‘The practice of Meditation’ explain this and much more with great clarity!
Releasing out our habitual orientations is not a task for the anxious ego…but, softening in the dharma rain and feel safer, closer to the truth..reliance on the ego-self construct diminishes and so we see more clearly

In the time that the historical Buddha was teaching he had some interactions with a certain King Udayana
This king was about to go to war… again!
He had won all his previous battles and was confident that his next venture would, doubtless, have a successful outcome…
Although, within relative reality, some might see that it’s usual in battles for many people on both sides to die, so many in the ensuing generations are marked by and carry the emotional fall-out…resources are squandered, the land is scarred…and there is action and reaction pulsing through time… from this king’s position all that was irrelevant.
He had yet to encounter any dharma teachings so in his opinion he was truly ‘a winner’… his kingdom would surely increase in size, riches and power… so why hold back?

The Buddha knew that now was the time to engage with this particular King, and was very skilful in working with his intention ….
Having shocked the King by the way he repulsed his attack ( the King had regarded his arrival as a bad omen)… from the Buddha’s unshakeable position of equanimity free from aversion (having realised the basis of all phenomena) he was able to work with the king’s pride…inviting him to engage with a far greater challenge – that of defeating the greatest enemy …
The king’s curiosity was piqued… and with that he started to listen to what the Buddha had to say…and began to examine his views and long held certainties under the different lenses of the profound teachings being offered for his benefit and the benefit of many others…including… us!

If you are wondering whether I just made this up …you too can now read the Mahayana Sutra, Advice to a King 2, Advice to Udayana King of Vatsa and check.
You’ll find the whole of the sutra on that link and see that what I’ve written is my interpretation… by way of an introduction to this sutra. It is freshly translated, just this July, and published by the group 84000 Translating the Words of the Buddha …. along with other translations, including the sutra Advice to a King 1 which the Buddha gave to his friend King Bimbisara.

As the Buddha offered so many different teachings for different students at different times in different situations…it seems wonderful that these reliable translations are being brought out and offered freely, into connection with us and our world at this time…so we can read them or speak them out, and contemplate on the deep wisdom offered… and the manner of its presentation.

James recently mentioned how much richness of dharma is yet to be made available…for our benefit and that of others, in whatever our native language is… and was inviting us to consider how we might help.

Donating money towards those engaged in producing translation of such a high calibre as those of the 84000 is just one such possibility…
If it should appeal to you’ll see on their site they offer different ways to do this… including doubling the impact of any regular donation.

There are other groups e.g. The Padmakara group, also offering similar high quality, group worked and peer reviewed translations. That the source of the translation is of such quality is vital for we dharma students… A deep understanding of the way both languages are used by native speakers… and a deep understanding of the dharma, as close as possible to that of the depth of the meaning of the text…will offer the greatest clarity

Clearly there are many different ways of bringing our life energy into connection with the world, inspired by the dharma…People are writing, talking, teaching, transcribing, typing, translating (lots of t’s!)… involved in art, making music, tsa-tsas, earth pots and so on… we find our own way for this to flower
Grand or overtly dharmic gestures may not be called for… communal litter-picking was another of James’ suggestions – decreasing a sense of hopelessness and passivity by increasing connectivity, sharing and participating free from judgment and with the warmth of an open heart… whatever is fitting is perfect.

Image from 84000 translation July update.