Hey, everyone. I was re-reading the journal I logged on silent retreat week at Long Quan Monastery.
It lasted about 6 days and we had a vow of silence all day & all night. We did not speak during meals, during afternoon breaks. The only words we spoke in were Chinese sutras. We’d recite the heart sutra at the feet of three gold Buddhas–Amitabha, Sakyamuni, and Bhaisajyaguru–and go to sleep. We did not speak for 6 days and had only our mind for a companion. Make friends, or falter!
Here I’ll publish the few daily entries that lend value to you.
This was on Day 1, when I felt very, very good about my practice and the retreat.
Day 1
I realize the writings of my monastery stay amount to very little on the pages of this adept collection of scribbles. For one thing the sun is always shining or the rain is coming down in a deluge, so either way I’m free to love the moment and get lost in the world. We are now ½ way through our program at Long Quan Monastery. The immersion has been so thorough and overwrought that any consideration for the world outside this monastery and my conditions therein have slid by the wayside. Our days are packed to the rafters. It’s 12:30 PM in Taiyuan, China.
I realize now that what’s been keeping me from the present moment for so long is myself. I realize now it was no one but me suffering my own catharsis of time and its developments through its passing.
I’m about to venture into the sunlight of the ordinary days here. The ordinary mind. We—Alex, Me, Alex, Andrew, and Matthew (5 people / 3 names / 1 Love) are talking the Diamond Sutra in a great circle of yin discoveries in the grass. The Diamond Sutra is my favorite sutra and made me burst into tears one night on the stark summit of our apartment building in Seattle. It was March, and I was newly single. The sutra hit me so deep it washed these marrows in my bones.
It rained hard as ever in China today. I watched it come down. We sat patient in half-lotus darkness through the brood of the storm while it waged war on the plants and plain red walls of Long Quan.
My meditations have improved and declined in the same degrees. I can sink less deeply to the Samadhi swamps of luminous concentration and yet I walk the temple paths of my everyday thinking like they are freshly groomed in the first spring inside my mind of mildew. The morose nature of deep stillness is gone, and the utter spinnin in mud of letting-the-mind-go to thinking has really chilled out. I find these two in combination makes for a real balanced middle way for now.
When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears. Every single flash of an instant, flash of a second, and abhidharma, is meaningful. All this living ought to teach us that living is good. All aught ought to do is be aught. This painful shredding of my earthen world ought to be for a purpose. What I mean to say is the worlds of darkness I leave in my wake was all me running around in circles about the candle of truth with a fresh new candle made May 28, 1993 in my hand. What I mean to say is this whole world that is my life is self-created. What you think you are you are. What you believe on the topic of this stunted world of change is the world of yourself, too. What I mean to say is let life love you. You should go home to it. It’s waiting to hold you in the warm light of its arms.
what we are stepping into 