The rain begins
the way all important things begin —
without announcement, present
where a moment ago it was not,
touching the river's surface, in a cadence
she did not choose to hear and cannot now
unhear.
She is sitting on a wall. This is the whole fact.
She is sitting on a wall, above a river
in a city that has been arguing with itself
for a thousand years, and has not resolved anything
and is still here, still beautiful,
still turning in the afternoon light, like a thing
that has forgotten it was supposed to arrive somewhere.
The boats pass. A leaf trembles.
Her breathing is doing what breathing does
and she notices this —
notices the noticing —
and something in the noticing, quietly steps aside.
Shankara told the story of ten travelers
who crossed the roaring river
and wept, because they could count
only nine.
Each one counted the others. Each one forgot
to count himself.
They mourned what was not missing.
They stood in their own light
and called it darkness.
Until the sage on the bank
said: you are ten.
And the counting stopped, because the counter
had been found, and the counter
was the tenth man all along, and the tenth man
was the one looking, and the one looking
was the river and the bank
and the counting, and the grief, and the sage
and the instruction
and the moment of recognition, that is not
an acquisition of something new, but the ending
of a subtraction that was never real.
She is sitting on a wall
above the Bosphorus.
She is the Bosphorus. She does not know this yet.
She is beginning
to know this.
Lao Tzu did not argue.
That was the teaching —
the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao,
which is another way of saying:
the thing you are reaching for with your hand
is the hand.
Wu-wei.
The watercourse way. Not passivity —
the river is not passive,
the river is the most active thing
in the landscape,
it is just that its action does not fight the shape
of the ground, does not insist
that the valley be elsewhere,
does not argue with the stone
about the stone's position —
it only finds the way through,
which is always there, which has always been there,
which is only invisible
to the thing, that is busy insisting
on a different way through.
The He Tu knew this —
the Yellow River's map
of cosmic order, not imposed, not argued into existence,
but revealed in the self-generating symmetry
of water finding its level, of nature's quiet arithmetic
that needs no calculator, and no proof
and no one to believe in it
for it to be
true.
The mosque across the water, was built by someone
who understood geometry as a form of listening.
The minarets do not argue with the sky.
They merely rise into it,
the way questions rise, when the questioner
has finally become quiet enough
to hear, that the question
and the answer
were the same sound
all along.
Chao-chou was asked
about the nature of Buddha.
He said: go wash your bowl.
This is either the most unhelpful thing
ever said
or the only helpful thing —
depending on whether, you understand
that the bowl is the koan,
that the washing is the path,
that the complete attention brought to the ordinary task
is indistinguishable, in its quality,
from the complete attention, the mystic brings
to the absolute —
that enlightenment is not somewhere else,
not in a different bowl, not after the washing,
not achievable by someone
more prepared than you —
it is the washing itself, complete,
without the mind running ahead
to what comes after the washing
or behind, to what came before,
only the bowl, only the water,
only the hands that already know
what to do, if the mind
will agree to stop
supervising.
She is breathing. The rain is falling.
The city continues without requiring her attention
and this is the gift —
that the city does not need her
in order to be beautiful,
that the river does not require
her watching in order to flow,
that she can set down
the work of holding the world together
for one afternoon and the world
will hold.
Attar's birds flew ten thousand miles
to find the Simorgh —
the mythical king, the answer,
the destination of the long seeking —
and found a mirror.
Thirty birds. Si morgh in Persian:
thirty birds.
They looked and saw themselves
and understood that they had always been
what they were looking for, that the journey
was not an approach towards the answer
but a gradual shedding of the certainty
that the answer, was elsewhere.
The mosque stands as witness to this —
the architecture of inwardness made stone,
the dome that holds the space
the way the self holds awareness
without being its source, the unmoving axis
of the turning world,
the still point, not despite the motion
but within it, as it, the center that is everywhere
and nowhere, and here,
always here, always this afternoon,
always this rain on this river
in this city, that has been seeking something
for a thousand years, and finding it
and losing it, and finding it again
in different minarets, different reflections,
different travelers sitting on different walls
above the same unchanged water.
The argument ends like this:
not with a conclusion but with a question
that has stopped requiring an answer,
not with understanding but with the thing
understanding, points towards
and cannot enter —
the way a finger points at the moon
and the teaching is:
look at the moon, not the finger,
and even this instruction is a finger
pointing at the moon, and even the moon
is the finger's gesture towards something
that has no name in the language
we have been using,
and perhaps this is why she is sitting
in silence
above the river, instead of speaking —
because the silence is not the absence
of what she wants to say
but the presence of something
language
approaches
the way the river approaches the sea —
moving, always moving,
closer, always closer,
and the sea already here,
already this,
the rain touching the water's surface
in its own cadence,
the leaf doing what the leaf does
in the wind that does not know
it is the wind —
and she, breathing,
aware of breathing, aware of the awareness,
arriving,
not at the end of something,
but at the beginning of a mystery
thought can name, but not contain,
can point towards, but not possess,
can love from this side of the river
and that
is enough,
that is more than enough,
that is everything the argument
was always
reaching for
and never reaching,
and the reaching itself
was the river,
and the river
was always
home.
