Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (Shambhala Dragon Edition) (Boston: Shambhala, 1985, 1987) ("To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To 'rest in the present' is a state of magical simplicity, although attainment of this state is not as simple as it sounds. At the very least, sitting Zen practice, called zazen, will bring about a strong sense of well-being, as the clutter of ideas and emotions falls away and body and mind return to natural harmony with all creation. Out of this emptiness can come a true insight into the nature of existence, which is not different from one's Buddha nature. To travel this path, one need not be a 'Zen Buddhist,' whut the mind, to return it to the clear, pty oich is only another idea to be discarded, like 'enlightenment' and like 'the Buddha' and like 'god'." Id. at x. "A tree frog or 'spring peeper' has replaced the white moth as my sentinel. It bounces down the silent row of bodhisattva, bounces back again with a minute pum, pum, pum, seeking the dark. Where is the door to Zen? Do you hear the peeping of a tree frog? Begin there! Or there! Or there! (Shunryu Suzuki-roshi said, If you have truly understood a frog, you have understood everything.) Zen is life, each moment of our life, thus Zen is everywhere." "Lao Tzu said, When your mind is empty like a valley or a canyon, then you will know the power of the Way. A Zen master says, How can I fill your cup until you empty it? In zazen, one opens to this emptiness, to the great stillness of our true nature, which is also the foundation of the universe. Then pure tears fall in utter relief at finding the way home." Id. at 44. "Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one's own folly, or even of one's navel, although a clearer view on all three of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind--with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into the fire, the Inuit using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone, achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga. In Tantric, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a sea shell or a flower petal. When body and mind are one, then the whole being, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, experiences that individual existence, ego, the 'reality' of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. The weary self of masks and screens, defenses, preconceptions, and opinions that, propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to be some sort of entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly fall away, dissolve into formless flux where concepts such a 'death' and 'life,' 'time' and 'space,' 'past' and 'future' have no meaning. There is only a pearly radiance of Emptiness, the Uncreated, without beginning, therefore without end." Id. at 81-82.).
