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nembutsu.info
Journal of Shin Buddhism
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In shinjin's sauntering stride
'I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land... Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.
... If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man - then you are ready for a walk.'
[From the essay 'Walking' by Henry Thoreau.]
[Poem by Rev. Zuiken Inagaki.]
"What is the Way?"
"Walk on!"
Directly through this wide world walking
Every trusting step falling away home
The quickening ground bearing all journeys
Namo Amida Butsu
We walk on
Where I go I know not
Wandering lost yet founded in wonder
Oya's westering steppes my travail turning
Becoming so becoming
I walk on
Pottering clay of pure land afoot
Mind's pan settling golden lotus pods
Jinen seeded in grave footprints ceded
Gateless gait swinging
Just walk on
At Buddha's nativity pedestrian lotuses bloom
As above, so below, bombus borne
Faith's flesh is grass blades' scabbard
Womb wounds healing
Compassion walks on
Pain slipping o'er sobriety's faltering mudflat
Tariki's tripping advert of intoxicating purchase
Dharma's elixir pressing Earth's drunken ease
Infinite spirit imbibing
Oneness walks on
Ambit of saponaceous wisdom so elusive
Wetness soiling soulful soles of embrace
Freshening fatigue gratefully taking for granted
Namo Amida Butsu
Waywardness walks on
Namo Amida Butsu
Going and returning are moving on
Ambu-lancing Amida Butsu
That peregrine power of lightening ON!
(© Copyright Gregg Heathcote, 3 January 1996)
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