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Poverty (MK71)

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KOAN:

Don’t light a lamp; there’s no oil in the house.
It’s a shame to want a light.
I have a way to bless your poverty:
Just feel your way along the wall.

—PZI Miscellaneous Koans, Case 71 (Yinyuan Longqi)

Text October 12, 2021

Unexpected Gifts: 10,000 Feet Down, The Stone

John Tarrant

Koans
For Your Benefit (MK48), Laozi's True Traveler, Poverty (MK71), Step by Step in the Dark (MK72), Suddenly It's Midnight, Where Do Songs Come From? (MK41)
Tags
April 5 2020, author Dante, being lost, Daodejing, descent, Dongshan, dreams, Green Glade of Meditation, Inferno, kindness, Linji, not knowing, PZI Zen Online, sunday talk, traveler, unexpected gifts, Yunmen
Category
Text, Transcript

John Tarrant talks about living in an underworld time, in a descent as a culture and as a world, and as a planet. Accepting the descent, and accepting the quality of being lost when it appears, is profoundly important. And there’s a great, strange, and interesting mystery in that.

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