From "Song of the Twelve Hours of the Day", Poems & Records from Pilgrimages, The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu (Green)
Meal time. The fourth hour of the day.
Aimlessly working to kindle a fire and gazing at it from all sides.
Cakes and cookies ran out last year,
Thinking of them today and vacantly swallowing my saliva.
Seldom having things together, incessantly sighing,
Among the many people there are no good men.
Those who come here just ask to have a cup of tea,
Not getting any they go off spluttering in anger.
wrrdgrrl: The memory of cakes long eaten. The idea of having things together. Imagining that there are "good" men. Are these the thoughts of a Zen Master? Could he actually have been subject to the same worries and idle thoughts that torture modern students of Zen? I could be projecting, but it seems like Joshu is writing here about imagining things a certain way and confronting instead what is our current reality. Vacantly swallows saliva.
Thoughts?
[Edit: I think the ones who don't have things together are the "many people" he encounters.]
Submitted December 07, 2018 at 09:38PM by wrrdgrrl https://ift.tt/2rrcjtf
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