No where to walk, no place to go ... yet time to climb out of bed.

Nothing to say, spoken in silence ... yet why has the cat got your tongue?

You are neither one with it nor separate, so intimate that there is no place to look for "it". Yet the direction you walk in life, the words you choose to say or not ... make all the difference in the world! I often feel of "Buddha", "Mind" etc. ... like "dance" ... as verb more than just noun ... verbs of action realized though our words, thoughts and deeds. How we dance ... Buddha dance or delusion dance ... makes all the difference ... even though all is just the Buddha dance dancing

Do not get so caught up in Keizan's "mother's and father's are not close to me." His point is that true intimacy is not even concerned about being close or not close ... so close and intimate it is! (Keizan was actually a fellow who was a loyal son to his mother all his life, keeping her close by even in old age ... perhaps with a bit of a "mother complex" in fact. Read more here .... Faure p. 39
http://books.google.com/books?id=XxF0P7 ... er&f=false )

Thus, we can also penetrate "the Buddhas are not my Way" for "my Way is Buddha way" ... and "Way" is an active "way to go" as the most intimate "no place else you can go to find Buddha". Like the words "fire" and "flames", the flames need not go anywhere to find fire ... yet all actively burns (Keizan makes a similar point using two Japanese words that both me "eye"). And will you choose to be the Buddha's flame providing light in the darkness, or the flames of delusion which burn down the house of our lives?

In the preceding chapter on Buddhanandi, one might have thought that all words and debate about Buddha, Practice, Enlightenment are not "Truth". Yet here we are told that "no place to go" is not only lying in bed for 50 years with our lips sealed.

Cook p. 68, Hixon p. 69

Gassho, J