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Zen Gardens


tariki

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Thanks. I did not realise until my second visit that the link was to another Forum....another little thread. Amid all the current news ( hopefully, some of it fake ) its good to find such small enclaves of sanity. Hopefully true seeds of healing.

 

O Saichi, what is your joy?

This world of delusion is my joy!

It contains the seeds of relishing the Truth.

Namu Amida Butsu is blooming everywhere!

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Kondo-River_Stream_in_Full_Autumn-010420

 

 

Not a zen garden, a Japanese woodprint. Mount Fuji. Nice.

 

"In the cherry blossoms shade there is no such thing as a stranger" (Issa)

 

And bringing thoughts together, Mount Fuji is believed to be in range of North Korea's missiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thanks Soma, yes I think we need to count our blessings. The park pictured is just a couple of hundred yards from extremely busy road, in fact a by-pass. The only "by-pass" I know of that cuts right through the centre of a City. The planners cut the heart out when it went through. The city workers do their best, with about fifty or so flower boxes lining the centre of the by-pass as it cuts its way through, but the noise always wins. I live out of town a bit.

 

What you have said made me think of a nature documetary I saw some time ago of a barren desert being transformed by a sudden rainstorm. The camera work captured the eruption of beauty.

 

Sorry to hear you are colour blind. Glad you were able to appreciate the tulips.

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81u5eFmoiWL._SY355_.jpg

 

 

And finally, a Buddhist Gnome, all ready to position in your garden of choice.

 

Giving my mother-in-law a garden gnome at Christmas time has become a tradition for us. Some 23 years since it started, I am now searching for a meditating gnome!

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Giving my mother-in-law a garden gnome at Christmas time has become a tradition for us. Some 23 years since it started, I am now searching for a meditating gnome!

 

Hi Paul, your mother must now have quite a collection, reminding me of a story I read in a Sunday Newspaper some time ago. A Chimney sweep had a large gnome and a couple of others in his front garden and always placed an Ad in the local newspaper advertising his services...."The one with the Gnomes". Then another man in the same trade moved in as a neighbour and put a few gnomes in his own garden. At that point just perhaps they should have had a polite word with each other, but instead the original chimney sweep added to his own set of gnomes with many more. Come the finish, each had countless gnomes in their gardens. Not sure just how it all ended up.

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2015_49_david_jones.jpg?itok=Pb-J5tV4

 

Back to gardens, a watercolour by the British artist David Jones. I am reading a biography of him at the moment. It is magical. His experience in the First World War coloured much, if not all, of his work. A Catholic, one of his works depicted the Crucifixion and the soldiers beneath the cross wore helmets just like the Tommies wore. For some reason some took offence at this. David Jones also wrote two very long poems and these were held in very high regard by the likes of T S Eliot. I have not read them - in fact I had not even heard of David Jones prior to hearing about the biography.

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Hi Paul, your mother must now have quite a collection, reminding me of a story I read in a Sunday Newspaper some time ago. A Chimney sweep had a large gnome and a couple of others in his front garden and always placed an Ad in the local newspaper advertising his services...."The one with the Gnomes". Then another man in the same trade moved in as a neighbour and put a few gnomes in his own garden. At that point just perhaps they should have had a polite word with each other, but instead the original chimney sweep added to his own set of gnomes with many more. Come the finish, each had countless gnomes in their gardens. Not sure just how it all ended up.

 

We have our own City of Gnomes in the lower reaches of our state. What I think started out as one or two people leaving a gnome on a rural street corner has grown into a free tourist attraction called 'Gnomesville'. I don't really care much for gnomes, but it is an amusing place to visit.

 

http://gnomesville.com.au/

 

gnomesville-city.jpg

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0aeb9db673495140f1c0e5da9b2cf519.jpg

 

A garden of sorts, in fact the gravestone of the poet and artist David Jones. The circle is significant. David Jones once said that everything constituted a sort of circle in some way. "I need to think that everything is complete somewhere".

 

Dogen (bringing in another thread) spoke of "continuous practice"........."On the great road of Buddha ancestors, there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moments gap; continuous practice is the circle of the way"

 

Bringing yet another thread - can't remember where - there was the suggestion that though we live ("common sensically") in linear time frame, Reality itself is not simply linear.

 

 

 

 

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Another "modernist" poet, T S Eliot, begins "Four Quartets" with these words......

 

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

 

​Four Quartets ends with T S Eliot affirming the words of the Christian mystic Mother Julian of Norwich:- "And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well"

 

So Eliot works out his own "answer".

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rosegarden.jpg

 

 

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

 

 

(The Rose Garden, with lines from Four Quartets)

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zen_garden8.jpg

 

 

 

 

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

 

​(T S Eliiot)

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