Kyoto Journal Issue 19

The best example of a practical mystic, one who was arguably not a mystic at all, is Dogen (1200-1253). To him, “spiritual leader of the heavenly worlds” means “the one to execute the transforming efficacy for sentient beings of the plain vegetable.” Originally, the ordaining of vegetables to be as nutritious as they are may have been a spiritual act; as a monk in training, to be, as you are preparing existing vegetables, only preparing existing vegetables constitutes a great spiritual achievement, in which spiritual and practical exactly meet. He suggested the monastic kitchen be called, “the department of fragrances”; this gets my vote, for fragrances lead sentient beings to put things in their mouths or not, and no one has ever paid enough attention to how this happens to be so…

There are many more strands to the East’s culture than there are to the Non-East’s. Unfortunately, the Non-East is forever reducing these down to be read only within its own narrow frame. It’s not that the East’s contributions have been too sparse but that they have been too plentiful. Every person in the Non-East has a pulse; but in the East, every person has a dozen pulses. In acupuncture theory, we find three pulses near the skin surface per wrist with three additional ones directly below these, for a total of twelve. I am aware of at least this many pulses, and so I wonder why the Non-East never came up with these. In the East, physicians go even so far as to find many different qualities of pulse, speaking not only of pulses that are thin, strained, or feeble but of ones that are grainy, ropy, lumpy, feathery, sticky and pudding-like, and more.

— Madeline Gins, March of the Transitive

Contents:

Cover Image by Takeda Yoshifumi
66pp
published December 15, 1991

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