The Perennial Source of Our Life
Within Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (originally published in 1854), in the chapter, “Solitude,” Thoreau opposes the point of view that without human company we are lonely and unsatisfied. Thoreau says, “What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely,
. . . but to the perennial source of our life.”[1] He praises solitude and connection with this source.
As an aside, Thoreau’s attitude caused some of his contemporaries to view him as a curmudgeon, but those who knew him well found him friendly and sociable. When asked at a dinner once which item he liked best, he said jokingly, “the nearest,”
Zazen practitioners have the great privilege of access to what Thoreau calls the “perennial source.”This source goes by many names, such as the Absolute or Original Mind. It can be intuited only when the thinking mind is set aside, making it verbally or intellectually indescribable.
When I attended practice periods at the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara, every morning, after zazen, we chanted several hymns, among which was “Hymn to the Perfection of Wisdom.” I assume that this hymn is about the “perennial source.” Its opening lines are:
Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom, the lovely, the holy.
The Perfection of Wisdom gives light. Unstained, the entire
world cannot stain her. She is a source of light and from
everyone in the triple world she removes darkness. Most
excellent are her works. She brings light so that all fear and
distress may be forsaken, and disperses the gloom and darkness
of delusion.
Access to the perennial source, far from rendering one a solitary curmudgeon, allows him or her to retain the joy of living throughout the ordinary pleasures and pains of human life. Usually intuition of it comes gradually to a zazen practitioner. If it comes suddenly, it can be powerful and dramatic. In a source I can’t find, Dogen refers to its sudden occurrence as “turning the body and flapping the brain.” However a practitioner comes to an intuition of it, the perennial source is a friend who never leaves.
Footnotes
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Boston, 1997 and 2004, p. 126.