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Dongshan's Voice of the Cuckoo (MK52)

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KOAN:

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.

—PZI Miscellaneous Koans, Case 52
(from Dongshan’s Five Ranks, second cycle)

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Dharma Theme March 22, 2023

Dharma Theme: In the Wild – Mountain Koans & Poems

PZI Teachers

Koans
A Thousand Mountains (MK13), Be a Tiger in the Mountains, Changsha Wandering in the Mountains (BCR36), Dancing Mountains (MK5), Dongshan's Voice of the Cuckoo (MK52), Going to Wild Places (MK73), Silver Mountain and Iron Cliff (BCR 57), The Green Mountain Walks About (BS41), Tortoise Mountain Wakes Up, Yunmen's East Mountain Walks on the Water (EV49)
Tags
awakening, Dharma Theme, Free & Easy Wandering, Iron Cliffs, journey, mountain poems, poems, poet Han Shan, poet Li Bai, Silver Mountains, solitude, struggle, wandering, wild, wildness
Category
Dharma Theme, Text

Eventually you come to a place where you can’t go on and you can’t go back. You have arrived at the base of cliffs; you can’t scale them, you can’t get around them, and there’s no handy tunnel through them. It’s a daunting place—that’s the point of it. And when you arrive here your life and your journey can become your own.

23 Words