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On February 20th, Lewis Hyde, author, poet, and translator of the verses that accompany the Zen Ox Herding pictures, will be our featured guest in Jon Joseph’s Luminaries Series.

Bluegrass Zen is sitting with these pictures and verses in anticipation of Lewis Hyde’s visit. This week we take up the second picture and verses,Seeing the Tracks.  

Reading the sutras and hearing the teachings, he can sense the presence. No gold vessel is like any other but all are made of gold. This man and this world, they are formed from the same stuff. Still he wanders, shouldn’t good and evil be set apart? Trying to separate out the truth we ends up in confusion. If there is a gate, he has not gone through it. Is there really something there, or is this just a joke?

In the woods, along the riverbank, strange marks all around.
What has bent the sweetgrass down just there?
Even in dark mountains and hidden valleys,
How could that heavenly nose be concealed?

As the wind blows in the pines in my front yard, I can feel my limbs dance in the current. Things like that happen all the time on the farm. The horse calls from across the field, asking to be let out of her enclosure; my heart calls and the gate opens as I run out into the field. Seamlessness is like this.

Signs of wholeness are everywhere, they can’t help but be. A word we sometimes use to speak of wholeness is love—to love this life is to be wholly in it, finding oneself in the pattern and shape of things from moment to moment.

With the first picture, out of your suffering, when heart is not open, when the herder sees themself as separate from the world, from the ox—the search begins. The first line of the preface says,

From the beginning nothing was lost, there is no need to search.

There it is, from beginningless time, the interbeing of all things. There is no problem here, just the unfolding and interweaving of all things. You experience this as the universe calling you to communion, to the dance.

Enter the wind in the pines, the horse calling from the barn—it is all right here, tracks and traces everywhere: reality gates. In one of our koans, a teacher brings someone’s attention to a brook, singing as it makes its course. The teacher asks them, “Do you hear that?” “Yes,” they say. “Enter there,” is his reply.

Traces, signs, everything pointing the way. For the herder, for you, this is when you notice you are held, but there is still a gap between the one holding and the one held.

 

Come join us Thursdays, for koan meditation, a dharma talk, and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

I hope you will join us.

—David Parks Roshi, Director of Bluegrass Zen