Living Doubt

“From nowhere, nothing arises, without mistake.” Soryu expressed this poem for me during my residency ceremony.

Residency ceremonies at MAPLE are the formal events in which someone is initiated into the training at MAPLE as a training resident. They are a beautiful gathering of the whole community where all the trainees express why they came to MAPLE and why they’re staying at MAPLE. It is a container for expressing the clarity of vows, and depth of one’s highest aspiration. At the beginning of the ceremony, Soryu always opens with a poem for the new resident.

Upon hearing those words, I remember feeling an enormous sense of physical pressure simultaneously expanding and contracting throughout the body, as though my breath was pressing against and massaging out long forgotten constrictions and tension in the body. There was a deep sense of joy and exhilaration, as though I was standing at the edge of a cliff. Yet a sense of mysterious apprehension, fear, and fire to realize its meaning beyond conceptual understanding.

What is this nowhere? And how could nothing arise from that place? What is unmistaken? The poem was a living expression and transmission of Great Doubt that still moves in my mind and body.