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New Year's Eve Peaceful Poetry 2008
The Lunar New Year evokes a longing for home—a place of warmth, happiness, embraced by love. Many people, whose childhoods were turbulent, have never truly had a home, but fortunately, the sangha can become a spiritual family, walking alongside our blood family to support and build each other up. The folk verse, “The bird flies back to the mountain as night falls,” reminds us not to sit idly when darkness comes, but to take care to return home.
King Tran Thai Tong, in the Diamond Samadhi Sutra, discussed “the myriad dharmas return to the one, where does the one return?” and through the koan, “The myriad dharmas return to the one, where does the one return?—The nine bends of the Yellow River,” shows that there is no distant path if we have the eye of wisdom: the nine bends of the river become a single airport in an instant. The gatha about the four mountains (birth, old age, sickness, death) awakens us to practice in the present moment to transcend suffering and return to our true home.
The list of three “homes” we need to cultivate right in this very moment:
- Our blood family and our spiritual family—two individual planets coming together to form a collective planet.
- Our body—the place that contains our ancestors and culture, needing care through mindful breathing and walking meditation so that body and mind are one.
- The sangha—a second home, a refuge for each other through the instrument of letting go of reproach, growing understanding and love, transforming the past and building the future.