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News Poems Artistry Mastery Buddhism Taoism Tao Te Ching All CategoriesTao Te Ching: An interpretation has been published
I've been working on this one for a while, as you can see from the sample chapters I've posted here over the last couple of years. But it's finally published, and available now on Amazon.
Former Secrets
This gentle rain
Falls on the Heart
Dissolving its shell.
Smithereens of agony flung wide
As the Heart's former secrets
Flood the universe with ecstasy.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 7
Heaven and earth keep on going because they don't try to go anywhere.
They never run out because they don't take anything for themselves.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 6
In-between this and that lives a force that never dies,
the mysterious mother of everything.
Heaven and earth are born through her opening,
and endlessly giving birth does not deplete her.
Divine Laziness on Goodreads
Divine Laziness: The Art of Living Effortlessly is now on Goodreads. View on Goodreads
Divine Laziness and The Book Depository
Divine Laziness: The Art of Living Effortlessly is now available for purchase through The Book Depository. View on The Book Depository
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 5
Heaven and earth are uncompromising
and burn everything as a sacrifice.
The way of the sage is uncompromising and lets it all burn.
Unlasting
Days drip by
One by one or fistfulls at a time.
Future melts to past,
I'm suspicious:
It's happening a little bit too fast.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 4
The Tao is empty but fills everything.
Bottomless source of all beings.
Edgeless and unconvoluted, shining with modesty, quite at home in the dust.
Hard to see but impossible to miss.
What could it be made of?
It is here before everything else.
The Buddha's (very) first teaching
The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dhamma) is usually considered to be the Buddha's first teaching after his awakening at the foot of the Bodhi tree. But it was not the first attempt he made at conveying to another human being what he'd discovered. This is my own rendering of his first utterance as an enlightened being (pilfered from a number of scholarly translations).
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 3
No favourites, no rivalry.
No treasures, no thievery.
No objects of passion, no loss of contentment.
So keep the mind empty and keep the heart full.
Weaken ambition and strengthen the bones.
Know nothing, want nothing, do nothing,
and things will look after themselves.
RadioNZ interview
I was interviewed by Jesse Mulligan on RadioNZ today about recently winning the unpublished manuscripts category of the Ashton Wylie Charitable Trust Literary Awards 2017.