The Pathless Path

Just thought I would begin to waffle as the mood struck me about the way things seem to open up. At least as I have experienced it. To tie it down, as much as it can be, it derives from the Pure Land Buddhist way of [i]hakarai[/i] a Japanese word which can be translated as "no-calculation". At base, it is simply to trust in Reality, that "it" means us well, and then seek to live as openly as possible.

Thomas Merton seemed to point towards such a "way" when he wrote that our real journey in life "is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts." I would quibble over "interior" but I'll let it pass. Merton also said that there are no formulaes, and also, when he was reading himself from the works of an Early Church Father, Iraeneus, found this passage worth recordung in his Journal:-

[i]If you are the work of God wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time........Give to Him a pure and supple heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes in you........lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of his fingers......[/i]

Theistic language, and being Buddhist, I am a non-theist. Yet the dividing line created by words and history (let alone dogma,and creed) seems to me ever more indistinct.

In a way this post has drifted from my first intention, but I will stay with Thomas Merton (or, as he was known in the monastery, Father Louis - but what is in a name? The birds don't even know they have one) One of his favourite books was his "Way of Chuang Tzu" which was a collection of his rather loose translations of that famous Chinese Sage. In his introduction he wrote:-

[i]For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. There is an affirmation of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home, which is God’s world. In any event, the “way” of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a “way out.” Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost.[/i]

I agree, being "lost" is often very reassuring. Losing that awful sense of wanting to [i]be[/i] something, or someone, which - in a way - is a dissatisfaction with who we already are, a lack of acceptance, even a lack of faith and trust. Acceptance is not passive, it can - paradoxically - be the catalyst of genuine transformation.

Maybe more another time.