KWAN SEUM BOSAL – Global Kwanseumbosal Kido for Peace

KWAN SEUM BOSAL

Kwan Seum Bosal, known as Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit, is the Korean name for the bodhisattva of compassion. Kwan Seum literally means "perceive world sound," which is also translated as "one who hears the cries of suffering of the world”. Bosal is the Korean translation of bodhisattva. The bodhisattva of compassion hears the cries of the whole world and responds with compassionate action.


Global Kwanseumbosal Kido for Peace

Dear Global Sangha,

We will be having a three hour Kwanseum Bosal Kido for the Ukrainian people and for all of humanity on Sunday, March 6th, 2022.

Let’s visualize our moktaks as being the impact that ends all wars, and our voices as being the Big Love that can be received by all beings. We must try. We just do it 100%.

Yours in the dharma,
Bobby

March 6, 2022
8 AM EST / 2PM CET / 3PM EET / 10PM KST
Click here to see this in your time zone

Join Kido: Zoom link
Meeting ID: 884 1103 0213
Passcode: 934993

 Imbalance is our world’s sickness: how can we cure it? Balance means understanding the truth. If you have no wisdom, you cannot become balanced. It is very important for everyone to find their human nature. That is why we sit Zen, to find our true human nature. So we are in a very important position, sitting in meditation. We must find our human nature, then together help each other become world peace. As human beings, we are all equal. We all have the same love mind. We must find the primary cause of this world’s sickness, and remove it.

- Zen Master Seung Sahn

 

Keeping Quiet - by Pablo Neruda


Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with 
death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead in winter
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Extravagaria : A Bilingual Edition

by Pablo Neruda (Author), Alastair Reid (Translator) 
Noonday Press; Bilingual edition (January 2001)
ISBN: 0374512388
page 26

Hokusai says

Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention…

Roger Start Keyes, art historian, Hokusai scholar, and co-founder of York Zen, wrote his poem “Hokusai Says,” featured on our York Zen Welcome Page, in Venice in 1990. It appeared suddenly as he was making notes for the “Young Hokusai” paper he was to give at a symposium on Hokusai the following day.

He says keep looking, stay curious. He says there is no end to seeing…

Roger describes how he was writing in one of his daily journal books when he experienced a sudden “raising of tone” and found himself writing out a continuous text until the impetus finally died away. On reading the piece through he felt it had the rhythms of a poem, organized it into lines, and made a few minor corrections. He took the title “Hokusai says” from the first line that had appeared.

He says everything is alive…

Hokusai self portrait

Back in California, Roger showed it to artist friends. One was Connie Smith Siegel, who shared it with W.S. Merwin’s daughter, Susan. Susan wrote it out in beautiful calligraphy and drew a border around it with motifs taken from a Hokusai woodcut.
Connie also showed it to Joanna Macy, scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Joanna started reading it in her workshops and, when later asked about its influence, wrote that “she enjoyed reading it aloud and feeling the impact it consistently had…for the masterly way the words convey a state of grateful and rapt attention that brings one more fully alive to the everyday mystery of life.”

Everything has its own life…

Its influence spread. It was reproduced in the Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center newsletter (1996) and in a number of books, including Mark Williams and Danny Penman’s Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (2011). It also started appearing online in blogs and YouTube videos.

Roger Keyes

Roger Keyes

He says live with the world inside you…

Realizing that none of the online recordings of the poem was by Roger, his friend and curator of The Laurence Sterne Trust, Patrick Wildgust, generously intervened. In 2015 he arranged for a recording to be made of Roger reading “Hokusai says” by sound engineer Jez Wells at York University. You can listen to this recording on our York Zen Welcome Page (and online).

Contentment is life living through you. Joy is life living through you. Satisfaction and strength is life living through you. Look, feel, let life take you by the hand. Let life live through you.

Who knows where “Hokusai says” will next appear?