Sublime

A hollow in the ground fills with water. The renewal of spring depends on the withering of fall. By having less, it’s easy to have more. By having more, it’s easy to become confused.

Parched wheat and pine pollen make a fine meal vine flowers and salted bamboo make a tasty dish when I’m exhausted I think of nothing else let others become buddhas or immortals

there is one truth you must accept, and that is the presence of suffering. Suffering has causes which can be illuminated in order to be removed. The things I teach will help you attain detachment, equanimity, peace, and liberation.

“Don’t worry. He has found emptiness.” Yes, I had found emptiness. Now I could be at peace in a bustling city. Even in the midst of a noisy crowd, my heart would be completely tranquil.

A life of poverty was the Zen ideal for a monk seeking the ultimate truth of reality, and so from these negative images came the poetic ideal of a man who has transcended the need for the comforts of the physical world and has managed to find peace and harmony in the simplest of lives.

too, a favorite theme of Zen artists. But the main importance of this sutra for China and for Zen was the point that perfect awakening was consistent with the affairs of everyday life, and that, indeed, the highest attainment was to “enter into awakening without exterminating the defilements [klesa].” There was an appeal here to both the Confucian

WANG P’ANG says, “The natural endowment of all beings is complete in itself. Poverty does not reduce it. Wealth does not enlarge it. But fools abandon this treasure to chase trash. Those who know contentment pay the world no heed. This is true wealth. Mencius said, ‘The ten thousand things are all within us’ (Mencius: 7A.4). How could we not be wea