June 5, 2014
Day 4
Reflecting on this day, I find myself thinking of those who screamed. It’s said that when the Buddha gave one of his teachings…on emptiness, I think…some of his disciples covered their ears, screamed, ran away, and never came back.
This evening on the way home, stuck at a traffic light, I contemplated the sky, as my Dharma friend Tashi suggests in his post. Oddly enough, I found myself thinking of Those Who Screamed. They took on an identity in my mind, like some kind of lost tribe. Contemplating the sky, I heard birds crying out to each other, heard cars rolling heavily over the road, and felt the close heat of a June evening in Texas. For just a fraction of a heartbeat, I fully realized that the sky and the clouds and the traffic and the birds and the heat would one day leave my cold, dead body behind. There would come a day when they would go on, and I would not.
Did I almost scream? I think I might have, but the light turned green and I was once again coddled in my sense of me, safely taking refuge in my half-believed ideas of my own mortality.
These brief moments of reflection…are they open to me because it’s my fourth day at Interplanetary Title, a time of great transition in my life? Or is it because when it comes to death, we are all of the lost tribe of Those Who Screamed?
Buddha Nature is perfect–empty of the separable, the fleeting stains;
not empty of the inseparable, unsurpassable qualities:
true purity, true self, true bliss, true permanence.
dharma pen 