Dokusan

In Japan, dokusan is a private meeting of a Zen student with his master, providing the student an opportunity to demonstrate the state of his meditation practice. We are pleased to add this subheading to our weekly postings. For background, readers must see Conjuring Archangel, on my author website www.wgreychampion.com, because the conjuring continues. Dokusan will contribute selections from Anna's ongoing journal, with her kind permission and at her discretion, in the hope that the gathering of insight may prove helpful to others entangled in the nettlesome web of karma. 

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In our recent discussions of selfhood, Archangel, we have talked of the stubborn, often unacknowledged intuitions of the voidness of thing, and of the verification of these by modern science.

Quite so, my daring. Go on.

We also have spoken of the intuited paradox the void and form are one and the essence of ultimate reality, a singular, transcendent self. But you and I recognize a specific nature in this singularity.

Wisdom, strength, and compassion. Correct, my precious and you want to know what affirms such a claim.

That’s it, Guardian, that’s my point.

An interesting one as always, child. Observe, for example, that all religions do in fact affirm these trait, mostly in terms of channeling human behavior toward virtue. But the characteristics we identify are inherent qualities, not behavioral strictures. We do not insist upon being wise, strong, and compassionate. We note that all thing have these qualities by nature.

“Insentient beings speak dharma!”

Exactly, my dear one, the “mountains and the rivers” tell us of transcendent reality, all we need to know, and in the lightning flash of that revelation we see our own one-self made one.

My favorite quatrain from Khayyam! May I?

Let me hear!

“And when thyself with shining foot shall pass/ Amid the guests star-scattered on the grass/ And reaching the spot where I made one/ Turn down an empty glass!”

Child, I may tell you, mine will be the last hand you release when you are “made one.”

In the Courtyard

I have stopped at Corner Bakery this morning on my way to the farm market. There are two local farm markets, and the better one, while a bit out of the way, has excellent local sources, and has had a loyal following in one location every growing season for decades. The other seems to use the same suppliers as the supermarkets. After turning seventy, Grey gave up gardening. We’re both over that hill now!

The Corner is quiet today, thankfully, so I can write this post. The last time I was here, two old gents, no doubt hard of hearing, were having a loud conversation about pro football teams, and this distraction was hideously augmented by a screaming, fractious child. That may account for the pen stroke on my handbag, the first, which I blessed as the sure sign of a true writer. Today there is a woman at work on her laptop, surrounded by food and drinks, her long hair streaked in hot pink. Her handbag is sequined; no ink marks there! Well, on to the farm stand for peaches, tomatoes, and perhaps a cantaloupe. 

The Carriage Lamp

    A carriage lamp lit
   As the night comes down
   To hang upon the roofs.
   Then through the foggy streets of town,
   The sound of hoofs.

   He's come for me
   In a horse drawn coach
   As he has before.
   I watch the lantern's light approach
   And hasten to the door.


  "Come, my dear, and let us ride!
    The coach light leads us on;
    Through the night, sit by my side,
    Till break of dawn."

Past Posts from The Weekly

Universal laws

Allow me, dear readers, to amend my assertion of last week blaming on old age a reflexively prejudicial contrast of the present with memories of the past. What may or may not be true of the aging process must be tempered by an overarching law of the universe, i.e. entropy. We are safe in observing disorder, chaos, degradation as we go through life. Civilization does decline and fall. In this regard, I find myself harking back to my metaphor of the pendulum, gauging the increase of its amplitude by the culture wars, which in turn are the measure of our decline. 

Excessive pressure to the right, so blatantly exercised, is now quite easy to see. A shrinking demographic of white men brazenly wields power to overthrow democracies all over the world in the name of “freedom,” for themselves alone, freedom that is from everyone else. Aware that they are way out of step with public opinion, they have been sly, subtle, scheming, lying their way onto the courts and using the algorithmic poison of social media to anoint their demagogues. 

But the pendulum is ruled by another law of the universe, Newton’s third: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So as far as the amplitude is pushed to the right it will also increase to the left. If you have read my first essay in Ruminata, dear readers, you will be alert to how many excesses on the left in the culture wars relate to sexuality, a very hot topic among humans. When such excesses catch the attention of moderates, they play into the hands of the rightwing. I daresay the left has the stronger claim to humanity, and thus I am loathe to call out extreme liberality. Still I am assured when some columnists do so in my daily newspaper. My own views hew close to opinion polls. Abortion should be legal, for example, within some reasonable limits. But still more inflammatory are the issues involving homosexuality. Curious to me in this tribe is a blindness to their own media success, making their lifestyle not only acceptable but attractive even to small children. Surely sex education might await their development. Primum non nocere.