Sublime

Ajahn Amaro

—Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

1. Three precepts of taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. 2. Three cumulative pure precepts (the three bodhisattva ideals): the commandment to keep the precepts, to practice good works, and to liberate all beings. 3. Ten grave precepts: against killing, stealing, misuse of sex, lying, dealing in intoxicants, speaking of another’s faults

Direct pointing (chih-chih a) is the open demonstration of Zen by nonsymbolic actions or words, which usually appear to the uninitiated as having to do with the most ordinary secular affairs, or to be completely crazy.

There is a legend in which the Buddha comes upon the mind of not picking and choosing.3 On the edge of his own profound change of heart, the Buddha meditates all night under a fig tree, and an image comes to mind. He remembers that, as a child, while his father plowed a field in an annual ceremony, he was left in the shade of a rose apple tree. At

Samyutta Nikaya as follows:

(see the Appendix for info on the 2009 edition, the “Shin Shogen”),

A man was working on the koan “No” for some years. He noticed how compulsive the mind can be, and for him, to bring his mind back to the koan, over and over again, many times a minute if necessary, was to gain an enlightenment at the simplest and most fundamental level—to survive the debris of the mind. It can be consoling to discover that you don’

Edmond Holmes’s masterly book, The Creed of Buddha,