The here and now mountain
Frozen puddle - Vajradarshini
To find a creative way into the Dharma, try bringing the teachings into dialogue with something else. It could be a painting you love, a poem or a movie.
On a recent retreat, we brought together the teachings on the 10 Fetters with the poems of Rumi, a Sufi poet and mystic from the 13th century.
Can you find any of the 10 Fetters in the poem below?
This World Which is Made of Our Love for Emptiness
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm, that work is over!
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness.These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words
and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.- Rumi
The connection between two seemingly disparate things starts with your intuition. “This poem is speaking to me of insight.” But that ‘speaking’ is not an explanation through concepts, it’s deeper than that.
In this article, I’m going to suggest it’s helpful to unpack the meaning from the poem, painting or film. To draw out the dharma teachings and make them explicit.
But with one caveat.
When you are done, pack all the meaning back into the poem, the painting or the film, and let it speak for itself once again.
The magic of art is that it’s able to point directly at reality, in a way that concepts never can.
Below is a personal unpacking of ‘This world which is made from our love of Emptiness’.
