Joseph Burgess

So, let’s use the word emancipation to describe a deeper, bigger, and scarier level of freedom: inner, outer, personal, economic, structural, and spiritual. Surely this is the task of our entire lifetime.

“The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.”

Nothing that he can do is right. And this state is called technically in Zen the “great doubt.” And the master works to bring about that state.

And what Zen proposes to do is to give us training in the practice of spontaneous action.

Because the question comes from the order of words, the answer comes from the order of nature; from lǐ .

Chinese language has another word for the actual order of nature, and this word is lǐ . This is a peculiarly interesting term, because its original meaning is “the markings in jade,” or “the grain in wood,” or “the fiber in muscle.” And it has been translated by the great student of Chinese thought, Joseph Needham, as “organic pattern.” But it refe... See more

hooks quotes a previously published author to define love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” All of this brings us back to the jubilee.

Meister Eckhart, in the 13th century broadened the meaning and responsibility for this work when he said:

We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.

When you practice, “the time becomes ripe.” While this phrase naturally implies a “later” (something unripe ripens in time), Dogen understands it is the opposite way: Time is always ripe. Buddha Nature always manifests in time, because time is always impermanence.