Fathomless Becoming

"As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,

Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me
I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,

But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me
stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,

Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows,

With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,

Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

I perceive I have not really understood any thing,
not a single object, and that no man ever can,

Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me
to dart upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
...

Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,

Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another,

From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,

Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil,

Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,

A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random,

Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,

Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets,

We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,

You up there walking or sitting,

Whoever you are, we
too be in drifts
at your feet."

- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
"As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life" in Leaves of Grass

Elemental Exchange

"The mountain range
the stones in the water
all are strange and rare
The beautiful landscape
as we know
belongs to those who are like it
The upper worlds
the lower worlds
originally are one thing
There is not a bit of dust
there is only this still and full
perfect enlightenment.
...
Without a speck of dust being raised,
the mountains tower up;
without a single drop falling,
the streams plunge into the valley."

- Muso Soseki (1275 – 1351)

Indra’s Pool

"In one single mote of dust
Are completely seen all worlds.
If living beings should hear about them,
Their minds would be confused and go insane.

As within a single mote of dust,

So, too, it is in every mote of dust.

All world-systems enter within them.

It is in that way inconceivable.

In every particle of dust

Are Dharmas of the ten directions and three times.

The destinies and kshetras are all limitless,

Yet can be known with all their differences.

In every particle of dust

Are limitless kinds of Buddha kshetras.

Of their various kinds, all limitless,

Not a single one remains unknown.

Everything within the Dharma realm,

With all the varying characteristics

And types of destinies, each having differences,
Can all be discerned and known."

- Indra's Net / Avatamsaka Sutra
(late third or the fourth century CE)

Inward Form

"The whole outward visible World with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward Spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, likewise it has its Character externally; like as Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.

...

The Being of Beings is a wrestling Power; for the Kingdom of God consists in Power, and also the outward World, and it stands especially in seven Properties or Forms, where the one causes and makes the other, and none of them is the first or last, but it is the eternal Band.

...

This Formed world has manifested itself with the motion of all forms with this visible world, as with a visible likeness, so that the Spiritual being might be manifest in a corporeal comprehensive essence; as the desire of the inward forms has made itself external, and the internal being is in the external; the internal holds the external before it as a glass, wherein it beholds itself in the property of the generation of all forms; the external is its signature."

- Jakob Böhme (1575–1624)
The Signature of All Things

First Distinction

"‘In the beginning,’ my dear, ‘there was that only which is, one only, without a second. Others say, in the beginning there was that only which is not, one only, without a second; and from that which is not, that which is was born.

‘But how could it be thus, my dear?’ the father continued. ‘How could that which is, be born of that which is not? No, my dear, only that which is, was in the beginning, one only, without a second.

‘It thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth fire.

‘That fire thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth water.

‘Water thought, may I be many, may I grow forth. It sent forth earth.’"

- Chāndogya Upaniṣad (8th to 6th century BCE)
Translated by trans. F. Max Müller, The Upanishads

Nested Worlds

"Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. [...] Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond. [...] And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the garden, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to be imperceptible to us. [...] Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves. [...] Thus, although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it, and of which it is the entelechy; and as this body expresses the whole universe through the connection of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a special way. "

- G.W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716)
Monadology

Pathless Way

"The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject
that we do not see the true nature of things.
Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in inner feelings of emptiness.
Be serene in the oneness of things
and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity

your very effort fills you with activity.

As long as you remain in one extreme or the other,

you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way

fail in both activity and passivity,

assertion and denial.

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality;

to assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality."

- Sengcan (496? - 606)
Xinxin Ming

Stillness Without Seeing

"...Stillness without seeing,
Not moving in a dark room.

Wakeful without wandering,

The mind is tranquil yet bright.

All phenomena are real and eternal,

Profuse, yet of a single form.

Going, coming, sitting, standing,

Don’t attach to anything.

Affirming no direction,

Can there be leaving and entering?

There is neither unifying nor dispersing,

Neither slow nor quick.

Brightness and tranquility are just as they are.
They cannot be explained in words."

- Niutou Farong (594-657)

Liquid Mirror

"How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink—But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through—” She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist."

- Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Buddha Lands

Water is not concerned with past,
future, present or the phenomenal world.
Even in a drop of water, innumerable 
buddha lands appear."

- Dogen (1200 - 1253)

Former World

"Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways.  They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death. [...] Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history."

- John McPhee (1931 - )
Basin and Range

A Kind of Gravitas

"Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation.

...

I speak about stones that have always lain outside or that sleep in their deposits, in veins, at night. They have not aroused the interest of the archeologist, nor the artist or the diamond merchant. No palace, statue, jewel, no dyke, embankment or tombstone was built from them. They are neither useful nor famous. Their facets decorate no ring or diadem. They do not bear lists of victories, or state laws, in indelible numerals. They are not boundary markers or steel, and do not earn credit or deference from bearing with bad weather. They only attest to their own presence.

...

I speak about stones as algebra, vertigo and order; stones as hymns and quincunxes; stones as stings and corollas, on the brink of dreams, catalyst and image. [...] As one speaks about flowers, leaving botany, gardening and flower arranging aside, still having a lot to discuss, so will I overlook mineralogy, ignoring the arts that give stones a purpose. I speak of bare stones - fascination and glory! - that both hide and yield up a mystery, slower, more immense and more profound than the fate of a short-lived species."

- Roger Caillois (1913 - 1978)

Materializing Reverie

"My pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village...Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green. ...The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring. [...] Water becomes heavier, darker, deeper; it becomes matter. And it is then that materializing reverie, uniting dreams of water with less mobile, more sensual matter, finds the full weight of its repose."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter 

Original Face

"The Sixth Ancestor was pursued by Ming the head monk as far as Ta-yü Peak. The teacher, seeing Ming coming, laid the robe and bowl on a rock and said, 'This robe represents the Dharma. There should be no fighting over it. You may take it back with you.' Ming tried to lift it up, but it was as immovable as a mountain. Shivering and trembling, he said, 'I came for the Dharma, not for the robe. I beg you, lay brother, please open the Way for me.' The teacher said, 'Don’t think good; don’t think evil. At this very moment, what is the original face of Ming the head monk?' In that instant Ming had great satori. Sweat ran from his entire body. In tears he made his bows saying, 'Beside these secret words and secret meanings, is there anything of further significance?' The teacher said, 'What I have just conveyed to you is not secret. If you reflect on your own face, whatever is secret will be right there with you.' Ming said, 'Though I practiced at Huang-mei with the assembly, I could not truly realize my original face. Now, thanks to your pointed instruction, I am like someone who drinks water and knows personally whether it is cold or warm. Lay brother, you are now my teacher.' The teacher said, 'If you can say that, then let us both call Huang-mei our teacher. Maintain your realization carefully.'"

 - Dajian Huineng (638 - 713)
Case 23 of Mumonkan

Ceasing to Stir

"Just let your minds become void and
environmental phenomena will void themselves;
let principles cease to stir and events
will cease stirring of themselves.
...
Ordinary people look to their surroundings,
while followers of the Way look to Mind,
but the true Dharma is to forget them both.
...
I assure you that one who comprehends
the truth of 'nothing to be attained' is
already seated in the sanctuary where
he will gain his Enlightenment."

- Huang Po (? - 850)
The Zen Teaching of Huang-Po:
On the Transmission of Mind

Everything is Flowing

"...everything is flowing—going somewhere,
animals and so-called lifeless
rocks as well as water."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

"Our Intellect Ingulphs Itself so Far"

"The glory of Him who moveth everything
  Doth penetrate the universe, and shine
  In one part more and in another less.
...
Within that heaven which most his light receives
  Was I, and things beheld which to repeat
  Nor knows, nor can, who from above descends;
...
Because in drawing near to its desire
Our intellect ingulphs itself so far,
That after it the memory cannot go."

- Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321)
Divine Comedy / Paradiso
Translation above by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mimir’s Well

"Odin’s eye remains in Mimir’s well,
preserved by the waters that feed the world ash,
seeing nothing, seeing everything. Time."

- Neil Gaiman (1960 - )
Norse Mythology

The Mysticism of Numbers

"When a man counts one, two, three,
he is not only doing mathematics, he is
on the path to the mysticism of numbers
in Pythagoras and Vitruvius and Kepler,
to the Trinity and the signs of the Zodiac."

- Jacob Bronowski (1908 - 1974)

Sage Stillness

"The sound of water says what I think.

...

The stillness of the sages does not belong to them as a consequence of their skillful ability; all things are not able to disturb their minds;-- it is on this account that they are still. When water is still, its clearness shows the beard and eyebrows (of him who looks into it). It is a perfect Level, and the greatest artificer takes his rule from it. Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human Spirit! The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things.

...

People do not mirror themselves in running water,
they mirror themselves in still water.
Only what is still can still the
stillness of other things."

- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)