“The whole world is one bright pearl.” – Xuansha
Gazing on it all with amazement,
each and every thing bathed in luminosity,
from the smallest to the largest,
nothing more or less precious —
a stone, a petal, a bee, a feather,
a wooden bowl, a comb, a golden coin —
it was all as clear to him as a full moon in October.
Letting the one bright pearl shine through
to the bone, blurring distinctions
of subject and object, absence and presence,
lover and beloved.
Not thinking, “Symbolically or metaphorically,
with meaning or without meaning?”
Letting go of the need to make sense of it all,
the right and wrong of it, the beauty and the grief.
Alive to the light without and the light within,
the way it scours the mind road —
the many twists and turns,
the missed signals and dead ends —
pouring out a kind of slow happiness all around,
infiltrating the heart.
~
(Xuansha Shibei (835-908) was a Zen monk and teacher known for the phrase, “The whole world is one bright pearl.” Sometimes translated as “one bright jewel,” it’s a metaphor Eihei Dogen also writes about in Shobogenzo.)
