For one to be able to live one must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.
Leo Tolstoy Walking down a green lane with the birds singing and wild flowers in abundance. However… However heavenly life is there lurks the potential for the bottom to drop out of the bucket. Here is how it was for Leo Tolstoy when he had everything, and had everything to live for.
Shortly after turning fifty, Leo Tolstoy succumbed to a profound spiritual crisis. With his greatest works behind him, he found his sense of purpose dwindling as his celebrity and public acclaim billowed, sinking into a state of deep depression and melancholia despite having a large estate, good health for his age, a wife who had born him fourteen children, and the promise of eternal literary fame. On the brink of suicide, he made one last grasp at light amidst the darkness of his existence, turning to the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions for answers to the age-old question regarding the meaning of life. In 1879, a decade after War and Peace and two years after Anna Karenina, and a decade before he set out to synthesize these philosophical findings in his Calendar of Wisdom, Tolstoy channeled the existential catastrophe of his inner life in A Confession – an autobiographical memoir of extraordinary candor and emotional intensity, which also gave us Tolstoy’s prescient meditation on money, fame, and writing for the wrong reasons.
So, here I am once again traveling. Since getting back from The Netherlands I’ve been ‘on the road’ visiting in Derbyshire and the East Midlands. So’s a great opener and many people find it almost impossible to start a talk or open a conversation with any other word. So, how come you are limping? So, when shall we plan to meditate this evening?
Such small words might seem to be unnecessary and silly however they do serve a function.
The truth is that so is a filler-word, and we all use filler-words. The thing is – well, I mean, you see – the human mouth can work an awful lot faster than the human brain. Nobody can think as fast as they can speak, and we all develop strategies to cope with it. Harold Wilson’s was probably the best. He did not smoke a pipe, or at least not in private. The pipe was there to help him through interviews. When he was asked a difficult question, he could fill it, tamp it down, light it, inhale, exhale, and all the time he was secretly thinking.
From Telegraph article. Nobody can think as fast as they can speak. Now there is something to ponder when thinking about Right Speech.
Trees say so much in a benign kind of way. Slowly, slowly and with no fussing they self-heal and fuse and bend with conditions. There is not a perfection of tree. No mistakes in their growth life. Age brings character, individuality and a grandeur hard to ignore.
For trees the passage of time expressed in their gnarled and nobly form is to be loved. Same with humans?
These past days, or is weeks now, I’ve had the space and opportunity to do some spiritual reading. This book fell off the shelf at me: Visions of Awakening Space and Time – Dogen and the Lotus Sutra by Taigen Dan Leighton. Zen Master Dogen quotes from the Lotus Sutra regularly in the Shobogenzo and clearly he holds this sutra in high esteem. For example it was Dogen, apparently, who added The Lotus Sutra at the end of the recitation of the Ten Buddhas which is spoken during formal meals and during a number of other ceremonies we do. The Lotus Sutra is included as a Buddha.
A few weeks ago while walking in the Lake District a woman asked about how I regarded the ‘flowery language’ of the Lotus Sutra and to be honest I’d never really applied myself to thinking about it. Off the top of my head I’d said I regarded such writing as helping the reader/listener to expand into a wider and deeper frame of mind, beyond the opposites, from where we are able to receive the teaching that follows. From my recent reading I understand the language of the Sutra and also the language of Dogen and where our Soto Zen emphasis of locating ‘practice’ in everyday living comes from. I’m so grateful for the chance to study a little.
Here is a verse Dogen wrote which appears in the last volume of Eihei Koroku (talks given to his monastic community). This verse is the first in a series called Fifteen Verses on Dwelling in the Mountains.
How delightful, mountain dwelling so solitary and tranquil.
Because of this I always read the Lotus Blossom Sutra.
With wholehearted vigor under trees, what is there to love or hate?
How enviable; sound of evening rains in deep autumn.
And spring rains here in this Black Forest valley are pretty wonderful too.
Practice Within The Order of Buddhist Contemplatives
Walking down a green lane with the birds singing and wild flowers in abundance. However… However heavenly life is there lurks the potential for the bottom to drop out of the bucket. Here is how it was for Leo Tolstoy when he had everything, and had everything to live for. 
