The other day I bought an ebook online, the Buddhist poet Osho’s And the Flowers Showered. This was a mistake, it seemed — not buying the book but buying an electronic version because there were so many passages I wanted to annotate, refer back to. I do this with my ebooks but it’s just not the same as actually making marginal notes and then doggy-earing thee page. I want to be able to go back and touch the text.
So I asked my house guest, Paul, who is a strong practicing Buddhist himself and practices calligraphy, if he wouldn’t mind copying it out for me.
He’s made a beautiful page that I will upload here for you, and now it has returned to an electronic version. What irony.
You are nothing but a hand extended by the whole to reach the ultimate.
You are nothing but a wave coming from the whole to touch the moon.
You are nothing but a flower opening, so that the whole is filled with fragrance through you.
And we’ve been discussing the work of the physicist David Bohm, so he added the quote at the bottom “You are a semi-autnomous abstraction from the whole.” Paul acknowledged Bohm lacks Oshu’s poetic skill but still that both books rested on my table and now on this site is sweet.
