Dana - the Practise of Generosity to Support the Dharma Teachings

In the Buddhist tradition, it is felt the dharma teachings of wisdom and compassion are of such great value that one cannot put a price on it, it can not be bought or sold in the market place, it is priceless. The teachings of liberation have been passed down through the generations by this ancient practice of dana: receiving and transmitting these teachings as a gift.

But the teachers do not charge a fee, the teachings are given freely. When we hear these teachings we are touched and moved, and the feelings of appreciation and gratitude naturally express themselves in the act of generosity by offering dana to the teacher, thus circulating and completing the gift. This natural response marks our entry into the economy of gift, where buying and selling are replaced by giving and receiving, and where the defining relationship is one of spiritual friendship. The act of giving is a declaration of mutual respect. Giver and receiver recognise they share the same fundamental values and concerns.

The gift takes us beyond the limitations of our normal self-interest and opens us to a life of mutual care, called good friendship (kalyana mitta) by the Buddha. The practice of generosity is considered to be one of the highest virtues in the Buddhist tradition, as within every act of generosity, there is also the act of relinquishment, thus cultivating the spirit of letting go.

Any gift is greatly appreciated and will help to continue to nurture the dharma in Australia and beyond. May the virtue of your gift be a support for you and for all beings to attain freedom and liberation … the complete cessation of suffering.

poem on Youtube - haiku from Sunday

Here's a clip of my performance at the " Friend in Hand" pub, in Glebe, last month, in the open mike section. " Word in Hand" is a really great night of live poetry. Many thanks to Jack Peck, the MC, for organizing the video record of the night, and for putting together this video for me. My link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSRBU2NzX0Q&feature=youtu.be

Jack is in the process of putting "Word in Hand " up on Youtube and on a community TV station, I'll keep you posted on this development. 

The news from Europe was very cheerful last week, and as usual ABC Sydney morning news began with the shootings that had occurred overnight. Went for a walk on Sunday at Blackheath - the Burra Korain ridge I believe? We were learning navigation, how to find our way in the bush. You do not put breadcrumbs down if you want to get back home safely. No, you use a map and compass.
Wrote this:


Biting winter wind
takes a big mouthful
of world-weariness

Cringefest at MONA

In April I was in Tasmania, and I wanted to visit  MONA  (Museum of Old and New Art), the exciting new gallery in Hobart.  And Rachel Edwards had had a brilliant idea: let's stage a Cringefest at the MONA markets! I readily went along with the idea of reading from ...old, only old...writings. Normally one wants to present the best, the shiniest, and maybe the newest of what one has written. But this would be like peering into the bowels of the machine: where did this stuff come from? And in that sense it was a great complement to MONA, half of which seems to be underground.
So we delved into our journals and diaries from yesteryear. Oh dear, oh dear. Did I really write that?

 This market was to be the last one, and I was bowled over by the variety of stalls,  the quality of goods, stalls such as "Conversations on Death And Dying", the taiko drummers who performed in the plaza...inside this pink Mickey  Mouse somebody was offering Japanese tea ceremony. Naturally I  wanted to partake. It was superb, and the first tea ceremony I have ever done.

 Paige Turner ( Rachel) and her friend Miss Wimple ran a "Recylclibrary", where people could simply take any book that was on offer. They are asked to donate books too, either to the Recyclibary when it pops up, or to Fullers Bookshop in Hobart. The patrons of this library were exceedingly pleased by the generosity of this arrangement!

Later on, we cringe poets and writers decided the moment had come for the full monty. We took to the stage, clutching our tattered old notebooks, pages spilling from overfull pages of ramblings. I am tempted to say that there is a catharsis for the audience at a Cringefest, where they are presented with the lurid, the hideous, the overblown emotions of the teenage writer....and they are reminded, "I too, once thought like that , and I'm awfully glad that I didn't write about it!"

  Above, Tasman's mother ( Tasman in the green t-shirt awaits his moment of humiliation) agonises over her housemates in her journal. I'm not sure what Paige Turner, in pink, shared with the audience but it was bound to be profound!
                                                                I really gave full vent to my criticisms of my siblings at age 13, and here the world at last is receiving a  poem about shoes written age 12! It was great fun, and the atmosphere of the market allowed for experiments like this to have an outing. Go MONA!!!

Tangdimmaa - Northwest Tasmania

I've just been for a beautiful walk in the Northwest of Tassie, at Tangdimmaa or Rocky Cape. It is near Stanley, west of the town of Wynyard. The day was still, and warm, and the sea like satin. The sea is so clear there, and because there are no ocean swells running from Bass Strait, only the gentlest murmurs fall onto shore.

 The vegetation is heath. Many plants looked similiar to our Blue Mountains plants, but on a small tough scale - even the snake that we saw was about 9 inches in length. The Rar.rer.loi.he.ner people lived here. I wrote this:

The old -
at the cave-site
bleached white midden




And also:

Crickets softly call
autumn's breath....
.....out.....

Katikati’s haiku pathway

New Zealand may be a damp place, but its public artworks in places like Katikati make Australia’s Big bananas and their ilk look like civic design by Year 2. I took myself off at Christmas-time to the eastern coast of the north island to visit this town, near Tauranga, so that I could walk its haiku pathway with Marianne. The town is renowned for murals, and we found all kinds of other artworks. In front of the info centre where we called in to ask for directions, a man was sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper. Only his face was bronze -coloured, the rest of him in white metal clothes. Beside him was a small terrier with a ball, undistractable in metal.

According to the interpretive sign we read later, the haiku pathway was the brainchild of Catherine Mair. It follows the Uretara stream (why are there streams in NZ, not creeks? Does a creek vanish in dry times? Streams however are constant here.) The stream allowed the Irish to land and settle here ( not sure what happened to the Maori). This is her haiku, carved into a large river boulder:

nearly tripping me
round my feet
the monarch butterfly

The info centre lady directed us behind the library, past the mosaic work flourishing around the childrens’ play equipment. The first haiku stone was on the corner of the library and it was carved in a beautiful italic script. Marianne especially liked the second one we came across. She’s just completed the Hollyford track in Fiordland, with her walking companions, but is left with a soreness in her foot.

We limped down the stairs towards the stream, she with her aching foot and me with my tender knee. We had our raincoats on for the drizzle that threatened. We came to an open park area, with a concrete path winding along beside the stream and the haiku boulders at strategic intervals. Willow trees were scattered here and there. At the crook of the stream, ducks paddled, looked at us and began to climb out and up the bank. Their hopefulness gave way to caution, and they retreated back into the water. Another duck in the distance made a “V” swimming towards them.

All the haiku on the stones have been previously published, and were chosen from collections.William J Higginson was at the bottom of the stairs - the editor of so many collections.


I loved this. It’s a haiku with much resonance - not easily understood. Those were my favourites on the walk. You could come back to them at a later date and revolve them in your mind. We wandered along reading the haiku. In some places the stones were blank, and had simply been arranged into beautiful arrangements. It brought to mind a story I read about zen master Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of San Francisco Zen Centre. In transplanting zen from Japan to the U.S. he also brought a very fine aesthetic - he sweated and laboured over the particular placement of a stone at Tassajara zen centre.

Marianne and I compared notes: did we like this one or that one? She found a haiku spread on one line, about a heron flying along the water, too anorexic. But I rather liked the image. Further along haiku bricks had been set into the path. These were haiku that had been chosen from a competition. It was good to be able to make a comparison with those that had been through a double layer of selection. Some of them, such as :

‘conversion -
the ray of sun strikes
between the goal posts’

is too obscure for me, because I don’t know enough about rugby, the national passion. We talked about this. Is there a wry comment about something here, that I am missing? But does it matter that I don’t get it? Thousands of aficionados of the game will. We talked about what ‘conversion’ means. My apologies to the poet of this witty haiku if I have not quite got your wording. My camera ran out of poop, and also I could not read your name on the brick.

We came to a place where there was a mounting for a bridge. This might be the spot where a rather lovely little pedestrian bridge had been, removed because structural flaws were found in it recently. the bridge would have taken you to the other side of the stream where the pathway continued towards the highway. We wandered on, reading the paving stone haiku and the boulder haiku, delighted by the stone which faced the housing development on the other side of the stream:

on the farmlands
new homes
slowly rising

Patricia Prime NZ


It sums up a whole complex of things in 10 syllables. Fantastic. I thought I could see across the stream into one of these comfortable houses, through the tinted glass to someone at a kitchen bench.

We found another undernourished haiku all in one line. Marianne said, “If I had a kid in my class who wrote that, I would think about it overnight and come up with a line for it in the morning”. For my money, the haiku that sets the scene but not too specifically, and then leaves a lingering haze in my mind, which is not quite in focus, is the best. It conveys mujo, impermanence, and how provisional things are - like the bridge, and the names of authors on haiku bricks. But this one

“A breeze and then my mind wanders on”

(a poet from the US, apologies sir, I didn’t write your name or haiku down correctly.)
is vague but commits what I consider to be a haiku sin. It is rather too self-conscious. There is great awareness of consciousness but little of nature.

We had by now walked through town, crossed Highway 2, walked past another mural being put up and the seal carved from a huge lump of wood with a chainsaw, and back down to the stream. The path here blends haiku with a bird walk.The beginnings of it have both haiku stones and sculptures - to my delight, the first sculpture was the karearea or native falcon, life-size, and there was an interpretive sign. They are ‘acutely threatened”, and can do 230kms per hr, when hunting. They take birds, but also rats, rabbits, mice. My haiku, for what its worth:

A hawk surveys
the path and stream
for smaller pickings

DL

Here’s a link to the website for the pathway:

www.katikati.co.nz/kk_text/haiku.html

We didn’t see it all. It is something you could return to, and wander and ponder. There are benches placed everywhere too, for picnics and just sitting and gazing. In the distance the Kaimai mountains were wreathed in cloud. Here is a haiku by one of the best (in my opinion) Australian haiku poets, Janice Bostok, who sadly passed away last year:

sleeping horse -
angled bones lean
into the summer sun

The Elders walk to the Gardens of Stone

The yatra for the elders in our community took place last Sunday in windy conditions. Despite that, the group opted to walk along the ridge- top at Newnes plateau, trusting me when I said that the destination was rather good. "But be mindful of each and every step!"






We had the good fortune to have Donald Elniff on the walk with us. We did tai ch'i with him in a clearing beside a huge old tree. It was a skilful way in to Broad Mind, the mind that is spread right across the body. And to be taught moves such as 'flowing over a waterfall' ( I think that's right) , and to be centred in the dan t'ien, helped to locate us right where we were, in Mingaan country.

I found this track with the help of my good friend Kate Litchfield (below).

It is discouraging to see the degradation caused by trailbikers on this ridge. The tracks weave in and out, and the rubbish carelessly tossed aside is an indicator of the lack of genuine connection to the land - it is only there for your recreational pleasure. Ok - that's my rave - I could also say that I experienced aversion and a hot series of thoughts when I saw the damage.
But then there is also this rusted twisted fender, some decades later...

So many delights along the way; I think I saw a flame robin.
and I loved the rivulets running down the road.















What else can I add? It was a terrific group of people. Other animals had been trotting along the road too, as we saw from the tracks and prints in the sandy soil. Perhaps dingos - a kangaroo - a large lyrebird, with its distinctive back claw print.

Oh - another total joy - pagoda daisies.



There are some very good websites which can show you some of the longer yatras that have taken place in Australia. Try dharma.org.au, and have a look at the art works which have been inspired by the walks. Also have a look at About Yatra, Carol Perry's piece is a clear explanation of what we are connecting with when we walk silently and mindfully with each other, in country. At the dharma gathering ( see dharma.org.au for the link) she leads a yatra to the beach.
Here is the link to the Encounter programme on ABC Radio National, which featured yours truly and my collaborator in April, Gary Gach, and others. The subject was Buddhist poetry.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2011/3294311.htm

Taking time
to sniff a boronia
I make myself late

ABC interview

Small biplane
dragonfly tries
to find the moon

Recently ABC radio interviewed me for their programme "Encounter". The programme was about Buddhist poetry and I was one of the poets, along with Gary Gach, Jane Hirschfield, Tash Sudan, and Bill Porter. I took Kerry Stewart the producer on a ginko along a ridge in the Blue Mountains, talked haiku. You can find this programme by going to the ABC website , look for Radio National , then go to 'Encounter', and thence to Buddhist Poetry in the index. Wish I knew how to link it to this blog.
Your chance to go for a ginko wander is in 2 weeks, Sat October 8. What a good way to forget the woes of the world for a while!

Yellow inside
the broken egg
beneath the tree