Assuming that there's possibly anybody who even cares, I've finally completed the Sisyphean task of posting all of my Bumbershoot and Music Fest Northwest pictures from last September over at the live site. If I were a Tibetan Buddhist, I suppose that I would now take them all down to demonstrate impermence and to avoid attachment.
Since I'm a Zen Buddhist, I'll let impermanence take care of itself (nothing will be on-line forever) and free myself from attachment through shikantaza practice.
The Patriarch Nagarjuna, founder of the school that gave rise to Tibetan Buddhism, said in his commentary on the Maha-prajna-paramita sutra that the mind that solely sees the impermanence of this world of constant appearance and disappearance is called the bodhi-mind. In his commentary, Nagarjuna was referring to what he identified as the four bases of mindfulness, the third of which is contemplating one's own mind as constantly changing.
Zen Master Dogen was concerned not so much on the impermanence of the mind, but on the mind that sees the impermanence of all things, including the mind. He encouraged us to "think deeply in your heart of the impermanence of the world. It is not a matter of meditating using some provisional method of contemplation. It is not a matter of fabricating in our heads that which does not really exist. Impermanence is truly the reality right in front of our eyes. We need not wait for some teaching from others, some proof from some passage of scripture, or some principle. Born in the morning and dead in the evening, a person we saw yesterday is no longer here today —these are the facts we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. This is what we see and hear about others."
When we truly see impermanence, egocentricity falls away and desire for fame and for profit disappears. Such a state is what Nagarjuna meant by bodhi-mind.
So go look at my impermanent pictures before they all disappear.
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