An Empty Chair

 

“Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today -  I wish, I wish he’d go away!”
 from the poem Antigonish by Hughes Mearns

Now there’s a poem that is very Dr.Seuss and very Zen. 

Zen is the child of Taoism and Buddhism that came from China and flowered in the particularly paradoxical culture of  ancient Japan.Apart from the practice of zazen or sitting meditation,  Zen Buddhism uses unsolvable riddles called koans to get the mind to make a quantum leap beyond itself.

If you wish to discover how nothing is the seed of everything and how perfect emptiness is profound fullness, you must listen without ears to the sound of one hand clapping.

True wisdom is fraught with paradox that is impossible to grasp with logic or reason or any intellectual concepts : it can only be experienced by the complete disappearance of the experiencer!

Advaita Vedanta is not so different from Zen ; both schools stress the need for experiential knowledge and not just book knowledge, for direct transmission from an enlightened master and for deep introspection into one’s true, original nature. Further, both require the total annihilation of  the ego-mind complex that dominates most human beings.

I sit peacefully on my favourite old rocking chair on my verandah, enjoying the slanting sun of the late afernoon.

My practice has gone up and down and all around for more than forty five years now – yet, I am still but a novice, a beginner, a devotee praying for grace.

Ah, but I count my blessings: again and again and again!

I am not worried or afraid…I know one day, when the time is ripe, I will get there.

And, at last,  the rays of the setting sun will caress an empty chair. 

"Liberated from the grip of egoism, like the moon after the eclipse, full, ever blissful, self-luminous, one attains one’s essence." Adhyatma Upanishad