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The question for tonight: What is the song your being sings?
In the evenings here, after heavy rains, a choir of frogs takes voice in my back yard. The rainwater has been absorbed into the earth, and there’s a bit of ground and grass and weeds for the frogs to rest upon. And resting, they take to song. Of course, I don’t know what they’re singing – what the song is about. But I suspect it’s just about being. Not about being anything in particular, just being what they are. The Froggy Tabernacle Choir, you might say.
Intermittently, they stop singing. All at once, they go silent. It’s almost as if one frog, the conductor, brings its arms down to silence them. It’s amazing to hear. First they start all at once, and then they stop all at once. And then finally, the concert ends, and they’re gone. Gone to where? Who knows? Maybe they just go to sleep, so they can wake up tomorrow evening and give a new concert.
I was reading the other night in Susan Murphy’s beautifully written book Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary (Wisdom Publications, 2006). Susan Murphy is an Australian writer, filmmaker, and Zen teacher. While reading to the sound of the frog concert, I ran across this passage (p. 111), and the synchronicity struck me:
Martin Buber tells a koan-like Hasidic tale … After the Great Magid’s death, his disciples came together to mourn, and talk about the things he had done. When it was Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s turn to speak, he asked them: “Do you know why the master went to the pond every day at dawn and stayed there for a little while before coming home again?” No one knew why. Rabbi Zalman explained that he [the master] was learning the song with which the frogs praise God. “It takes a very long time to learn that song,” he said.
In Zen practice, we sometimes come up against it. We plead: How long is it going to take before I finally get this? I’ve been practicing, more or less diligently, for so long, yet there’s still something wanting in me. What am I missing? Why can’t I get it? I suspect questions like these plague practitioners in any tradition – religious, philosophical, professional, social, or otherwise.
We’re looking to an imagined future that holds the end of our quest, as we search for the wholeness we know is out there somewhere. Or in here somewhere. Well, Susan Murphy suggests an attitude we can adopt in regard to these nagging questions. She says:
You can’t rush the song of the frogs, and you can’t absorb it in just a few visits to the pond. Patience is the willingness to come back and listen again and again. It is mindfulness… What is that song with which the frogs praise God, with which buddha nature sings the frogs and us and the dawn star? … What is that song? Why do we go back to sleep and forget it again and again? And when you wake, knowing it at last, who wakes?
Indeed, who wakes?
Let us stop and listen now, and take in that song. The song that sings our being in this moment. And in each moment that arises anew. Out of nothing, out of ourselves. Remember what legend tells us that the Sixth Zen Patriarch heard in the Diamond Sutra – the verse that led him to his own teacher?
Abiding nowhere, mind comes forth.
In our context tonight, we might say “Our song comes forth.” So, let us listen to and with the ears of mindfulness – and find wonder and joy and peace in the sound of our own Froggy Tabernacle Choir, in whatever language it sings.
Thank you.
EMPTY CLOUD ZEN 