PZI Teacher Archives
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Freely I Watch the Tracks of the Flying Birds (MK23b)
KOAN:
Freely I watch the tracks of the flying birds.
—PZI Miscellaneous Koans, Case 23b
From Crossing the Brook:
a. Slowly I cross a brook and extinguish its sound.
b. My lazy gaze follows the tracks of the flying birds.
—PZI MK Case 23: Xuedou’s verse following Yunmen’s Good Day koan, Blue Cliff Record Case 6
Dharma Theme: Adrift
The mind is a great artist, ceaselessly creating and assessing problems. The territory of the koan is finding the delicious helplessness of the mind and body, and settling into that—it’s the robe of the moment.
Freely I Watch the Tracks of the Flying Birds
Everybody, every time, has its own difficulty and crisis. This is ours. We can trust our own lives that brought us here, and perhaps we have something to do here. And we don’t know what that is but we’ll find it as we keep walking. The thing about the meditation path is, I don’t have to think a lot about what’s mine to do. You just give yourself to the meditation, and it’s produced for you. It’s given to you. The path opens by itself, you know. Transcript of PZI Zen Online Sunday Talk with John Tarrant, recorded March 29 2020.