At the Mudface Café...

... you can talk all night.

I had already decided on the title "At the Mudface Café" for my day-ending open thread post using that photo of the seeming face I saw in the mud on the trail today. 

And after that pedestrian pareidolia, as I kept walking the muddy path, I was struck to hear this passage in my audiobook:

"He's my big best friend.... He's a great mysterious Bodhisattva I think maybe a reincarnation of Asagna the great Mahayana scholar of the old centuries." 

"And who am I?" 

"I dunno, maybe you're Goat." 

"Goat?" 

"Maybe you're Mudface." 

"Who's Mudface?" 

"Mudface is the mud in your goat face. What would you say if someone was asked the question 'Does a dog have the Buddha nature?' and said 'Woof!'" 

"I'd say that was a lot of silly Zen Buddhism." This took Japhy back a bit. "Lissen Japhy," I said, "I'm not a Zen Buddhist, I'm a serious Buddhist, I'm an old-fashioned dreamy Hinayana coward of later Mahayanism," and so forth into the night, my contention being that Zen Buddhism didn't concentrate on kindness so much as on confusing the intellect to make it perceive the illusion of all sources of things. "It's mean" I complained. "All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can't answer their silly word questions." 

"That's because they want them to realize mud is better than words, boy."

The book is "The Dharma Bums," by Jack Kerouac, which I'm listening to because it came up yesterday in that post about leaving notes on the top of mountains. The link on the book title will take you to the full text of the book. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the audiobook, which is beautifully read by the actor Ethan Hawke. He reads like a reader reading you a book — not like an actor giving a theatrical performance — and he really put me in touch with the music and flow of the book. I had the mud and the words, man.