‘A Mouse as a Monk’ – Shibata Zeshin – WikiArt
We ought to love our being. That’s what animals do. The ones “that cut the airy way”, and feel “an immense world of delight”, as the poet William Blake wrote. The ones that sit on the window sill, in a pool of light, with eyes clinched in full appreciation of it all. The ones in the meadows, chewing and ruminating away their abundance of presence. Animals have being as their intrinsic companion. They live there, in being, as being, that’s how they have their life in such perfect order. That’s how they are alert, awake, aware, and know patience, diligence, scrutiny, care. They draw their intelligence from their sweet, sublime being, and their fierceness too — their courage, their laws, and their absolute well-being. We humans haven’t been doing so well. We have deviated. We have taken it all so personally. Maybe there is some lesson here to learn. A little wisdom from our friends.
Should we be in any need of a little guru here, I think I dug up the best of all. I didn’t find Its Highness amongst the large and the spectacular, but in the teeming world of our cereal fields, hopping around in the vegetation, feeding on seeds and on nectars. The harvest mouse is a four grams precipitation of the highest wisdom, wrapped in a brown and reddish fur coat, and equipped with a highly prehensile tail for the climb to heavenly heights. This mouse performs a unique sadhana. At the ripest of time, it climbs the stem of a chosen flower, and cuddles itself up in the cup of its petals to have a feast of the most delicious pollen. It stays there, inebriated by the scent and taste of it all. And it so happens that it sweetly falls asleep there. That’s it. This is Its Highness’ special sermon for you. This practice will act on you as a metaphor of the most sacred spiritual endeavour, of the highest understanding. It is saying, or rather showing, that you have to fall asleep to your self, or to sleep your regular self off. To so cuddle in your being as to realise yourself as being only being. To so impregnate yourself with the perfume of being as to be made of its very fragrance. And to so crawl into its blossom and bliss as to be yourself consumed by them both, and revealed as the flower of being itself, as the blooming of happiness.
Its Highness, if it could talk, would say something like this: You have to so totally and one pointedly devote yourself to your being as to feel to be made of it, with devotion fading and appearing as only a residual part of your sense of being a separate self, a somebody other than pure, essential being. You have to love being only being, so that love is no more a bridge between yourself and being, but the very nature of being — of who you are. You will feel the world and experience to be the very scented petals of being. And the stem of your bodily existence will draw its unabated strength and pliability from the rich soil of your selfless self — from its inseparable essence. You will feel yourself to be like a furious, furry ball of being. And experience will appear to you as a sweet, loving cuddle with your own nature. And your life will be made into nothing but a swift disappearance into God’s eternal embrace. That’s how you happy-sleep and wake up to your own nectar of beingness. When you harvest it all. As a mouse simply does.
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Text by Alain Joly
Painting by Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891)
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Websites:
– Shibata Zeshin (Wikipedia)
– William Blake (Wikipedia)
Suggestion:
– Other posts from ‘Eternity with a Smile’ in the blog…
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The Dawn Within 