Posted inDharma, Koans, Videos

Summer 2023: Sesshin Talk 4

August 1, 2023

A sincere heart – just one – is simply the ten directions crystal clearthe ten directions themselves squeeze the marrow from the bone.

Dogen

A hawk travels many miles by its stillness

Valerie richly unfolds Case 46 from the Mumonkan, Sekiso’s “how do you step forward from a 100-foot pole?” (…And manifest your whole body in the world of ten directions)? The pole-top evokes that state of not-one-thing: house fallen, person forgotten, not a speck of cloud in the spacious sky. No-one to do anything and no-one to be helped or saved. But that’s not the end of it; how could it be. So then what is it to let oneself fall into the myriad things, without supposing they were formerly other than one’s very body?

Valerie dialogues on the matter with several kindred spirits, but especially Dogen, who says: “a sincere heart – just one – is simply the ten directions crystal clear” and “the ten directions themselves squeeze the marrow from the bone.” So you don’t exactly have to do it, this step. What are we letting go of in this step, after all? Of some belief in lack, some contraction? It’s just a contraction! Just a story rehearsed enough to get kind of crusty. What if that contraction, that fist, is itself formed by the single fist which nothing lies outside of? As David Hinton translates Mumon: “nurture the simplicity of occurrence appearing of itself; soon inner and outer are a single tissue.”

Photo by Elisa Stone on Unsplash

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