One of our orchids.
The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.
It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality.
This
seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World
War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21st
century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen
master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled,
A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays,
and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko
Kudo.
I
took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this,
a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I
should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published
a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a
little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading
Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead
contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good
role model.
As
I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how
I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom
for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the
famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took
sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.
Only
when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the
title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend,
Linda Culbertson, executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.
Suzuki
evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific
transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of
verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to
writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words,
I find this comforting.
He
then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with
their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined
“bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word
preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the
familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts
that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”
“Zen
tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen
always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality
itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born
every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”
Yet
the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too
easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after
all the same.”
Hallelujah!
The
book’s title is that of the author’s poem:
A
Flower Does Not Talk
Silently
a flower blooms,
In
silence it falls away;
Yet
here now, at this moment, at this place,
the whole of the flower, the whole
of the world is blooming.
This
is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;
The
glory of eternal life is fully shining here.
I
think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.
Related Post: A Flower’s Tears
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