Bamboo: A Forest of Emptiness

You can fall in love with bamboo, but be careful which one you choose, or you could be trapped in your own attachment. The wrong one in the wrong place will overrun your premises, exploit your weaknesses, corrupt your foundation, topple fences, and collapse your roof...

There are more than a thousand varieties of bamboo... Bamboo falls into two categories: Clumping bamboo grows slowly on short roots in one place... Running bamboo spreads across the porous borders of your defenselessness...

Bamboo is...

Durable (you can't kill it)

Sustainable (it always grows back)

Grass (it's a weed)

One of the fastest growing plants on earth (it will mow you down)

Flexible (you can't break it)

Works like a screen (you can't get beyond it)

Stronger than steel (it grows under asphalt, through concrete, and in the invisible gaps between mortar and brick)

... Like single blades of grass, bamboo stalks have no independent existence. They rise from a common root system, and that root system is big...

To make peace, stop fighting. In the struggle between you and your world, sign a permanent ceasefire. Let bamboo be bamboo... Under the sheath of its skin, bamboo is empty. Absolutely everything is.

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. This single phrase is the summation of the Buddhist path, the culminating insight of the Way... Bamboo is strong because it is hollow.

No matter how we react to our environment, the environment has no gripe with us. Every war is a war with ourselves. Everything is empty and ephemeral. We can turn anything into a weapon to wreak havoc and destroy peace, and we do...

To live and let live in emptiness; that's the secret to paradise...

First, be quiet... Drop your personal agenda. Let go of defenses and offenses. Face your critics. They will always outnumber you.

Lose all wars. All wars are lost to begin with...

Give up your seat. Be what you are: unguarded, unprepared, and surrounded on all sides. Alone, you are a victim of no one and nothing...

Do good quietly. If it's not done quietly, it's not good.

Start over. Always start over.

-- Karen Maezen Miller, Paradise in Plain Sight - Lessons from a Zen Garden