from intro.
- it had taken him fifteen years to tap and train his own "voice."
- Seven-Storied Mountain, an auto-bio by Thomas Merton.
main text:
- magic mandala -- circles within circles. Buddhist designs that are always circles filled with things, the circle representing the void and the things illusions.
- comparisons are odious. - japhy ryder / gary snyder.
- Japhy was always giving things, always practicing what the Buddhists call Paramita of Dana, the perfection of charity.
- Smith you don't realize it's a privilege to practice giving presents to others.
- everything comes to an end.
- Japhy: I've been reading Whitman ... and he means ... the attitude of the Bard, the Zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing as a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway ... all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume ... I see a vision of the great rucksack revolution.
- "this thinking has stopped."
- Practice standing on my head.
- Though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
