What is the price of Luling rice?

Another favorite bit from Refining Your Life:

From Dogen:
“When you eat a grain of Luling rice, you may become the monk Guishan.  When you add a grain, you may become the cow.  Sometimes the cow eats Guishan, sometimes Guishan pastures the cow.”

.’A monk asked Qingyuan Xingsi, “What is the essence of the buddhadharma?” Master Qingyuan replied, “What is the current price of rice in Luling?"

’One day Guishan said to the monks “A hundred years after my death I will be reborn as a cow belonging to a parishioner near the skirt of this mountain.  On the right flank of the cow will be written ‘I am Guishan’.  Now if you saw the cow is me you are wrong because it is just a cow, and if you say it is just a cow, you are wrong because it will be me.  So what should you say?”'

From Uchiyama:
…we assume the self is a fixed entity…and yet, though we say that nothing is fixed, it is not a matter of our “self” being nonexistent.  As in the story of the Luling rice, our self occurs at the juncture where what is relatively fixed intermingles with that which is indeterminate or undefined.  

…Our dharma becomes the buddhadharma precisely when it is functioning as this body in our daily life

….there will always be complaining and unsatisfied aspects of the self with which we have to deal.  The dharma is not going to become manifest only after we have somehow brought this aspect under control or stamped it out.  The function of the dharma and of zazen is to care for the obstreperous aspect of ourselves in the same way a mother lulls her baby to sleep.  In other words, “Guishan pastures the cow.”

Bringing new meaning to pastoral care!

On having finished From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment: Refining Your Life

On having finished From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment: Refining Your Life, Dogen and Uchiyama - a book I know I will be keeping close!....

The gāthā of Xuedou (p83)

One, seven, there, five

The truth you search for cannot be grasped.

As night advances, a bright moon

  illuminates the whole ocean;

The dragon's jewels are found in every wave.

Looking for the moon, it is here,

  in this wave, in the next.

How it speaks to the question I have carried across my own (Dogen-esque)seas:

Seeing the ego in Purpose,

the judgement of Squander,

everything dropped, except

the path of vow.

One, two, three, four five - 

Manifesting moon wave after wave.

I keep laughing......just read a quote that I had always heard ...incorrectly, then looked it up:


"The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."


I had always heard this as "the quality of mercy is not strange"... .. And thought...huh? Of course it is not strange, though it may be rare...do they mean to normalize mercy? How do these words do that? Isn't this a sing lyric (it is) and doesn't it sound kind'a like....


Yes, it's from The Merchant of Venice, which I last saw/heard as a junior high school kid at a Shakespeare in the Park performance. I totally forgot that the quote came from there! Must have bern besotted with being out late in the city. (And note...there are a few instances of the same mis-hearing on the web.)


How perfect!


This gift was from Marc Ian Barasch's Field Notes on the Compassionate Life .... A delicious book that underscores my gatitude for every mercy!