Buddysm
Oh what I wouldn’t give for a law like equivalent exchange!
Here are some fictional Buddhist causes and conditions, similes and parables. They focus around the theme of meeting, coming together, aligning, etc.
Position
A yoga master once asked her students for any poses they could do that she couldn’t. They offered every challenging pose, alteration, and creative twist they could design. This went on for several days and nights.
But the master always formed herself perfectly. She could not be surprised.
(Describe her shapes changing in a timelapse, like some biblically accurate six-armed vishnu)
Thus confirmed, the master entered into a state of deep meditation, thinking the world held nothing more for her.
But still one student came before her, bowing in awe and reverence. The student brought her an apple, mottled yellow and dim red, begged her humility, and asked for her open ears.
He asked her, “I have a pose to try. When I define it you know it immediately as yoga. And as you are the master of all Yoga, it should not give you any trouble, may I see you stay in it for my benefit?”
The master replied she would hear his description.
“It is a pose you know, though it’s been some time, I think you have forgotten its name. So I will describe it by form. Kneel with your butt on your heels. Reach out both hands before you on the ground. Raise your neck brightly.”
The master replied confidently:
“My pupil you underestimate my memory. What you say is true, it has been quite some time, for that is the “Child’s pose- Balasana”
The student apologized meekly and remained quiet in the pose themself, waiting to witness the master perform it too.
The master began to move into the pose. She was deft and flexible. Her body laid nearly flat against the mat. Her back and leg muscles spread like glorious wings, becoming air inside the air.
She stated the pose formally, then its histories, then its developments, then its effects on a person present in it. She taught, as she taught all other poses, the Child’s pose.
Just as the master began to release herself from the pose, intent to return to her repose, she smiled, laughing at herself.
“You were right my student, you certainly have brought me a teaching I had forgotten! But why do you act as if you were wrong?”
The student didn’t understand the master’s new conclusion. “I’m sorry. You knew the pose, Master.” As they continued to bow in Balasana.
“It’s true I knew the pose, but repose I have forgotten. While explaining the uses of the pose I remembered it just as its name implies, a pose for a beginner in the world. I have treated it wrongly in that respect, for I allowed a student to bring it to me. But there was an even bigger question I felt while bowing there in front of you. I am truly flexible, as much as one can be, but how is it my limits fall so short of true flexibility?”
The student began to stand, disappointed in the apparent taunts coming from his beloved teacher. “Sorry, master. Please forgive my presumptions.”
The master went on, “In all my time with Yoga, I have forgotten its one true teaching, the mutable stretch and shift of all static relationships, the meditations on impermanence, the cyclical nature of the breath and the body. All these, the arms of yoga, rolled into a single shape. I had forgotten. But most of all I had forgotten myself, me, my past which I have held so long and so strenuously away from me, I thought myself an adult, a teacher, a master. But I am just a student!”
She continued, exhilarated “Your question brought me a question, your awareness brought me awareness: can I take the pose in which I am the student, and you are the master? I don’t know, Master? Tell me.”
The student only sat back on their seat amongst all other students, saying only one more thing:
“I don’t think as yet I could flex so much to say. I will have to take a simpler pose.”
He sat still in long lines and columns of symmetry, in the infinite field of the teacher’s school, where one could view from any angle the crystal patterns of the pupils like many knives on end, of endless scale and repetition. Yet there amongst each line, each pattern, warped and viewed in every style from the every column of the peristyle, opaque and darkest at its center, she still saw the pupil watching, humiliated but attentive, the balanced core of the universe standing even all around them. The Master had never seen anything like it, or at least, she thought it just a child’s dream, the magnitude of it, the dizzying spectacle of it. In front of her school, perfect in every form, she sensed that little teaching waiting patiently for more, fading like unity into obscurity.
The buddha is like a mountain standing obscured behind many tall trees
The sangha are the many trees believing themselves to be tall
The dharma is the journeyman on the forest floor path between
The mountain grows, the trees shrink
The mountain breaks into tiny stones
The trees become green harmony
The buddha is the many rocks that rose up from the earth
The sangha is a forest with its roots and leaves weaved together.
The dharma is the apex of the sun, seeing no shadow
The rocks are columns holding precepts
The forest is the great robe of forebearance
The sky is a noble room which dresses peasants in the lion’s skin
The buddha is a teacher.
The path is revealed by becoming lost
This peace is many pieces
Motley slotted in the moss
Piles - Flies and Outflows
There was once a seeker of truth Traveling from land to land for truth He showered deserts in his footsteps His journey sprinkled over eons He came upon a mountain foot Unable to move another foot He looked up to the ridgeline Where he spotted spots between its teeth and laughed to tell the toothy truth “There’s a piece between your teeths” He said, between chews. He then gathered up his bread and leavened up the hillside And he reached the top And there was a small wooden chair with a hole That thickened the air with putrid stink And in it filled up to the seat the brown tipped derrière With a Dairy Queenly curl spilled there The world unbidden squarely twirled And the seeker got his truth From the flies he shooed away When they turned again and then returned And he said One would view a mountain very different when a mound amounts atop One would view a mound verily different when a mountain mounts atop And he wallowed And he drifted And he stopped
Fly on the wall Where with wherewithal thee fly As I am stalled upright staring In angled planes of eyes Let not brush all your buzzing Bush and hair twitch by my thigh But rather watch me run and rush till time does my paint dry And therefore watch me fly-like thusly So my finger occupied with shushing Let not my hand befly
Listen to me, Brothers
The vow of the boddhisatvas
Is a mistake. To serve Buddhas
One must first Buddhas awake.
Budds
Lotus Sutra 11, the jeweled stupa. When the Buddha preaches the best of the sutras, the sutra of the wonderful flower, he gathers up all buddhas in all the ten directions.
First the stupa comes, bearing the body of Abundant Treasures resplendent in its canopies and redolent in its banners.
This is the body of the Sutra, dressed in gold, and the other precious seven.
To pay respects to the Buddha Abundant Treasures, and take refuge in his excellent promise, the Buddha that has so expounded his body must summon up all Buddhas in all the ten directions.
The white tuft on the Buddha’s head will rend the boundaries of the saha world to reveal all his projections.
The near dimensions all align, folding inward over each other like broken puzzles into a single pure land of flat wide walkways, lined with trees of lapis lazuli and ropes of gold-leaf filigree lining the ways.
The Buddha has brought on the assembly. The spectators sit in seats tiered and graduated. Below each a boddhisatva, Above each there is a Buddha.
The story tells itself the skillful means. A beacon rises from the ground. The beacon is the wonderful dharma of the flower. A flower blooms inside the sutra. It summons Buddhas with its gleaming fragrance like bees. They spread the flower from their puffy coats like pollen dust in the breeze. The buddhas are a field of growth.
They tell us skillful means, they tell us skillful, what it means, the field the growth the flower lone and in their myriad manies.
Skillful means to gather to me. Skillful means to bring together parties. And that is the metaphor and that metaphor is its own doing. The flower sutra gathers up to gather gatherings. It bridges our dimensions and leaves us unity. How is one to do it, Buddha? I have no white tuft and laserbeam? “Do not worry, good son, you are doing fine just listening.
Skillful, friends, it looks like this, and meaning’s what it’s doing.”
Mirrors
“Might it be possible to transfer a mind
To see through the eyes of the other?”
The acolyte asked with a firm chest.
The master thought a while under wizened lids:
“No. I suspect. The identity is eternally private. And still to become is to die. There can be no other when the self arrives. You can see for yourself. Ask me, who am I?”
He continued when he opened his eyes, feeling a passionate heat in his breast he hadn’t felt for a long time:
“I am the teacher in disguise. Here I am a student. I teach the way to guide. But you, you already knew this. Because I and you are I.”
The student stood up from a knelt bowing dip, sturdy as a wooden cart.
He took cabbage heads and lettuce heads into a kitchen and left, having done his duty.
But the kitchen was dirty. The monks there were lazy and slept more than they swept.
When the acolyte returned, the acolyte was angry at the sight of fresh food soiled underfoot.
He wheeled into them like a wheezing, spitting, thunderstorm. The monks bowed and shut their seedy eyes.
When he tried to move them one way, their bodies react to peal away. They sent out shoots and limbs to stabilize, and put their guards up with their loyal forearms. But the acolyte did not stop pelting them, switching and striking and booming. The dusty floor had risen to the air, with the thick cakes under the acolyte’s shoes picking up prints from the ground. He only kept mowing at the monks. He would remove the weeds.
But as he pulled one bloodied monk up by the neck intent to plant his face, the other monk would save his friend with a well placed cabbage bed.
Shoved into the soft of rotten vegetable, the bloodied monk managed a “thanks”. And with two hands grabbed the bulb from on his head as he would eat it, only it had eaten him.
The acolyte, on seeing this, was enlightened. It is said all the dirt of the floor and the air were swept into him, like a tempest.
He was coated all in clay and lettuce shreds in coiled strands curled onto his top. And he put out one hand and said, stay. And he lay down one hand and said stop. And the cart on which he endless strained upturned and spread the stock, as the wheels turned freely round.
The monks, on seeing this transformation, supplicate to pay obeisance, for they were in the presence of the Buddha, Pristine Fired Clay. The Buddha’s skin was glass like passion from the kiln, shining and reflecting great precepts. His ceramic churned with legends shaking in the six ways into all the ten directions. Among them the two in front of him, bowed in praise. Back he showed the monks to them, now perfect bodhisattvas, cracked like buried moulds from the ground. He was to give a sermon there that started:
“Is it possible to free a mind to see through the eyes of the other? It is possible when you look my way.”
Too true, Sariputra.
The Lesser Vehicle makes up
the greatest part
of the Greater Vehicle.
A Fast French Dream in a Far East Car
When I’d ate my fill, I stood on my own two legs and said “Ay Boss B, Thanks for all these micro greens, I’m gonna head.” Boss B said “You’re welcome… to sit down instead” But I, well done with all the green, stood high And wore the coat that bore me between lives I looked on but back behind replied “Ay Boss B, thanks for the chair and the crown, but I’m gonna fly” Again he said “Sit down instead” But this time he was burning red He sucked it up across the room until the limes turned blue “Down, Sit, I said” Boss B said “Ayyyyy Boss B, don’t beef with me, I’m just peacing till the end. It’s all cool, this new blue rule, but sorry cyain’t interested.” “Please!” He yelled, yellowing. “You are my best!” I knew what he had meant, but I said “Those other fellas are your benefits” He said “Those infants never made me bread” I said “Hey Boss B, just look at me, I grew up here and now I’m me” “These buds may be may babies, but they’re still bloomin’. Me, I’m just a seed. I follow winds and sun smoochin’. I’m free.” He said “No you belong to me, you are my progeny, we are one species, you betray your duty, you fire on the innocent” I laughed at that as tears I shed “Ay Boss B, Be, don’t follow me, I’m working on that job you dread. I’ve got to go to bed. Tomorrow I’ll wake up bright and early, open shop, and raise the dead.”
In this gatha
There is not one bit of truth
Which makes the truth we find here
Great in its importance
Perhaps we're all just silent, monks Who took the vow to wait before we know we're's the last one with n minus one x's before his a2ned eyes deceiving him. That night, All confusion, All around, spots the singular mirror that is all of our waitless crowns. Two windows flank the day. The door is much smaller than all men, at once! But we'll have to wait and see.
Eggsistentialism
We cry when we slip the womb We cry when first we’re cut We cry when we dont know what to do We cry when just because A little hammer does us in You don’t have to conquer the whole egg Just have a crack And dont go out the way you came in
Dude, what if there were a really big fella waiting a long time from now, and everything that we have here preserved in its purity went into him like a refreshing gulp of watahhhh.
When someone goes
to speak the dharma, do not interrupt
when someone comes
to show the dharma, do not be distracted
when someone hums
to spread the dharma, do not block the way
when someone grows
to love the dharma, do not ever negate
You’re either a pick and a flick
or a pick and a lick
to not pick at all?
that just aint realistic.
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Ring the gong
weepworthy... thank you for sharing Nate