little thoughts

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Twinkling like teeny-weeny Christmas lights, the red and green and blue display themselves, perhaps as questions, perhaps as statements....

-- The best teachers are the ones who do what they can to get out of the way ... teaching nothing ... smiling at the sun.

-- Virtue is good stuff ... right up to the moment when it becomes virtuous.

-- A lot of people are just dying to know who they are, staring transfixed and somehow disappointed into the bathroom mirror, heaping effort upon effort to clear things up: "Who am I? I am just dying to know." Whole lifetimes pass in sometimes differently-stated versions of the question and the hope: I am dying to know who I am and yet through it all, the emphasis is misplaced and the yearning goes unrequited ... I am dying to know who I am and the emphasis is placed on the "I am" and the "dying" is neglected. Every moment (never mind spiritual adventures, just look at the ordinary stuff) is born and dies instantaneously. Birthdeath ... poof! ... just like that! It's nothing weird. Present becomes past ... what's weird about that? The only thing that is weird is imagining things somehow don't work that way and that somehow, if I close my eyes tight enough and cross my fingers hard enough, I am different ... and peace is somehow a stranger.

-- Again I come around to my gratitude that my Zen teacher left no "Dharma heirs." Jesus, what a blessing! In Zen Buddhism as in other spiritual constructs, lineage is important. To continue the tradition is important. Parents have children and those children have children and so the unbroken line continues and it is socially yummy. But there is a difference between what is yummy and what is true. What is true may not fit into the confines of belief and hope and words, but that doesn't make it any less true. No sense in turning it into a trifle.
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