I finished Red Pine’s The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, a very short book. Of the four writings included, only one, Outline of Practice, is reliably the work of Bodhidharma; he didn’t write very much. This short work in less than 3 full book pages provides the core of Zen in four steps of practice, none of which sound very appealing or exciting. I provide them here because they were of help.

1. Suffer injustice.
2. Adapt to conditions
3. Seek nothing
4. Practice the Dharma

The following are excerpts and paraphrases of the actual text.

Accepting the injustice in one’s life and others is based on accepting that “what one is” is what one has been. Accept that with an open heart and without complaint.

It was worth camping overnight to watch the sun rise between the darked Matha’s Children peaks from Cat Back Ridge. Around Memorial Day, the sunrise catches the groove between those points at the very place it begins to peek over the horizon, shedding an eerie backlight through the fog topping the valleys below.

Being Memorial Day, the (Less than – in my opinion) Honorable Rep. Hiram Peabody will be putting the final touches on his dull-witted speech he delivers each Memorial Day in hopes of getting re-elected to the easy life in Washington. There will be the dutiful mention of local recently dead soldiers, and of those stoned into immortality atop pedestals in Remembrance Park. Afterwards he will kiss the cheerleader (a professional kiss, not a real one) who will have floated through town in the Memorial Day procession atop the hood of a new Lincoln described tastefully as being proudly provided by Jones Brothers Ford.

In China some mountain paths sometimes include trails where the only means of continuing is to scale a vertical cliff by means of iron ladders. Sometimes Buddhism is like running into a wall, or contemplating a wall, or risking life by using an iron ladder of indiscernible repair.

Posts about things that drive me up a wall will fit in this category.