An online community sharing the study and practice of Chan Buddhism

Photographs by Yao Xiang, with accompanying
haiku and poetry by Issa, and others

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all-
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
      I know the voices dying with a dying fall

      Beneath the music from a farther room.

      So how should I presume?"

    -- From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot



 



Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice
from what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire

But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
to say that for destruction, ice
is also great and will suffice.
-- Robert Frost





Time and space collide
Silence ... who's singing that hymn?
some lonely cricket

 



Old man hummingbird
at what age did you first taste
the sun's sweet nectar



For so work the honey-
bees,
Creatures that by a rule in
nature teach
The act of order to a
peopled kingdom.
-- Shakespeare

 



When the bush warbler
sings, the old frog belches
his reply
-- Shoha



This world is a dream
So filled with pain and sorrow
yet..at times, so cool

 



The light in the dark
the hard thing in the soft thing
both chewing their cud