WW: Memorial

(This rhododendron grows just outside my mother's kitchen window. Since she moved here 6 years ago it has never bloomed – a fact she drew to my attention just last year.

But this spring it brought on four small white blossoms [one of them out of frame]. Rhododendrons grow riotously on the North Coast, and there are a great many of every colour in this neighbourhood, including the stunning pink native ones. But white heads are rarest. Especially such delicate ones.

As you can tell by its sallow leaves this plant isn't happy, which is undoubtedly why it hasn't bloomed before. I don't know what's bothering it – several other rhododendrons in the immediate vicinity are doing great – but when the bloom falls I'll feed it and see if that helps.

As my mom died three months ago, I'm especially drawn to these timid white blossoms – the colour of mourning in Japan.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Shells

the world is my cloister
except when it's my oyster
for then I cannot roister
because it's so much moister


(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Bike in the jungle

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Source Buddhism

I've been rereading The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, the succinct little Thich Nhat Hanh book that amounts, so far as I'm concerned, to our Bible.

Non-Buddhists may be astonished to learn we lack one of those. Instead, we maintain a libraryful of sutras – pamphlet-sized documents that more or less quote the Buddha – along with three or four additional libraries of epistolary commentary. And we Zenners tend to bust even that down to the Heart Sutra (a short summary of the Buddha's insights), four koan anthologies, and, in Soto, Dogen's Shobogenzo. (Other schools swap that last out for their own founders' teachings.)

But for my money, Heart satisfies the hunger for a source of record, something to tell us in no uncertain terms what we're supposed to be doing here. Heart was the book that made me a monk, and the one I return to in moments of despair and confusion. And it never lets me down, though each time I find I've never read it before.

Among insights gained this time is TNH's reference to "Source Buddhism", one of three streams he sorts modern Buddhism into, by way of understanding the differing perspectives. The other two are Many-Schools Buddhism, notable for its didactic nature, and the Mahayana, which emphasises the responsibility of practitioners to their species and world (the famous "bodhisattva principle").

And though my own tradition – Zen – sits squarely in that last camp, I find I'm a bit of a Sourcer.

Quite a Sourcer, really.

Source Buddhists insist on the primacy of the Buddha's teaching over all other authorities. What he said, is Buddhism. Anything else… might not be.

I think this is an important fixation, because humans compulsively pile everything they like under the rubrics they've already adopted. If they're pacifists, they define even their most bellicose conduct as perfect pacifism. If they're conservatives, each innovation they make becomes the soul of conservatism. If they're feminists, their every impulse reflects pure disgust for sexism – highest of all, their purely sexist ones.

Nowhere is this fatal flaw more evident than in religion.

And in no religion is it more evident than in Zen.

So it's comforting to know that in my instinctive sourcery, I'm paddling an Original Stream – perhaps the original stream – of Buddhism.

Because the path of the Buddha isn't always the smoothest, but I do believe it's the most effectual.

And in case you're wondering: yes. My own meandering improvisations thereupon do constitute "original Buddhic teaching".

Seriously; have you ever met a human?


(Photo of the 6th century Teaching Buddha in Ajanta Cave 16 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Worn-out chain

(Brought to you by decades of wind and salt in a marine environment.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Hermit Robe Chant

Don't walk in front of me;
I may not follow.

Don't walk behind me;
I may not lead.

In fact, just stay the hell away from me.


(With apologies to generations of Jewish summer camp kids.)



(Photo courtesy of Finn Norstrøm, Arkivverket, and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Smoke bush

(Cotinus coggygria)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.