Thursday June 8, Valerie Forstman: Nansen’s circle and the seamless tomb

Valerie takes up case 69 from the Hekiganroku, “Nansen draws a circle,” and traces what it might mean to accord with this “circle” (or perhaps to notice how powerfully we are in accord, willy-nilly) exactly as we are, including when we’re sick, in pain, or porous to the world’s unimaginable pains.
She draws a half-dozen other koans into case 69’s circles of resonance, and students’ stories and insights, and Yamada Koun’s favorite circle: the zero which forms the intimate denominator to every last vivid thing’s “numerator.” Sitting plop down in the circle of right-here, she says, it’s possible to “think neither good nor evil; personally see Buddha-nature.” Intimately. Where any distance between seer and seen is just shed; the circle is resolved and endlessly resolving.
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