#flower sermon

[raffaellopalandri]

The Teaching Without Words 無言之教 / wú yán zhī jiào

I have long observed that certain locutions are so tightly bound to the linguistic, cultural, and cosmological matrices from which they arise that translation, in the ordinary sense, is not merely inadequate but category-mistaken. One may transport lexical correspondences, historical glosses, and philological annotations across languages, yet the operative meaning remains embedded in a lived…

[frequentpondcrosser]

[butlerphotos]

Flower Sermon For all of my Buddhist friends.

[mushroooms]

Listen/purchase: Flower Sermon by Lotus

[serenoa-repens]

[javedbabar-blog]

Blooming Buddha

The Buddha’s Flower Sermon was when he held up a white flower before his disciples and said…

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[somebodysittingthereallthetime]

[somebodysittingthereallthetime]

Toward the end of his life, the Buddha took his disciples to a quiet pond for instruction. As they had done so many times before, the Buddha’s followers sat in a small circle around him, and waited for the teaching. But this time the Buddha had no words. He reached into the muck and pulled up a lotus flower. And he held it silently before them, its roots dripping mud and water. The disciples were greatly confused. It was on the side of a bed, just a plain yellow flower. I'd stopped to light a cigarette and I was distracted, looking at it. It was a little as though the flower were looking at me too, you know, those communications, once in a while... You know what I'm talking about, everyone feels that, what they call beauty. It was just that, the flower was beautiful, it was a very lovely flower. And I was damned, one day I was going to die and forever. The flower was handsome, there would always be flowers for men in the future. All at once I understood nothing, I mean nothingness, nothing, I'd thought it was peace, it was the end of the chain. I was going to die, Luc was already dead, there would never again be a flower for anyone like us, there would never be anything, there'd be absolutely nothing, and that's what nothing was, that there would never again be a flower.

The Flower Sutra

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Julio Cortazar - A Yellow Flower