#InPlace 24

Ritual averse, yet she has such:

brewing tea of blackberry leaves,

chard, kale, squash leaves, maple blooms;

pour, settle, sip, sit


"Yard tea" steeping. Such tisanes are best dried and crumbled and then sealed away from air, 'tis true, but simply gathering the herbs and foliage and steeping them fresh works well enough for the purpose.


The Way does not have any particular form that can be cultivated. the Dharma does not have any particular form that can be validated. Just unrestricted no-recollection and no-thought, at all times everything is the Way.
— Wuzhu, Lidai fabao ji in The Teachings of Master Wuzhu 141 (Adamek)

#InPlace 25

Through the reed shade,

watch leaves fall in autumn,

branches rattle in winter, foliage

tremble in spring or droop in summer


Watching is part of her tea "ritual" in all seasons.


In spring, cherry blossoms.
In summer the cuckoo.
In autumn the moon.
In winter the snow, clear, cold.

— Dogen (after Tanahashi)

#InPlace 26

Dark of the year, altar lacks

flowers: a moss covered oak branch

makes do; in spring

she finds a spray of quince


Flowering quince goes well with the red altar cloth and bowls, so she enjoys the three weeks or so that the blossoms may be available. Still, every offering is quite right.


One day Daowu and Yunyan were out walking with Yaoshan, who pointed at two trees with his finger. One was healthy and the other was withered up. He asked Daowu, "Which is better, the withered tree or the healthy tree?" Daowu answered, "The healthy one is better." Yaoshan said, "So everything around it becomes bright and colorful." Then he asked Yunyan the same question. Yunyan said, "The withered tree is better." Yaoshan said, "So everything around it looks gray and withered up." An attendant named Gao appeared suddenly. Yaoshan asked him the same question. Gao said, "The withered one is withered and the healthy one is healthy." Yaoshan turned to Daowu and Yunyan and said, "You were both wrong."
-- Soto Zen Ancestors in China, James Mitchell, 62

#InPlace 27

Winds from river by day

winds from mountains at night

sing to cottonwood branches:

cottonwood branches clack back


Though the old woman has a cot in the hut and naps there often, she has seldom slept in it overnight. But she does lie long abed in the afternoons, attending the rustling leaves or rattling twigs.


The dharma does not rise up alone—it can’t emerge without reliance on the world. If I take up the challenge of speaking I must surely borrow the light and the dark, the form and the emptiness of the mountains and hills and the great earth, the call of the magpies and the cries of the crows. The water flows and the flowers blossom, brilliantly preaching without ceasing. In this way there is no restraint.

— Ziyong Chengru in The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women, Caplow and Moon, 241

#InPlace 28

The young-old monk, watcher

over infants and mad crones,

gets a late spring offering —

handful of vinca blossoms


Jizo once greeted visitors to the homestead, but lost his head more than once as water hoses were hauled around the garden. In his new location at the hut he is a hermit, but has never left off his practice. The stone behind him was raised from the dry creek bed the preceding summer.


Firmly based on steadiness, it can't be surpassed.
A shining window below the green pines --
jade palaces or vermilion towers can't compare with it.

-- Shitou, "Song of the Grass-Roof Hut" in Taishō shinshū daizōkyō (1924-33) reprinted in Hongzhi, Cultivating the Empty Field, 2000, tr. Leighton and Yi Wu