Fewer people made it to class today. Two told me of technical issues but others simply didn't show, and one vanished partway through. Zoom, for all its gifts, hasn't the draw of actual presence. It's rewarding enough for those who let it be, but for those skeptical it may be the opposite.
Oh well, at least the students who weren't there didn't have to hear me try to make sense of Dogen's On the Spiritual Discourses of the Mountains and the Water (山水経), without being able to register whether people were following me or not! (I get a little crazed talking about certain subjects, Zen being one of them, and the body language of the class lets me know I'm not pushing people too far.) I'd chosen five lines to focus on, pointedly taking them out of sequence, but that may still have been too many. These three would have been quite sufficient.
Or maybe just this, in my own words: if what goes up must come down, then what comes down must first have gone up! (Streams are fed by rains, which are fed by clouds, which are fed by seas...) To think of water as something that essentially flows down is to miss part of its nature and most of its life. Maybe the same goes for everything else?
But any sort of Zen insight, especially glibly verbalized, may be a bridge too far in this moment of unfathomable flows.
Oh well, at least the students who weren't there didn't have to hear me try to make sense of Dogen's On the Spiritual Discourses of the Mountains and the Water (山水経), without being able to register whether people were following me or not! (I get a little crazed talking about certain subjects, Zen being one of them, and the body language of the class lets me know I'm not pushing people too far.) I'd chosen five lines to focus on, pointedly taking them out of sequence, but that may still have been too many. These three would have been quite sufficient.
If
we recognize [water] only as something that flows, the word ‘flowing’ slanders
the Water. One reason for this is that the use of the word forces It to be
something not flowing.
In the opinion of the everyday stream of the ordinary and the befuddled, water is unquestionably that which exists in rivers, streams, oceans, and seas. This is not so, for the rivers and seas have come into existence within the Water. Thus, there is the Water even in the places where there are no rivers or seas. It is just that when the Water descends to earth, it creates the effect of ‘rivers and seas’.
In the opinion of the everyday stream of the ordinary and the befuddled, water is unquestionably that which exists in rivers, streams, oceans, and seas. This is not so, for the rivers and seas have come into existence within the Water. Thus, there is the Water even in the places where there are no rivers or seas. It is just that when the Water descends to earth, it creates the effect of ‘rivers and seas’.
When
a dragon or a fish views water as a palace, it will not be like a human being
seeing a palace, nor will such a creature perceive the water to be something
that is flowing on. Were some onlooker to say to the dragon or the fish, “Your
palace is flowing water,” the creature would at once be startled and filled
with doubt, just as some of you may have been startled earlier when you heard
it asserted that mountains flow like water.
Or maybe just this, in my own words: if what goes up must come down, then what comes down must first have gone up! (Streams are fed by rains, which are fed by clouds, which are fed by seas...) To think of water as something that essentially flows down is to miss part of its nature and most of its life. Maybe the same goes for everything else?
But any sort of Zen insight, especially glibly verbalized, may be a bridge too far in this moment of unfathomable flows.
