Wednesday, December 05, 2012

The Message


In Gaza. Here it is so easy to find anger. i denounce the enemy, and wonder what i am capable of. Yesterday a man told me, “I am a rocket without a base.” He raged against the injustice of it all. He was not wrong. It is easy to choose sides, factions, and flags. i consider victory. i'm lost in confusion. I stand in the rubble of broken houses and broken lives and i am ready to utter the words "i hate". Then a love sends a message and it breaks through the swirling clouds that surround me. i stand on the barricades as the sea crashes on the rocks. i find my ease, i smile and i hold everything, even my false distinctions, close.

Do you know what it is like to have such a friend? If not, maybe, just maybe, i can be that friend.

Huang Po

Give up those erroneous thoughts leading to false distinctions! There is no 'self' and no 'other.' There is no 'wrong desire,' no 'anger,' no 'hatred,' no 'love,' no 'victory,' no 'failure.' Only renounce the error of intellectual or conceptual thought-processes and your nature will exhibit its pristine purity--for this alone is the way to attain Enlightenment, to observe the Dharma, to become a Buddha and all the rest. Unless you understand this, the whole of your great learning, your painful efforts to advance, your austerities of diet and clothing, will not help you to a knowledge of your own Mind. All such practices must be termed fallacious, for any of them will lead to your rebirth among 'demons'--enemies of the truth--or among the crude nature spirits. What end is served by pursuits of those? Chih Kung says: 'Our bodies are the creations of our own minds.' But how can one expect to gain such knowledge from books? If only you could comprehend the nature of your own Mind and put an end to discriminatory thought, there would naturally be no room for even a grain of error to arise.