The Quiet Explosion

"What is to give light must endure burning."
— Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul

     Even wordly people, rather than study many things at once without really becoming accomplished in any of them, should just do one thing well and study enough to be able to do it even in the presence of others.
     How much the more is this true of the supramundane Buddha Dharma: it is a way which since beginningless past has not been cultivated or practiced; and therefore, it is now still far from us. Our natures too are dull. In this exalted and free-reaching Buddha Dharma, if one takes on too many things at once, it will be impossible to perfect even one thing. Even concentrating solely on one thing, those whose faculties and capacity are dull by nature will have difficulty in thoroughly mastering it. Strive, students, to concentrate on one thing alone.
     Eja asked, "If so, then what thing, what practice in the Buddha Dharma, should we be solely devoted to cultivating?"
     Dogen replied, "Although it should be in accord with potentiality and conform to capability, that  which is now transmitted and solely practiced in the school of the Patriarchs is sitting meditation. This practice takes all potentials and is a method which can be practiced by those of superior, muddling, and inferior faculties alike.
— Dogen, Record of Things Heard (Shobogenzo-zumnoki), Thomas Cleary (tr.), pp. 12-13.

     "One ought not depend upon the instruction of others, the words of the Sagely Teaching, or the inner principle of witnessing the Way. Born in the morning, dead at night; the fact that people we saw yesterday do not exist today is something that meets the eye everywhere and is close about the ears. This is something one sees and hears in respect to others: as one applies it to his own bodily self and considers what is true, even if one may expect a life of seventy or eighty years, in accordance with the truth that one must eventually die, one does die.
— Dogen, Ibid., pp. 40-41.

     When we look at the record of that master's deeds [Zen Master T'an Hsia T'ien Jan], when he sat it was always with dignity, when he stood it was always with proper bearing; he was always as though facing an honored guest. Even when sitting down for a little while he always crossed his legs and folded his hands; he took care of the community property as one would take care of his eyes. Whenever there were any diligent in practice, he would not fail to praise them; even a little bit of good he deemed important. His ordinary mode of action was exceptionally excellent; his record is set down as a mirror and guide for the monasteries.
— Dogen, Ibid., p. 63.

                   Pourvou Que Ca Doure
Life grows, life is not made; you can make
     death. Neither were the sun nor the stars created,
But grew from what grew before. Without the corruption
     of plants and corpses life could not grow.
Look around you at civilization decaying and sick:
     look at science, corrupted
To be death's bawd; and art — painting and sculpture,
     that had some dignity —
Corrupted into the show-off antics of an imbecile
     child; and statecraft
Into the democratic gestures of a gin-muddled
     butcher-boy: look all around you,
And praise the solitary hawk-flights of God, and
     say, what a stinking of famous corpses
To fertilize the fields of the human
     future ... if man's back holds.
— Robinson Jeffers, in In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers, James Shebl, pp. 73-74.