Quotes from David Hinton

Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place.

Rather than simply obey political power and implore the spirits to shape your fate in positive ways, the question of wisdom arises, and the empowerment that wisdom offers: act wisely and good things happen, act unwisely and bad things happen.

If you aren't free of yourself how will you ever become yourself?

In perennial Absence you see mystery, and in perennial Presence you see appearance. Though the two are one and the same, once they arise, they differ in name.

Gazing at the Sacred Peak What is this ancestor Exalt Mountain like? Endless greens of north and south meeting Where Changemaker distills divine beauty, Where yin and yang cleave dusk and dawn. Chest heaving breathes out cloud, and eyes Open dusk bird-flight home. One day soon, On the summit, peaks ranging away will be small enough to hold, all in a single glance. Tu Fu

Tu Fu's wandering through the thousands of miles of ancestor peaks was always the Tao/Cosmos open to itself- ancestor wandering itself and gazing into itself; thinking itself and feeling itself, lamenting itself, and celebrating itself, writing poems about itself.

Keep up self-definition and you'll never be apparent.

All day long, year in and year out, that Presence fills our mirror-deep minds, whispering all its silence through us, replacing meaning/thought with the elemental beauty of meaninglessness, the clarity of the ten thousand things.

Dharma companions filling mountains, a sangha forms of itself: chanting, sitting ch'an stillness. Looking out from distant city walls, people see only white clouds.

Try to improve it and you ruin it. Try to hold it and you lose it.

Autumn Begins Autumn begins unnoticed. Nights slowly lengthen, and little by little, clear winds turn colder and colder, summer's blaze giving way. My thatch hut grows still. At the bottom stair, in bunchgrass, lit dew shimmers. We

Honor is a contagion deep as fear

endeavor's nobility is ability, action's nobility is timing. When you never strive you never go wrong.

In meditation, you can watch thoughts emerge from emptiness and return back to that emptiness. This leads first to the realization that you are separate from those thoughts, which we normally identify with self.

Just do what you do, and then leave: such is the Way of heaven.

And so, there is nothing to practice because we are always already enlightened, always already Absence somehow open to the world.

Standing Alone Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk. Between river banks, two white gulls Laze, wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill, To and fro, they follow contentment. Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs Still hung. Heaven's loom of origins Tangling our human ways too, I stand Facing sorrow's ten thousand sources. Tu Fu

Amid spring mountains, alone, I set out to find you. Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery Deepens. I follow a stream up into last snow and ice And beyond, dusk light aslant, to Stone Gate forests. Deer roam all morning here, for you harm nothing. Wanting nothing, you know chi gold and silver all Night. Facing you on a whim in such dark, the way Home lost- I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat. Tu Fu

Facing Snow Thin slice of ascending light, radiant arc Tipped aside bellied dark- the first moon Appears, and barely risen beyond ancient Frontier passes, edges into clouds. Silver, Changeless, the Star River spreads across Mountains empty in their own cold. Lucent Frost dusts the courtyard, chrysanthemum Blossoms clotted there with solemn dark. Tu Fu

8th Moon, 17th Night: Facing the Moon The autumn moon is still round tonight. In this river village, isolate old wanderer Hoisting blinds, I return to its brilliance, And propped on a cane, follow it further: Radiance rousing hidden dragons, bright Scatters of birds aflutter. Thatched study Incandescent, I trust to this orange grove Ablaze: clear dew aching with fresh light. Tu Fu

Dawn Landscape The last watch has sounded in the Amble-Awe. Radiant color spreads above Solar-Terrace Mountain, then cold sun clears high peaks. Mist and cloud linger across layered ridges, And earth split-open hides river sails deep. Leaves clatter at heaven's clarity. I listen, And face deer at my bramble gate-so close Here, we touch our own kind in each other. Tu Fu

Returning Late Past midnight, eluding tigers on the road, I return Home in mountain darkness. Family asleep inside. I watch the Northern Dipper drift low to the river, And Venus lofting huge into empty space, radiant. Holding a candle in the courtyard, I call for more Light. A gibbon in the gorge, startled, shrieks once. Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out: Rickety cane, no sleep… Catch me if you can! Tu Fu

Absence is all existence seen as one undifferentiated tissue (reality, as we have seen, prior to our names), while Presence is that same tissue seen in its differentiated forms, the ten thousand things (reality differentiated by our names). And it should also be emphasized that both terms, Absence and Presence, are primarily verbal in Chinese: hence, that tissue of reality is seen as verbal, rather than the static nominal: a tissue that is alive and in motion.