Verses on the Faith Mind

Dear friends –

I am very humble as I speak to you tonight, becase for several months now, I get two or three or even more notifications from Word Press that new friends are following this collections of things that are very important to me, and which I therefore think, must also be important to you.

But not knowing you, I don’t know what it is that makes one of you tell a pal about our √ritual family” and suggest that they join it too.

But since there are so many new folks, I feel that I should add something which I feel is wonderful, and here it is:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/zen/fm/fm.htm

It is a link to a Chinese poem which was written by tSeng ts’an, the Sixth Zen Patriarch, sometime before 600 AD (he died in 606 AD). At this website you will learn a lot about him and about zen in general, and you will be able to read a number of translations of this text, some into Japanese snf some into English. And if you can read Chinese, you will find the whole original text in Chines characters.

The version of this text that I love themost I heard on a tape by Ram Dass (who I love deeply who has taught me so many things, though I have never talked to him, only seen him give a talk once, but lidtened to tapes of him for hundreds of hours driving back and forth from Ashby to Cambridge, while I was teaching at MIT.

Iyt is by Richard Clarke, and you will find it right at the end of this long sequence of web pages. Its title is “Verses on the Faith-MInd.”

I hope it will sing to you, as it has to me for so many years (I was given a beautiful little pamphlet with Richard Clarke’s version on it by my wonderful dharma sister Kathy P who had gotten this pamphlet at a Ram Dass talk. I loved it so much that I typed the whole thing into my Mac, so that I could send it to friends – that was a long time ago, maybe before the internet, anyway before i had ever seen an electronic version.

Sp here you are, all my virtual sisters and brothers, and if you feel like telling me what sort of things in Dream Deep have spoken to you, please write to me at haj@unt.edu, and if IZ have other things that are similar, I will be very happy to try to put them into our Dream, though I barely know how to steer this thing, which is why I have just been pasting things in, rather than uploading them, because I have never learned to do this. I am in this century, yes, but just barely. I don’t know how to make a web page – I am forever thankful to my friend Rainer for setting up this Word Press place of meeting, and to John Lawler, a great linguist-geek-brother, who gave me squatter’s rights on his huge web page, where he has put a lot of articles by me on pragmantax and on poetics. If you use the prompt :“haj papers” in a search engine, it will take you to these.

So I hope to hear from you sometime or other, but if I nevr do, that seems to be just fine – it seems that the horse knows the way home.

Peace to you all and a very happy summer (or, if in the southern hemisphere. winter).

Peace –

Haj

everything
less vast
than love—
let go of

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