Category: Haiku and Beyond

Red Pine’s note that the focus of Book Two:Gathas is “less personal and more instructional” probably helps to explain why I didn’t like the poems in this section quite as much as the poems in the first section. Still, there were a number of poems that I did like.

My favorite selection was actually a series of ten poems beginning with “Below High Cliffs.” Here’s my favorite from that series:

7.9
Below high cliffs
I don’t dress up my body
I eat roots and wear plants
my socks are hemp my shoes are sedge
dense bamboo shades my windows
thick moss covers the steps in front
desires die in the quiet
cares disappear it’s so still

The Chin River flows from Maoshan northwest into the Yangtze at Nanking and parallels the route between Nanking and Huchou. In number 68 of his Zen Talks, Stonehouse refers to Pinghu’a Fuytsan Temple as Lake Temple. Here, however, the reference must be to Huchou’s Wanshou Temple on Tao-changshan, where Storehouse lived for a time with his teacher, Chi-an. The last line recalls choangtzU: “Though he has a body, he doesn’t harm his mind” (6. 1 a).

Perhaps I like this poem even more than I normally would because I am feeling rather stressed at the moment. It’s a reminder that we can forget our cares if we work at simplifying our lives and quieting our desires.

Certainly much of the stress in our lives is self-made. We want so many things that we drive ourselves crazy longing for them as if they will somehow complete us, and once again make us whole. How strange when we actually get them we are no longer interested in them and find ourselves wishing for something new.

Another favorite poem in this section is:

11 Autumn on the Chin River Road

Everywhere the west wind rains down leaves
chance led me back to Lake Temple’s shelter
among those I knew how many remain
of a thousand worldly cares not one of them is real
all of life’s turmoil turns out to be a dream
clearly every harvest depends upon the seed
knowing this truth has helped make me free
I’ve never followed those who harm their minds

Obviously I haven’t mastered my mind nearly to the extent that Stonehouse has because, no matter how hard I try, I can’t convince my mind that “life’s turmoil turns out to be a dream,” though it often appears so when looking back at events.

However, I’m sure that my body would appreciate it if I were able to hold steady to this idea. I’m convinced that too often stress can defeat the very actions we try to take to resolve perceived “problems,” and at the very least makes it harder than it needs to be to address and solve problems.

It occurs to me that the first section of The Zen Works of Stonehouse as translated by Red Pine could aptly be named “Poems for Retirement” instead of “Mountain Poems.” Perhaps that’s merely because the poems were compiled after he retreated to his mountain home at the age of 67. In a deeper sense, though, the poems offer the kind of advice that can only be practiced by someone who has “retired,” either in the sense of retiring at the end of a career or in the sense that a monk “retires from society.”

Admittedly, I’m feeling a little hypocritical about presenting these ideas while I’m in the midst of repainting our bedroom and making some other “much needed” changes to our house before the first year anniversary of our move. The hectic schedule we’ve been maintaining the last few days hardly fits the spirit of this work, though perhaps reinforcing Stonehouse’s advice.

There were so many poems whose advice I enjoyed that I had a hard time limiting myself to four selections, but I think these are representative of Stonehouse’s key ideas.

The first of the five selections could actually serve as a brief summary of all the poems:

5.
To glorify the Way what should people turn to
to words and deeds that agree
but oceans of greed never fill up
and sprouts of delusion keep growing
a plum tree in bloom purifies a recluse
a patch of potatoes cheers a lone monk
but those who follow rules in their huts
never see the Way or get past the mountainsp>

Again, as in his previous work I discussed, Red Pine’s notes provide an excellent key to reading Stonehouse’s works:

Confucius said, “A man can glorify the Way, but the Way does not glorify a man” (I. unyu: 15 .28) When Tzu-chang asked how he should act, Confucius replied, “To your words be true, in your conduct be sincere” ” The plum blossom’s association with purity and seclusion was immortalized in the poems of Lin Ho-ching, a Sung-dynasty recluse who lived outside Hangchou. Zen masters often summarize the Buddhist path with the saying, “When I first entered the Way I saw mountains. After a while, I saw that mountains were not mountains. Now I see that mountains are mountains.”

I particularly liked the phrase “oceans of greed never fill up” because it increasingly seems to me that the greatest barrier to happiness, and certainly to “enlightenment,” is greed and its many manifestations. As you’ve probably noticed, I also have a personal prejudice against rules and traditions, preferring to seek any enlightenment I can find not in the practice of traditional religions but, rather, in the immediacy of life itself.

I’m afraid my recent attraction to the art of blowing bubbles also attracted me to this:

31.
This body’s lifetime is like a bubble’s
may as well let things go
plans and events seldom agree
who can step back doesn’t worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
we gather and part like clouds
earthly thoughts I forgot long ago
withering away on a mountain peak

The Diamond Sutra ends with this gatha: “All dependent things / are dreams or illusions, bubbles or shadows / they’re dew or they’re lightning
/ regard them like this.”

My recent brush with cancer for a second time and my increasing awareness of how fragile life really is have reduced me to short-term planning. While others may make plans for next summer, I find myself planning for next month or the month after that. I’m limiting myself to the kinds of plans I four-year-old can understand, a trip to Disneyland with a grandchild in September or October. For now, I’m content with enjoying the day, even if that includes sore muscles from painting overhead too long.

I certainly agree with Stonehouse when he says:

38.
Scorpion tails and wolf hearts overrun the world
everyone has a trick to get ahead
but how many smiles in a lifetime
how many moments of peace in a day
who knows a toppled cart means try another track
when trouble strikes there is no time for shame
this old monk isn’t just talking
he’s trying to remove your obstacles and chains

One of the first measures enacted by the First Emperor when he unified China in 22, BC was to standardize the axle length of carts so that all tracks would be the same width.

The Five Obstacles include desire, anger, tiredness, anxiety, and doubt. And the Ten Chains include shamelesness, sensitivity, envy, meanness, regret, laziness, over-activity, self-absorption, hate, and secretiveness.

Despite commercial messages to the contrary, “scorpion tails and wolf hearts” insure that most commercial transactions seldom end in smiles. If you want “smiles” and “moments of peace” you’re going to have to find them on your own, not in the worlds of things that others would foist on you.

Though I’m not sure how generally true it is, I agree with:

59. br>
Most of the time I smile
old men can relax
my mind is free of troubles
nothing but mountains meet my eyes
the P’eng soars into the sky
a leopard blends into mist
I’m more like the flowering plum
I wait for the year-end cold

The P’eng is the great bird in the first chapter of Chuangtzu, where it is used as a symbol of transcendence. It is so big it must climb ninety thousand miles into the sky before it has room to turn south. ln the Yiching: the leopard that can change its spots is used as a metaphor for the person who succeeds in eliminating his vices through the cultivation of virtue. The P’eng represents the goal of Taoist practice, while the spotless leopard represents the goal of Confucian cultivation. The flowering plum, meanwhile, is China’s symbol of perseverance in the face of hardship, blossoming during the coldest period of the year.

I’ve certainly found that I can “relax” in ways that I could never relax while teaching. Although I sometimes am a little embarrassed by how little I “get done,” not having to get things done has set me free in ways that I have never known before.

In my continuing attempts to better understand Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions, I recently bought David Hinton’s book The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan, a Chinese poet who lived from 689 to 740 C.E.

Hinton’s short but informative introduction clearly places Meng within the “wilderness (literally rivers-and-mountains) tradition that is the heart of Chinese poetry” while also showing how he fits within the Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist tradition:

Rather than subject himself to the strictures of a conventional life, which for the intelligentsia in ancient China meant city work in the government bureaucracy, or perhaps the monastic life of a Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist monk, Meng cultivated the independence of a simple life in his home mountains. There, far from the cultural centers of the time, his poetry developed outside of prevailing literary taste, and in direct response to the mountain landscape he inhabited.

and

Meng was admired not for the bucolic romance of his life, but for the singular way he inhabited the sage philosophical ground shared by all of ancient China’s great poets: the Taoist cosmology described by the originary masters, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. The central concept in their cosmology is Tao, or Way, by which they meant the process (hence, a through which the “ten thousand” living and nonliving things arise and pass away, each emerging out of nothing, flourishing for a time, and finally returning to nothing.

My favorite poem in the eighty-one-page collection is probably:

OVERNIGHT AT KINGFISHER-HUE MONASTERY
IN THE WHOLE-SOUTH MOUNTAINS

At Whole-South Mountain’s Kingfisher-Hue,
fallen rain perfects the failing flare of dusk.

After so long deep in closed-gate meditation,
I take staff in hand, hike up into open vistas,

and soon, following along to a recluse home,
fathom tranquil dwelling’s quiet mystery.

Confucian and Taoist: though different ways,
they merge here in all this forest and cloud,

our two minds joined together in such joy
as we talk and laugh in the day’s last light.

Ready for sleep, we return to high twilight
windows, gaze across distant peaks aflame:

it carries thought back to red-cliff beacons,
brings memories of towering coastal peaks.

With a creek’s windswept sound so crystalline,
who needs the tune of a silent mountain sage?

Although I was first struck by the lines “though different ways,/ they merge here in all this forest and cloud,” which obviously resonates with my own views, I’m sure Hinton’s notes

Whole-South Mountains: just south of the capital, Ch’ang-an, the Whole-South Mountains are legendary in the poetic tradition because Wang Wei wrote his most famous poems at his recluse home there.

… throughout the recluse tradition “gate” often carries the metaphoric sense of “awareness,” that through which the empirical world enters consciousness. This added dimension harks back to a passage in Chapter 52 of the Tao Te Ching, where a kind of meditative practice is described:

If you block the senses
and close the gate,
you never struggle.
If you open the senses
and expand your endeavors,
nothing can save you.

contributed to my appreciation of the poem, particularly because I found much to admire in my earlier readings of the Tao Te Ching.

Truthfully, though, the poem stands on its own because it captures feelings I’ve experienced when hiking the mountains after spending many hours reading, not too different from the sense of elation I felt recently while hiking the Indian Peaks Wilderness in Colorado. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose deepest thoughts and beliefs can often be found deep in the wilderness.

Another favorite is:

ON RETURNING TO MY MOUNTAINS, FOR
THE CH’AN ABBOT CLARITY-DEEP

I heard the unborn inner pattern young
and always practiced seeing through self,

but we rarely follow mind’s deep impulse:
this life’s rugged path is often full of dust.

Now, back to old canyons in my twilight,
I find myself a neighbor to Clarity-Deep.

Amid forests, rejoicing in kindred spirits,
we sit perfecting the mat’s jewel together,

contemplate this drift on seas of suffering,
teachings lost in a surging swelling world.

Using dharma’s subtle mystery, you guide
us into that crystalline purity of origins,

where karma’s travail ends in tranquility,
mountain-and-forest feelings flourishing.

I come at dawn asking after some answer,
and by dusk our talk touches clarity whole,

like your dark brush exhausting ancient
truths, its words startling human realms.

Compassing a bamboo hut’s empty silence,
herbs and flowers blur winter into spring

here. Cascade-spray flecks cap and robe.
lnkstone and chin perch atop tablerock.

To fathom the erasure of insight, we watch
dusk and dawn composing the wild gulls.

You could almost imagine that Wordsworth must have read the first lines of this poem before writing “Intimations of Immortality” with its famous lines “But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home:/ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” if such feelings weren’t almost universal. I sometimes suspect that my love of children is an attempt to recover those lost feelings, magical feelings lost in the everyday “dust” of life that threatens to besmirch our very existence.

Perhaps like the Chinese poets in the wilderness tradition, I return to the mountains and rivers to renew that magic, to recapture that sense of awe that too often has given way to mere boredom and ennui, to experience directly the mystery of life that we spend too much time merely reading about.

Although there are too many of Saigyo’s poems that I found delightful and enlightening to include here, the three following poems represent an important theme in Saigyo’s poems as translated in La Fluer’s Awesome Nightfall.

Although I certainly appreciate Saigyo’s gloomier poems with their sense of temporariness:

The sound of a swollen
mountain stream rapidly rushing
makes one know
how very quickly life itself
is pressed along its course.

and the accompanying sense of inevitable loss for they also reflect the kind of wisdom that age itself reveals if we listen to it. The older you get the greater your sense that life rushes by much too quickly.

However, my favorite poems are the more optimistic ones where at times Saigyo seems to have attained enlightenment. Though these poems recognize the fleeting nature of life, they subtly shift the emphasis to an appreciation of beauty, no matter how fleeting it may be:

Now seen … now gone
the butterfly flits in and out
through fence-hung flowers;
but a life lived so close to them
I envy though it’s here and gone.

Of course, it may be that this particular poem appeals to me because of my recent obsession with getting a good picture of a Monarch butterfly and with my increased attention to butterflies in general this year. It’s almost as if I only realized that butterflies existed this year after ignoring them most of my life.

I also appreciate what could certainly be Taoist elements in his poetry, as in the following poem:

Tightly held by rocks
through winter, the ice today
begins to come undone:
a way-seeker also is the water,
melting, murmuring from the moss.

While excellent in their own right, such poems remind me of Lao Tzu’s wonderful water-metaphors with their emphasis on finding The Way. Of course, the same could be said for Saigyo’s consistent use of the moon as a symbol, one of the elements Red Pine emphasized in his translation of The Taoteching.