Now, let’s reflect on a stanza from a poem by Garcia Lorca and one by Allen Ginsberg. As I said in my last piece, all we have to do is follow the ballet dancer, Nijinsky’s advice, “It’s really quite simple. I merely leap and pause. Leap and pause.”
The best poetry shows us how to leap from the known to the unknown. It ties things together which don’t at first seem to relate to each other and that is genuine intimacy.  
The poet Garcia Lorca lived in a very difficult time in Spain when civil war was raging. He was assassinated by fascists for the boldness of both his plays and his poetry. In spite of all this, he was a master at pausing and leaping.
Here are the first few stanzas of one of his poems, “Little Infinite Poem:”
To take the wrong road                                 
is to come to the snow
To come to the snow
is to get down on all fours for 20 generations
And eat the grass of the cemeteries
 
Often in our spiritual practice we think we are on the wrong road. But if we continually ground ourselves in our meditative practice, staying with our commitment regardless of how dissatisfying or even “wrong” it feels, at some point we are able to leap completely beyond good and bad or right and wrong and come to the snow.
 
I am writing this during a light December snowfall. Snowplows have not been out yet, nor sidewalks shoveled. How still and at peace everything seems, with no cars on the street, no people outside. The neighbor’s black dog is lying just outside their back door and he too is covered with a thin coating of snow.
 
Can we “get down on all fours for twenty generations” and deeply appreciate this pristine coating new fallen snow gives to all beings surrounding us? Can we give ourselves to the life force moving from the distant past to the endless future and “eat the grass of the cemeteries?”
 
Suzuki Roshi said that his teacher had a permanent callous on his forehead from doing prostration after prostration in the meditation hall day after day, decade after decade. Can we humble ourselves in this or some other manner? If we do, we will enjoy the nutrients of the grass of the cemeteries, the nutrients that come from the rich humus underneath. Real humility emanates from our immersion in the humus, giving ourselves completely away to something unimaginably both grounding and spacious which is not a thing at all. When my second teacher lived at Eiheiji monastery in Japan, the monks had almost no food. Three times a day, they had soup made from the weeds that grew outside.  My teacher said once, “Grass soup, best thing I ever taste!”  But we have to do a lot of pausing to discover the power of this kind of nutrition.   
 
Instead of getting down on all fours and eating the grass, we continually aggress against those we identify as "other.” As Franz Kafka said, "What do I have in common with others? I hardly have anything in common with myself! My thoughts run around like a wild horse, and feelings jump about like a monkey in the forest."    
           
Kafka was a great writer, but he had not learned to pause.  He was caught, as so many are, in the neuromuscular lock of fear which gives us no room to experience intimacy... with the grass, with the rich humus underneath it, and with generations and generations of life all around us. 
 
Allen Ginsberg’s "Song" is another good example of leap poetry.  Here is the first stanza:
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction
the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.
 
Can you see the leap from the twin burdens of solitude and dissatisfaction to love?  
Here is the final stanza:
yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.
 
Can you leap with him, beyond the weight of your worries and concerns to your original body, the body of the universe, love embracing love?            
And the final lines with their repetition of a single affirmative word, followed rhythmic phrasing like the beating of a heart:
yes, yes, that’s what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted to return to the body where I was born
 
Dogen called this “the body beyond the body,” the body Ginsberg longed for. Ginsberg wrote that poem in 1954, well before the time he began his Buddhist meditation practice, but even then, he had an inkling of the power of the simple act of pausing and leaping.
 
When Yaoshan was sitting in meditation, a monk asked, “What do you think about, sitting in steadfast composure?” Yaoshan said, “I think not thinking.”  The monk said, “How do you think not thinking?” Yaoshan said, “Non-thinking.”
 
When we think non-thinking, we naturally embrace the anxiety of being human rather than indulging it or repressing it, as Basho, Lorca, Ginsberg, and Dogen were able to do.               
Dogen lived in 13th century Japan, a time dominated by strife much worse than we have been experiencing.  Here are two of his key instructions for pausing:
 
Sit zazen wholeheartedly and let go of all things; gathering together all distracted thought and scattered mind within this posture keeps your heart and mind from being stirred.  

When we do this over and over, we discover that, as Dogen says, “We can wander at ease... beyond the boundary of delusion and enlightenment, free from the paths of ordinary and sacred, not caught by ordinary thinking.”
                       
The pause and the leap are both separate and not separate. We start with an aspiration to meditate and we practice pausing over and over... until we realize that as Dogen suggests, “between aspiration, practice, enlightenment, and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap.”
 
We discover that all moments are whole, lacking nothing, regardless of what we think or how we feel about them. 
                       
Huineng asked a monk, "Do you depend upon practice and enlightenment?"  The monk replied, "It’s not that there is no practice and no enlightenment. It’s just that it’s not possible to divide them."
 
In the sixth grade my parents sent me to ballroom dancing lessons, which I endured for some time. The highlight of my couple of years there was watching the married instructors, who were experienced stage dancers, do the tango. The seamlessness of their pauses and leaps entranced my friends and me, in spite of our hatred for this antiquated practice our parents forced on us.
 
Of course, I had no understanding then the wholeness is always seeking wholeness, (little) self is always seeking (big) self, even though so called “little” is continually cradled by so-called “big.” If only I had known that in the sixth grade.
 
In moments of confusion, can we remember to pause completely so we can leap completely?   Dogen suggests, “when you are fully present, you are free of how broad or narrow it is where you are. 
This is what he calls “actional understanding,” or in my paraphrase “life giving life to life.”    Breathing in, we pause, breathing out we leap, breathing out we pause, breathing in we leap:                                                                                                          
In plum blossom scent   
Pop!   
Sun appears   
Mountain Path
-Basho

Now I’d like to talk about “leaping beyond dualistic thinking.” 
The famous early 20th century ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky, when asked about how he had developed his technique to such perfection, replied, “It’s really quite simple. I merely leap and pause. Leap and pause.”  Let’s look at pausing and leaping in dancing, poetry, Zen practice, and life.                                        
To really pause, to completely still the body and mind for even a moment, is difficult. But without the pause, the leap loses its connection with reality; it loses its rootedness. The leap, then is impulsive and lacks balance, as with George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. When I was in my early twenties, my fury at the promoters of the Vietnam war led me to join a group which chased Hubert Humphrey when he came to my campus to speak. This impulsive leap almost got me arrested, and only widened the gap between the pro and anti-war groups.
                                   
This past year has been a difficult one for most Americans. The pandemic has gone on unabated (although now there is finally a vaccine becoming available); Donald Trump and his supporters are continuing to insist he won the election; the racial divide has grown wider than ever since George Floyd’s death. But the pandemic has also given us the opportunity to pause. And if you do this, you realize that, regardless of how stressed you are, you are still breathing.  And as your breath ebb and flows, you can experience the ebb and flow of any anxiety which might be present.
Whether you are sitting in meditation or not, you always have the opportunity to pause and breath fully and completely into any and all emotions that are arising. And if it’s a difficulty you’re experiencing, that’s fine, since difficulties are the path to freedom. There’s really no other path.
Our Zen practice is to be with whatever arises. Difficulties are the path. It might even be possible to open ourselves to deeper and deeper feelings and discoveries with each breath.  This is really pausing. Instead of acting impulsively, really pausing.  
                                               
The summer after I chased Humphrey, I spent three months at Tassajara Zen Monastery in Carmel Valley. And the practice there, of course, was in the art of pausing. It was only after I had spent time there that I was ready to again insert myself into activist politics without leaping impulsively. For the next fifteen years I continued my immersion in both daily meditation and periodic retreats. As a result, when my only brother suicided by hanging himself from a sheet in a locked hospital ward, instead of acting impulsively myself, I paused meditatively for about a year, sitting day after day right in the middle of my confusion, fear, guilt, and feelings of impotence. I was comforted by the quiet presence of our teacher, Katagiri Roshi, who sat with us every day. Finally, when I had regained some balance, I was ready to leap into acting to both advocate and develop humane community-based alternatives to a locked hospital for people like my brother. And it worked!
 
Many of our best writers have spent time pausing reflectively before they leap. Maybe they are reflecting upon a difficulty; maybe they are reflecting upon a theme that arises out of that difficulty; maybe they are reflecting on an image or a series of images. Pausing doesn’t make us any surer of what we’re doing but it can give us both a sense of balance and a rootedness in something deeper than our mindless chatter. Pausing is the best preparation for leaping---but at some point, we do have to take the risk and make the jump. 
Here is Agnes de Mille: “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist and poet never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
As I think of what Ms. De Mille said, three poets who lived in times of social unrest not unlike ours come to mind: Matsuo Basho, Garcia Lorca, and Allen Ginsberg. 
Here’s Basho, writing in 18th century Japan:
In plum blossom scent
Pop!
Sun appears
Mountain Path
 
Aside for a stay of a couple of years in a Zen monastery, Basho was a traveler, meditatively traversing Japan on foot time and time again over the course of his life.  In the circumstance above we can imagine him on his journey, finding himself immersed in fog and then pop, the sun appears.
I take this as a metaphor for our spiritual journey.  Sometimes we are immersed in the fog of confusion, not knowing anything. Even our meditation isn’t going well. If we continue on our journey in a meditative way, so each step is actually a pause, when we least expect it, everything opens up and we feel the warmth glow of the sun shining on all of life.  And at the same time our path opens up before us, reminding me of Suzuki Roshi’s saying, “There are no enlightened people; only enlightened activity.”                      
                                   
How might we walk peacefully on our own path when its foundation is constantly crumbling or we feel we are constantly in fog? First it was the virus, then George Floyd’s death, then the looting and burning throughout our city. What’s the role of our supposed protectors, the police, in all of this? Where can we find any kind of stable footing and see more than a few feet in front of us? Can we notice our urge to leap simply to get out of our current situation? Or are we inclined to just withdraw completely and freeze?
 
Maybe it’s possible to pause and be present for each of our feelings. Can we give a warm hug to our fear and confusion? Can we relax into uncertainty even though chaos is swirling around, and we feel we have no place to settle?  It is possible that our discomfort arises not from uncertainty, but from our resistance to it. I wonder if we can simply follow Nijinsky’s advice: “It’s really quite simple. I merely leap and pause. Leap and pause.”
 
The best poetry and the most deeply satisfying lives involve leaping from the known to the unknown.  As we leap, we experience interbeing in which the sun does, indeed, shine on everything and we walk on the path bathed in its glow.

Now I will discuss two more Bodhisattvas:
Avalokiteshvara and Samantabadhra.
 
The most common image of Avalokiteshvara is one in which he has many eyes to witness the suffering of all beings and many arms to help each of them.  In my book Nothing Holy About it, I add, “He sits on the lotus that grows in muddy water with roots deep in the mud. The beauty of the lotus depends on the quality of the mud. Is the mud well composted? Does it really include all beings? If so, it will be a beautiful lotus, and Avalokiteshvara will do wonderful things.”
 
Avalokitesvara is continually changing forms and also changes gender; sometimes with two arms, or four, or a thousand... as many as they need and sometimes with as many as ten heads.  In Zen, Manjusri is on the main altar either accompanied by Avalokitesvara or by himself, reminding us that if we return to the stillness of beginner’s mind, we can give ourselves away both naturally and freely.
 
Manjusri shows us how to deconstruct our beliefs about who we think we should be, so we can be wholeheartedly present, responding to the cries of the world as Avalokitesvara does.   Without Manjusri energy, there are often two problems with our compassion:  1.) We become co-dependent, needing to take care of others’ pain to feel okay about ourselves; 2.) Our compassion is mixed with anxiety and worry.
 
We may start off being open. Then we start to worry, “Is she okay? Did I show my compassion correctly?” In extreme situations we even stay awake at night worrying. 
When we do either of these, it might be time for us to go to our place of meditation and hang out with Manjusri. In my first book I talked about my friends Jim and Sharon: 
“Sharon is quite needy, and Jim constantly indulges and excuses her behavior. I came to realize that Jim’s co-dependence was getting under my skin. I found myself thinking, Well, this is curious. What’s going on here? Recognizing my own reactivity was Manjusri’s wisdom.  Then I needed to evoke his energy to turn my eyes inward and look deeply at my own negative reactions—at my own shadow. I saw how deeply I was caught by Jim’s situation.  If we focus our kind attention on our shadow, there is the possibility of becoming enriched by it. When I saw my negative reactivity clearly, it dissolved.  My heart opened completely to both Jim and Sharon, and I felt deeply connected.”
 
With Manjusri’s courage, we can draw our own negativity toward us with an invitation.  We can charm our shadow into a relationship and see that it is just pent-up energy. Once energy is flowing freely, our shadow is no longer a shadow, and compassion naturally flows out to those who are suffering around us.        
 
The Lotus Sutra states, “If a living being needs to be saved, Avalokitesvara will appear in the body of a buddha.”  Then it lists more than thirty different bodily manifestations according to what is needed: male, female, young, old, varied by class, station, occupation, divine, human, nonhuman. This is the bodhisattva of compassion, available to whoever is crying out.
 
The final bodhisattva I want to touch on is Samantabhadra, known as the bodhisattiva of great activity based on his interconnectedness with everyone and everything.  He appears in the Flower Garland Sutra, exclaiming, “If the mind makes no discrimination, the 10,000 things are as they are, of single essence.” Dignity, vibrancy, and light emanate from each of his pores. He shows us that everything in the universe is present in every cell in every being, even an ant, even a piece of dust.
 
As an expert meditator, he rests in two types of samadhi. The first is “ocean mirror samadhi.”  When the ocean is still, it mirrors everything: the sky, the clouds, birds... with an awareness that each thing is connected to everything else. The second is “ocean seal samadhi.” Not only is all life reflected in this great ocean of being, every being is completely itself and also the whole ocean in its individuality, undivided from everyone else.  Within the ocean the sparrow’s existence is sealed, just as it is. When our mind is still, we don’t need to look anywhere else for validation, because we experience Samantabhadra’s ocean seal samadhi.        
Samantabhadra manifests this interconnectedness by riding on an elephant, which symbolizes his calmness, deliberateness, and unyielding action. The past year or so since COVID began running rampant, I have watched a pulmonologist neighbor of mine leave for the hospital before dawn every morning and get home late at night, often going a couple of weeks with no days off, calmly and deliberately, day after day. When I said to him, “Aren’t you exhausted Tom? How do you have energy to continue in this way,” he responded simply. “I am doing what I most deeply what I want to do, saving lives. This is why I became a doctor.”
Most people who know Tom have no idea that he is working these kinds of hours with such wholehearted commitment. Samantabhadra is often hard to see. When we are completely engaged in something, we disappear within the activity itself, as Tom seems to have done.
Since every pore in body includes the entire universe, by helping one being, he helps everyone.  And we can actually transform the world!
 
As the bodhisattva of environmentalism, Samantabhadra views each bird, each rock, each tree as precious and brilliant. As the bodhisattva of social justice, like Martin Luther King, Samantabhadra has an indomitable spirit, acting calmly and deliberately without yielding regardless of threats and arrests. Since George Floyd’s death several months ago we have seen Samantabhadra’s power in galvanizing so many, many people to peacefully protest or volunteer to help distribute food here in the Twin Cities.
I want to end this piece by a statement from my first book about how bodhisattva work may progress:  
“We start with Maitreya, who helps us develop inspiration and out of that tap into a deep aspiration. Then Manjusri keeps us steady, cutting away expectations, desires, worries, and anxieties. Next comes Avalokiteshvara to open our heart so we can radiate authentic compassion. Finally, Samantabhadra, inhabiting every pore of our body with vibrancy and light, so we can manifest great activity.”                         
We need these bodhisattvas for guidance as we open to and bring alive our dreams, our flowers in the air.   They instill with us both a radical optimism and an energy to bring that optimism alive.

Now I will discuss two more Bodhisattvas: Avalokiteshvara and Samantabadhra.
 
The most common image of Avalokiteshvara is one in which he has many eyes to witness the suffering of all beings and many arms to help each of them.  In my book Nothing Holy About it, I add, “He sits on the lotus that grows in muddy water with roots deep in the mud. The beauty of the lotus depends on the quality of the mud. Is the mud well composted? Does it really include all beings? If so, it will be a beautiful lotus, and Avalokiteshvara will do wonderful things.”
 
Avalokitesvara is continually changing forms and also changes gender; sometimes with two arms, or four, or a thousand... as many as they need and sometimes with as many as ten heads.  In Zen, Manjusri is on the main altar either accompanied by Avalokitesvara or by himself, reminding us that if we return to the stillness of beginner’s mind, we can give ourselves away both naturally and freely.
 
Manjusri shows us how to deconstruct our beliefs about who we think we should be, so we can be wholeheartedly present, responding to the cries of the world as Avalokitesvara does.   Without Manjusri energy, there are often two problems with our compassion:  1.) We become co-dependent, needing to take care of others’ pain to feel okay about ourselves; 2.) Our compassion is mixed with anxiety and worry.
 
We may start off being open. Then we start to worry, “Is she okay? Did I show my compassion correctly?” In extreme situations we even stay awake at night worrying. 
When we do either of these, it might be time for us to go to our place of meditation and hang out with Manjusri. In my first book I talked about my friends Jim and Sharon: 
“Sharon is quite needy, and Jim constantly indulges and excuses her behavior. I came to realize that Jim’s co-dependence was getting under my skin. I found myself thinking, Well, this is curious. What’s going on here? Recognizing my own reactivity was Manjusri’s wisdom.  Then I needed to evoke his energy to turn my eyes inward and look deeply at my own negative reactions—at my own shadow. I saw how deeply I was caught by Jim’s situation.  If we focus our kind attention on our shadow, there is the possibility of becoming enriched by it. When I saw my negative reactivity clearly, it dissolved.  My heart opened completely to both Jim and Sharon, and I felt deeply connected.”
 
With Manjusri’s courage, we can draw our own negativity toward us with an invitation.  We can charm our shadow into a relationship and see that it is just pent-up energy. Once energy is flowing freely, our shadow is no longer a shadow, and compassion naturally flows out to those who are suffering around us.        
 
The Lotus Sutra states, “If a living being needs to be saved, Avalokitesvara will appear in the body of a buddha.”  Then it lists more than thirty different bodily manifestations according to what is needed: male, female, young, old, varied by class, station, occupation, divine, human, nonhuman. This is the bodhisattva of compassion, available to whoever is crying out.
 
The final bodhisattva I want to touch on is Samantabhadra, known as the bodhisattiva of great activity based on his interconnectedness with everyone and everything.  He appears in the Flower Garland Sutra, exclaiming, “If the mind makes no discrimination, the 10,000 things are as they are, of single essence.” Dignity, vibrancy, and light emanate from each of his pores. He shows us that everything in the universe is present in every cell in every being, even an ant, even a piece of dust.
 
As an expert meditator, he rests in two types of samadhi. The first is “ocean mirror samadhi.”  When the ocean is still, it mirrors everything: the sky, the clouds, birds... with an awareness that each thing is connected to everything else. The second is “ocean seal samadhi.” Not only is all life reflected in this great ocean of being, every being is completely itself and also the whole ocean in its individuality, undivided from everyone else.  Within the ocean the sparrow’s existence is sealed, just as it is. When our mind is still, we don’t need to look anywhere else for validation, because we experience Samantabhadra’s ocean seal samadhi.        
Samantabhadra manifests this interconnectedness by riding on an elephant, which symbolizes his calmness, deliberateness, and unyielding action. The past year or so since COVID began running rampant, I have watched a pulmonologist neighbor of mine leave for the hospital before dawn every morning and get home late at night, often going a couple of weeks with no days off, calmly and deliberately, day after day. When I said to him, “Aren’t you exhausted Tom? How do you have energy to continue in this way,” he responded simply. “I am doing what I most deeply what I want to do, saving lives. This is why I became a doctor.”
Most people who know Tom have no idea that he is working these kinds of hours with such wholehearted commitment. Samantabhadra is often hard to see. When we are completely engaged in something, we disappear within the activity itself, as Tom seems to have done.
Since every pore in body includes the entire universe, by helping one being, he helps everyone.  And we can actually transform the world!
 
As the bodhisattva of environmentalism, Samantabhadra views each bird, each rock, each tree as precious and brilliant. As the bodhisattva of social justice, like Martin Luther King, Samantabhadra has an indomitable spirit, acting calmly and deliberately without yielding regardless of threats and arrests. Since George Floyd’s death several months ago we have seen Samantabhadra’s power in galvanizing so many, many people to peacefully protest or volunteer to help distribute food here in the Twin Cities.

I want to end this piece by a statement from my first book about how bodhisattva work may progress:  
“We start with Maitreya, who helps us develop inspiration and out of that tap into a deep aspiration. Then Manjusri keeps us steady, cutting away expectations, desires, worries, and anxieties. Next comes Avalokiteshvara to open our heart so we can radiate authentic compassion. Finally, Samantabhadra, inhabiting every pore of our body with vibrancy and light, so we can manifest great activity.”         
                
We need these bodhisattvas for guidance as we open to and bring alive our dreams, our flowers in the air.   They instill with us both a radical optimism and an energy to bring that optimism alive.

I want to talk about the place of the bodhisattva in Zen with a focus on four of the most well-known Bodhisattvas: Maitreya, Manjusri, Avalokitesvara, and Samantabhadra.
The bodhisattva tradition, which focuses primarily to reaching out to the cries of world, became a key feature of the development of the Mahayana tradition beginning in the first and second century in India and extending to modern times.
Bodhisattvas, as awakened warriors, knew how (and teach us how) to help people emerge from hells which are self-created. As we are ending one of the most difficult years in our nation’s history, we need the radical optimism, which bodhisattvas embody. Buddhist practice during the last several hundred years has included two complementary strains: other power (tariki in Japanese) and self-power (ji-riki).  From the other power perspective, bodhisattva power is out there to be called upon.  We call on these presences, these spirits, to help us. In Asia, pilgrims journey to mountains or other power places where energies of specific bodhisattvas are particularly strong. From the self-power perspective, these so-called Bodhisattvas are parts of our deepest self, which naturally reaches out support human suffering.                     
In Buddhist temples or practice centers throughout the world the 4 Bodhisattva vows are routinely recited. When we recite them, we are both vowing to become who we really are AND acting on the sense of interdependence which in a manifestation of our authenticity.
 
We commit ourselves to one or more of the heroic ideals of the Bodhisattvas, which at times seem extraordinary, but are as ordinary as Mr. Rogers’ refrain, “Won’t you be my, won’t you be my, won’t you be my neighbor?”
 
In our meal chants, and those of most Zen communities we visualize these four bodhisattvas, call them to mind, and evoke their energy in the following manner:  "Maitreya Buddha, of future birth; Manjushri Bodhisattva, great wisdom; Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, great compassion; Samantabhadra Bodhisattva, great activity."
 
I will begin with Maitreya.
Supposedly, Buddha told Maitreya that he, too, would become a Buddha someday. Then Maitreya started envisioning himself as a Buddha: calm, compassionate, and wise. In subsequent centuries, Maitreya became an icon of, 1.) hope and of our intentionality to fulfill our own aspiration to settle into this same calm spaciousness; 2.) maitri or metta, which means loving kindness. Maitreya embodies the unfulfilled aspect of a bodhisattva who has not yet become Buddha. He also enables us to get a glimmer of the self we want to be and/or the world we want to create.
 
One Asian country which has venerated Maitreya for centuries primarily as an “other power” is Bhutan.  When I was visiting that country about 15 years ago, our guide and translator pointed out to us huge rocks along the road inscribed with “come, Maitreya, come” in the Sino-Tibetan script used in that country. Our guide told us further that he and his wife both did visualization practices daily so they would be able to both join Maitreya and manifest him as he sits in what is called “Tusita heaven.”
 
And as far as “self-power”, in the west the simple phrase, “May I be safe, May I feel protected, May I be loved” has really taken hold; a Maitreya or metta practice. We begin with ourselves and extend all the way out to people we dislike and back to ourselves.  Earlier in the year when George Floyd was murdered, I broadened my own loving kindness practice to include Blacks who live in fear of the police, store looters, the police themselves, our own president, and even rabbits eating our plants in the backyard.

Here’s a piece by Lew Welch which I am particularly fond of:
“At last, in America, Maitreya, the coming Buddha, will be our leader, and, at last, will not be powerful, and will not be alone.  Take is as a simple prophecy.  Look into the cleared eyes of so many thousands, young, and think: Maybe that one? That one? That one?  Look out. The secret is looking out. And never forgetting there are phony ones and lost ones and foolish ones.  Know this: Maitreya walks our streets right now.  Each one is one.  There are many of them. Look out.  For him, for her, for them, for these will break America as Christ Cracked Rome. And just tonight, another one got born.”
 
He wrote this during another difficult time in our history, the 1960s. I appreciate his attempt to see everyone as a future Buddha in spite of the great dividedness in our society, which again seems to be dominant.
 
A few years after Lew wrote this poem, Zen teacher, Issan Dorsey opened the Maitri Hospice in the San Francisco area, the first of many hospices around the country to support and minister, folks with AIDS.
 
Not only is Maitreya the loving-kindness Bodhisattva, he is also the bodhisattva of rejoicing, jubilation, and play. Budai or Hotei, a jolly monk who lived in the 9th century China, is considered to be an incarnation of Maitreya. He carried around a sack full of oranges that he gave to kids he encountered. Budai is the fat Buddha who greets us in many Chinese restaurants. Supposedly, when he was asked about the fundamental meaning of life, he dropped his sack. When further asked but how to live this meaning, picked it up and walked away.  This reminds me of a quote by George Bernard Shaw, “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
                         
Maitreya’s radical optimism can help us during difficult times.  Once, many years ago, when I was on a break walking on the sidewalk on a foggy day during a retreat at San Francisco Zen Center and feeling very down, I slumped my head toward the sidewalk in front of me and saw a green sprout pushing up through a tiny crack cement in the cement.  That sprout must have been emanating from Maitreya, because it gave me the energy to not throw in the towel, as I was ready to do, but both continue the retreat and my meditation practice with renewed inspiration.  
             
In my book Nothing Holy About It, I quote Seng-ts’an: “Dreams, delusions, flowers of air,” and I add, “As human beings that’s what we are: deluded dreamers, flowers of air.” 
It’s wonderful that we are flowers of air, that we have an ephemeral quality that allows for transformation. Because we’re flowers of air, we can become whatever we envision. When we get discouraged or feel despondent, Maitreya reminds us that in spite of, or possibly because of, our ephemeral, flowers-of-air nature, we can reignite our dream any time.
 
I want to finish by talking about Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. Manjusri is often the only bodhisattva to be present on altars. He is generally holding a sword and resting on a lion, a symbol of courage and equanimity. The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) texts may be considered actions of his sword: instead of teaching us something new, he deconstructs all of our ideas and concepts. Manjusri’s words are considered turning words, which may penetrate and radically alter our consciousness.
One example is the statement in the poem “Faith in Heart Mind:” “Gain and loss, right and wrong; away with them once and for all.” 
I remember settling into a deep silence reciting that phrase during a long retreat.   
 
Manjusri is always portrayed as a youth not yet burdened by thoughts. The bumper sticker I saw recently Don’t Believe What You Think must have been written by or about Manjusri.
Suzuki Roshi used Manjusri’s sword with me on more than one occasion. For instance, when I was obsessing about finding a monastery in Japan which I felt good about, he pointed to the raku teacups on his shelf in the kitchen and said quietly, “If you try to find the best one, you will not appreciate any of them.” His sword of wisdom was so powerful that instead of going to Japan, I stayed and practiced with him for some time.
 
And of course, Suzuki Roshi is known particularly as a beginners’ mind teacher because of this adeptness at dispensing with old ideas, opinions, and patterns. Our beginners’ mind cuts away thoughts as they begin to solidify, which mine were doing, and the sword keeps coming down until the mind goes completely silent and there is a wonderful openness to what is!
 
Manjusri is also adept at using language to overcome the separation of the subject-verb-object.  He encourages us to use meditation to help us pause so we can leap beyond our usual way of dividing our thoughts up.  Here’s a statement of his in one of the sutras:
If a person, when cultivating the paramita of wisdom, does not see any paramita of wisdom, and finds neither any dharma to grasp or to reject, s/he is really cultivating the paramita of wisdom.
 
In spite of this, at times Manjusri is criticized by Buddha for being too verbose and too eager to use words to show us how to see through and be free from, all limited views.  As my second teacher Katagiri Roshi commented about unexpectedly seeing a beautiful flower, “Wow.”
Then he said, “Wow may be too much. Let the flower speak for itself.”