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It’s Dongshan month at Bluegrass Zen and in the PZI universe. Throughout July, the PZI Open Temple is taking up koans from this old master. In our Bluegrass Zen Retreat later this month, we will head to the Kentucky mountains, hearts open for the cuckoo’s call home, as in Dongshan’s Five Ranks, second cycle:

For whom do you bathe and make yourself beautiful?
The cry of the cuckoo is calling you home.
Hundreds of flowers fall, yet her voice isn’t stilled;
even deep in jumbled mountains, it’s calling clearly.

One of my favorite koans is the account of Dongshan leaving his teacher Yunyan and asking, as he leaves, how he might sum up Yunyan’s teaching. “Just this is it,” replied the teacher. Leaving confused, Dongshan, sees his reflection in a stream and has an awakening. He writes the following:

Just don’t seek from others or you’ll be far estranged from yourself.
Now I go on alone, but everywhere I meet it.
It now is me; I now am not it.
One must understand in this way to merge with suchness.

This Thursday evening, we will take up Dongshan’s poem, line by line, dancing with his words, falling into Dongshan’s “now,” boundless and vast and quite particular in its presentation. I hope you will join us.