Friday, August 10, 2012

Footnotes

I am back to my usual habit of studying after breakfast, now that the Tour de France and the summer retreat are both over, and was keen to pick up Dogen's Genjo Koan, Three Commentaries again, while I still have that mind-attunement from the Genzo-e. Starting to read Uchiyama Roshi's commentary - Shohaku is not only a student of his, but the translator for this as well - I came across this footnote, which seems to contain more concentrated teaching than you might find elsewhere in a month of Sundays:
"Because the present moment is always the present moment, there is no way the present moment can become something else. And yet, because our mind often wanders here and there, in the past or in the future, we lose sight of the present moment, and therefore we need to practice letting go of thought and returning to here/now. This returning to here/now is nothing special, it is a really ordinary thing, because through this practice, the present moment simply becomes the present moment. However, within this ordinary practice through which we become simply ordinary, there is infinite possibility."

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