Just finished teaching a retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin, CA.
This picture is of a meditator relaxing on a bench waiting for the gong that calls people into the meditation hall
Here’s a poem, with thanks to Frederick Turner:
Chang Jian’s“On the Cloisters Behind the Temple of Mount Po”:
At dawn I slip into the ancient shrine;
The early sun has lit the sacred grove.
Bamboos; a path to a secluded glen
Where amid woods and flowers the Zen monks live.The birds by nature love the mountain light;
The pool’s reflections purge the hearts of men.
Ten thousand noises here are silenced quite,
But for the sound of bell and clear chimestone.
Chinese painters of the Tang dynasty – when Chang Jian wrote — mourned the difficulty of describing the sound of a bell in words, but this photo image seems to be able to depict the silence that, in poetry, the gong sound is meant to evoke as the space around the sound.
