Encouragement to Practice (Chinul)

Here is a short summary of the 12th century Korean monk Chinul's manifesto for his fellow meditators called "Encouragement to Practice" written in 1190. 

If you fall to the ground, then you must get back up using that ground. So too, both delusion and awakening derive from one mind. We must look inwards, cease conditioning and empty the mind of inclinations to self and of shameful infatuation with material and secular concerns. 

Knowing of our mistakes, we should endeavour to reform and discipline ourselves so we do not repeat them. This is refraining from wrong to realise the mind-ground without wrong, in the absolute sense realising no-self. We call it sila. 

To calm the agitated mind, we must have faith in the Buddha teachings, that the path to enlightenment is for everyone, not just for special few in special times. With faith we can attain calm concentration and transcend desires. This is the freshness of the mind-ground without distraction. We call it samadhi. 

Still, the mind may be dull, so we must awaken to the understanding of essential voidness. Through purification of the mind, a natural clarity of brightness arises. Dig to the root and you need not worry about the branches; secondary spiritual powers are of no concern. When the practice is genuine, we will not fall back into eternity and annihilation views. If it is not genuine, it will be subject to impermanence and backsliding. The development of the non-dual noumenon and purification practice of phenomena go hand in hand. This is the mind-ground without delusion in which all truths and clinging are forgotten, and clinging itself extinguished. We call it prajna.

Sila, samadhi and prajna make up the threefold training. When agitation is replaced by calmness and dullness by alertness, without grasping or rejecting, this is the radiance of original sublime mind. This is not mind-extinction, but true radiant wisdom from realising the nature of mind as not arising or having been produced, but always there; so subtle thoughts are not left behind. The threefold training of right practice, calmness and clarity is important even in worldly affairs, how much more so then in training the mind, and it will repay the effort. 

The spirit that has not seen the inner light will gravitate towards that which it is most drawn to, so at death if the attachment is to external things or visualised images or fabrications of the mind, then we will be drawn to that, rather than the pure realm which is empty of all objects.

The best path is sudden awakening of the mind-only noumenon followed by gradual cultivation. With wisdom, meditators never allow the mind to fall into wrong views, and recollecting mind-only, all sense-realms are extinguished. Do not neglect the internal empty brightness of pure awareness and cultivate this through diligent practice.

This was originally published for Buddhist Travellers in 2011.

Ko Un: Poetry is water, but poetry is also wine!

Suffering, inebriation, sorrow, melancholy, transience, profound peace, celebration: the Korean poet Ko Un is almost 80. Suicidal in his early years, suffering tuberculosis, personal loss, insomnia, beatings at the hands of the police, for a decade he was a Buddhist monk, then imprisoned several times in solitary confinement for his political activism, few could be more prolific — in the relative calm that followed in Ko Un's turbulent life, he wrote over eighty books in fifteen years. The first translation of his work published in the UK, 'First Person Sorrowful' (2012) has just come out this week. The translations are by Brother Anthony of Taizé who was born in Cornwall, but has lived in South Korea since 1980.

Places I wanted to Go (2002)

Thirty years ago
I had places I wanted to go.
I was everywhere on a map
of a scale of 1,000,000 : 1.
Twenty years ago
I had places I really wanted to go.
The blue sky that kept returning to me through the bars of my cell window
was my road.

Thus far I have managed to plod here and there.

But I have set a few places aside.
After I have quit this world
the places I want to go
will keep on waiting for someone to come.

I had places I wanted to go.
When flowers fell,
when flowers fell in the evening,
I straightened up,
closed my eyes.


Sunshine (1984)

I really don’t know what to do.
Let me swallow my spit,
and my unhappiness, too.
An honoured visitor is coming
to my tiny cell with its north-facing window.
It’s not the chief making his rounds,
but a gleam of sunlight for a moment late in the afternoon, 
a gleam no bigger than a square of folded pasteboard.
I go crazy; it’s first love.
I hold out the palm of my hand,
warm the toes of my shy, bared feet.
Then as I prostrate myself on the floor
and bask my gaunt, unreligious face,
in that scrap of sunlight, all too fleeting it slips away.
When the visitor has receded beyond the iron bars,
the room becomes several times colder and darker.
This special cell in a military prison is a photographer's darkroom. 
Without sunlight I laughed like an idiot.
One day it was a coffin.
One day it was altogether the sea.
Amazing! A few have survived here.

Being alive is itself being at sea without a single sail in sight.


Little Songs (2002)

Today
may be a trivial day,
it's the day someone's being born,
someone's leaving,
someone's waiting.

Today too, the glow of the setting sun is glorious.


~*~

Scarlet rhododendrons are in blossom.
The crape myrtle trees beyond have no thought of blossoming.

So everything in this world has its own way of living.
Glad of that,
I wander on.

 

—Ko Un (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé)
from 'First Person Sorrowful' (2012)

Yu-Na Kim (Korean Bond) Record at 2010 Olympics

 

She won the gold in the women's figure skating in Vancouver with a record-breaking score. I didn't catch any of the Winter OIympics, so thanks to Jim (themusicman2) for letting me know about this. I'm re-posting it from his site.