Ikkya: Skeletons Speak
15th Century Zen Master Ikkya visits an old temple surrounded by graves. The resident skeletons share with him their insights on living, dying, and death. And Ikkya shares those insights with us in a series of poems that are the subject of the August Edition of The DailyZen Journal. Here are a couple of my favorites.
The vagaries of life
Though painful,
Teach us
Not to cling
To this fleeting world.
No one really knows
The nature of birth
Nor the true dwelling place:
We return to the source,
And turn to dust.
Many paths lead from
The foot of the mountain
But at the peak
We all gaze at the
Single bright moon.
More poems and commentary can be read here.
The vagaries of life
Though painful,
Teach us
Not to cling
To this fleeting world.
No one really knows
The nature of birth
Nor the true dwelling place:
We return to the source,
And turn to dust.
Many paths lead from
The foot of the mountain
But at the peak
We all gaze at the
Single bright moon.
More poems and commentary can be read here.