There is only one Karma. Not one for each person, for each tree, for each planet or star. Just one universal Karma. Everything is moving along – being moved along – according to the Karma. Karma
Infinite, Eternal, Empty. That's the Godhead. Why Empty? Why do Buddhists say The Empty, the Void, Nothingness? We used to think that between the stars there was nothing. Now we know that it is filled with
The English sinologist Arthur Waley writes of great Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu: "To be known is to be lost. The wise man ‘hates that the crowd should come'."* Well, I'm so much less known now than
To quicken: to give life, to vivify. The anthropologist Margaret Murray at the age of ninety-nine declared in her "The Genesis of Religion" that the origin of the religious feeling occurred long, long ago when a woman first felt the mysterious quickening and attributed it to an unseen Power.
I never cried during my mother's illness, nor at her death. Nor later at my daughter Kathie's funeral. I had come to understand that tears are for unfulfilled fantasy: what I had imagined the rest of
The essence of the Japanese tea ceremony is the acceptance of the As Is: to attain a state of detachment transcending judgement, when things, people, all events, all of existence, are accepted just as they are.
Let me tell you of the room where I do nearly all my painting. There are many physical influences there, but I'll now just mention the Chinese because they seem to be the more powerful.
I speak of each of us having a Soul, as if each Soul were individual. But perhaps there's only one Soul, with myriad manifestations.
We can photograph the “ordered woods and gardens” – as most do. I much prefer the apparently disordered – the rust, the “junk.” And, hopefully, through it the Higher Order.
The purpose of meditation, Zen master Dogen taught, was not to become the Buddha-Nature but to realize that we already are, that we always are.
