Crossing Nebraska

Last week’s post left just two questions outstanding: One, what does the realization of emptiness have to do with the cessation of suffering; and, two, how is it that the realization of emptiness gives rise to compassionate action? In order to focus more completely on these questions, I’ll change the format of this final post in the Heart Sutra series just a little bit by concentrating on Rosan Yoshida’s translation at the beginning and then presenting the three translations in full at the close of this post. Recall that we left off last week with the realization that, with respect to ultimate reality, even the Four Noble Truths are empty; and there is nothing, not even knowledge, to be gained. After all, our conception of knowledge presupposes a knower and a known, and our conception of gain requires that something with a determinable identity enjoy some enhancement of some kind. Clearly this is all solidly in the mundane realm where qualitative and quantitative judgments still ...

Poetry doesn’t have to be good to save your life; it just has to be your own. This is a truth that I learned during my turbulent teen years – years during which the only thing keeping me from losing my mind, so to speak, was the fact that I was writing about it! Alright, perhaps I exaggerate just a little bit – we are talking about dreaded adolescence, after all – but it is true that poetry provided meaning for me at a time when I really needed it. You see, I fancied myself something of a rebel poet back then, skipping out of the classes that I didn’t like in order to steal my way down to the darkened high school auditorium – there to sit alone in the yawning silence, plumbing the depths of my being. Sure, I’d started reading about Eastern religions and philosophy by then, but I’d not yet begun to meditate. Poetry was my meditation, and it held me in good stead throughout those turbulent years. I strongly recommend it to anyone grappling with life-changing issues. And it doesn’t even ...

It seems that I’ve gotten a little off track of late with respect to my posting frequency. My apologies and kind regards to anyone who might have been wondering where I’ve been. Actually, I was under the weather all last week – with barely enough energy to drag myself off of the couch, let alone sit up writing at a computer. I knew I’d be writing about poetry and Zen, though, so I was at least able to pull a dozen or so books down from my bookshelves to sift through as I lay about in recovery. I even managed to scribble out a few pages of notes related to inspiration (which I didn’t actually have), and the unconscious mind (which I had in abundance), and poetry as a spiritual practice, and how it is that words have anything at all to do with the largely wordless practice of Zen. I was even intending to include a few poems of my own – they are Zen poems, after all. Up until a couple of days ago, though, I had no idea how I was going to tie it all together. So what happened since th...