The eternal flame

You came here to enter a garden ...
 
where everything that happens is an image, and all of it gets wiped away.
 
Your purpose is to find your own meaning, amidst the changing scenes.
 
Life is a picture where you feel, right through, from the front straight through to the back.
 
There is the form which you see with your senses and then what comes up, from deep inside.
 
When these 2 match, the universe effortlessly flows and time completely disappears.
 
We must blend seamlessly with our immediate environment, connecting with our essence.
 
Here lies all communication - the gates open into empty space. We go direct to the source of our being and meet with our own loving presence.
 
We fill every experience with ourselves and every image has its own power. Life is not a one-way reflection: what arises exists from its own side.
 
If you can fathom the depth of what I say, peace will not elude you. Nature and water is found in the garden, in the autumn fire of ...
 
the total absence, of me.
 
---

 
Kyoto, Japan.
 
I entered the hall at Enryaku-ji (延暦) on Mt Hiei and knelt before the eternal flame (不滅の法灯, fumetsu no hōtō). Lit by the monk Saicho in the 8th century, it survived the 1571 massacre by Oda Nobunaga. The reason why Nobunaga spilt so much blood at this temple was that its warrior monks answered to no one. They believed they had moral immunity and controlled political affairs. Their temple was also sited in the northeast where a repository of sacred power was always built to protect a city from evil. Razing Enryaku-ji to the ground, for Nobunaga, restored the Buddha's true teaching on Mt Hiei - leaving Kyoto to fall to the corruption within its own establishment. But the eternal flame proved inextinguishable and throughout the battle stayed alight. And 11 years later, Nobunaga was assassinated ... by his own demon within ... one of his closest retainers, Mitsuhide:
 
Remember! The path which winds through the world of form is the path of peace! Whatever persists will end in absence and reveal ... the flame of light!
 
Much love x