A Gift of Dharma for 9.15.10
Today’s quote is from Peter Muryo Matthiessen, the National Book Award-winning writer and Zen teacher. Ordained through the White Plum Asanga, lineage of the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi, he has authored at least two books that will be of special interest to Buddhist practitioners: The Snow Leopard and Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals, 1969-1982. You can also read his talk “The Coming of Age of American Zen,” delivered at the Boston Park Plaza for the 1996 Buddhism in America conference, in Brian Hotchkiss and Al Rappaport’s Buddhism in America: Proceedings of the First Buddhism in America Conference. This is the quote:
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.
