Always Only This

New podcast and more

New podcast:

I recently had a wonderful conversation with Mike Kewley on his podcast. Mike is a meditation teacher and author of the marvelous book The Treasure House: Discovering Enlightenment Exactly Where You Are. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation:

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Some words from HUANG PO:

from The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind, transl. by John Blofeld:

“All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you—begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured…. If you can only rid yourselves of conceptual thought, you will have accomplished everything. Our original Buddha-Nature is… devoid of any atom of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy… That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside. Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva’s progress towards Buddhahood, one by one; when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature which has been with you all the time; and by all the foregoing stages you will have added to it nothing at all. You will come to look upon those aeons of work and achievement as no better than unreal actions performed in a dream… There is nowhere which is outside the Buddha-Mind… Relinquishment of everything is the Dharma… but the relinquishment of ALL delusions leaves no Dharma on which to lay hold… You must see clearly that there is really nothing at all—no humans and no Buddhas. The great chiliocosms, numberless as grains of sand, are mere bubbles. All wisdom and all holiness are but streaks of lightning. None of them have the reality of Mind… These mountains, these rivers, the whole world itself, together with sun, moon and stars—not one of them exists outside your minds!... Your true nature is something never lost to you even in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of Enlightenment… Above all, have no longing to become a future Buddha; your sole concern should be, as thought succeeds thought, to avoid clinging to any of them… Do not permit the least movement of your minds to disturb you. This alone is what is called liberation. Ah, be diligent! Be diligent!”

—Huang Po (Obaku in Japanese)

— Huang Po was a teacher of Chan Buddhism, which in Japan became Zen. He lived during the Tang dynasty in China and is considered one of the great Zen Masters. Toni Packer loved Huang Po. She would always read selections from this book on the last day of her silent retreats, and these crystal clear jewels would drop into the deep openness and presence that was so alive after seven days in silence. I must have participated in at least fifty retreats with Toni over the years, so Huang Po has been with me for a long time. Every time I dip into this book, I hear more in it.

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Love to all…