Bankei’s Zen Made Easy

  

Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Peter Haskel’s Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei; those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The prize of enlightenment is so precious, one might naturally think it must be very difficult to attain.  The history of Zen certainly includes some heroic strivers, among them the Second Patriarch Huìkě who cut off his own hand to offer Bodhidharma as evidence of his earnestness.  The very last advice the Buddha gave his followers was to strive hard [1], and monks of the sangha have virtually always been given a rigorous and demanding regimen of meditation and sutra chanting. 

     Yet Zen, particularly the Rinzai (Linji) tradition that arose from the Southern School has always recognized the possibility of sudden enlightenment.  Their founder Huìnéng, after all, experienced what the Japanese came to call satori when he overheard a passage of the Diamond Sutra.  Though monasteries of all sects continued the demanding spiritual practices they had inherited, none considered diligent effort sufficient to guarantee enlightenment, and many thought spiritual liberation might suddenly arrive at any moment. 

     The seventeenth century Japanese monk Bankei served as abbot of several important monasteries (including that at Ryoanji in Kyoto where the celebrated “dry garden” of raked sand and rocks is found).  He was as well a genuinely popular teacher whose public sessions attracted tens of thousands of listeners.  His approach to Zen, though singular in its simplicity and surprising to many, was approved by such masters as he could locate and his work became sufficiently influential that he is today regarded as one of the greatest exponents of Japanese Buddhism [2].

     Bankei’s central teaching is his exhortation to dwell in the Unborn Buddha Mind, a concept derived from the concept called in Sanskrit anutpāda, which is to say unconceived, or unborn [3].  His sermons hammer away at this one simple counsel to the point of becoming tiresome.  “Straightway abiding in the Unborn Buddha Mind just as it is , and you’re a living  tathagata from  today forever after” (4).  “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn” (13).  ”You’re always a living buddha, and there’s no time when you don’t remain a buddha” (22).  One need do nothing to achieve this status; it is in fact always already present {4].

     Bankei repeatedly recounts his own history of pursuing enlightenment by practicing zazen, reciting sutras, and studying Chinese to read the accounts of earlier masters, only to assure his followers that they need do none of these, though, if they wish, they may (49).  Bankei does not shout or strike meditators, seeking to shock them into enlightenment.  He tells them that, rather than anticipating years of rigorous and perhaps fruitless effort and self-denial, they are fortunate to hear his advice which has the potential to bring them enlightenment the very same day they hear his message.  The question is problematized by Bankei’s claim that “there’s no such thing as enlightenment” (83) and that “talking about wanting to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is certainly useless.” (84). But the aspirant need not worry about his meaning.  Everything, Bankei says, is already perfect.  There are no rules: “Do whatever you like” (58, 155), he says.  A student need do nothing but recognize the fact of a liberation fully present in every moment [5].

     Thus he insists that moral laws and miracles are irrelevant (7), there is no need even to speak of Buddhism or Zen (8), koans are nothing but “old wastepaper” (23) and icons useless (25).  All methods are merely expedients (103) and, if study has any role at all, it would be only to confirm one’s satori (114). 

     One must, however, contend with an adversary perhaps more subtle than memorizing characters on a sparse diet with a harsh teacher: the old bugbear of self-consciousness.  Bankei notes that his listeners are paying attention to his sermon with their conscious minds, yet they are simultaneously aware of other extraneous sounds such as sparrow, crows, or human voices which they hear without intention or effort, thus with the Buddha Mind [5].  While one may intentionally concentrate on a lecture or on achieving a goal, one must sneak up on oneself unawares to avoid paying attention or striving.  Surely this is the reason that most of Bankei’s listeners did not find their lives transformed after once hearing him speak.  Will is powerless, one must fall without thought into the Unborn Mind . 

     By his account Bankei’s own enlightenment came after prolonged arduous effort, when he was ill and had not eaten for a week, “on the verge of death.”  He spit against the wall and, when he “noticed that the sputum had congealed into a jet-black lump like a soapberry,” he suddenly realized “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn . . .I’ve just been uselessly knocking myself out!” Presumably his overstressed physical state had taken him out of himself and brought him momentary thoughtlessness which was sufficient to alter his consciousness, leaving his spirit “clear and buoyant” (13).  Yet he insists that his listeners need not follow his path.

     Bankei does not shrink from self-contradiction; indeed, he embraces paradox.  In spite of criticizing the traditional means for pursuing enlightenment, since one need do nothing whatever to find the Unborn Buddha Mind, he also declares that “to practice is hard” (67) and advises students “don ‘t fritter away your time” (89).  In spite of considering koan study “of no particular usefulness,” (23) he uses koans to bring his followers to understand his position. 

     The very koan that elicits Bankei’s dismissal of the device in fact enriches the subtlety of his vision.  An old man asks Hyakujō Oshō whether an enlightened person remains subject to causation.  He says he had told a follower of his own that such a one would no longer be subject to birth and death whereupon the student was condemned to five hundred lives as a fox.  When he was told that an enlightened state “does not ignore causation,” the student was freed from his fate and died in the form of a fully enlightened fox [6].  His error had presumably been to provide too definite an answer.  Bankei thus reminds his listeners of the value of such old stories for some and warns against accepting duality.  Bankei's use of the story, reminds his followers of the teaching while holding it at arm’s length, using it while explicitly rejecting its value. 

     Another central koan for Bankei’s Unborn Buddha Mind is that in which a monk who pursues the Sixth Patriarch, expecting to challenge his succession is startled into a higher consciousness by being told  “Think neither good nor evil. At this very moment, what is the original self of the monk Myo?” [7]  This “original self,” identical with the Unborn, though always and inevitably present, is obscured by delusion and accumulated habitual ignorance.   Hui-neng assures his questioner who inquires whether this is the most profound mystery that “what I have told you is no secret at all.  When you look into your own true self, whatever is deeper is found right there.”  He sounds here very much like Bankei.

     We twenty-first century Americans may feel that our era, even more than seventeenth century Japan is a “degenerate age of Buddhism” (6), sorely in need of a kickstart of insight.  Bankei reminds us that the Unborn Buddha Mind is always present, always perfect, for those who can recover a spontaneous unselfconscious grasp of it.

 

 

 

1.  "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!" Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha translated from the Pali by Sister Vajira & Francis Story.

2.  In the century following Bankei, Hakuin rose to prominence.  He was an advocate of very rigorous and unremitting practice and very critical of what to him was “do-nothing” Zen, including that practiced by Bankei’s followers.  Most modern Japanese Zen has roots in Hakuin.

3.  The term is often encountered in the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras and in the Lankavatara Sutra as well as in  Nagarjuna.

4.  Readers may be reminded of the use of the expression “always already” (immer schon) in Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, and others.

5.  This point appears on pages 5, 27, 28, and 33.  The reader may be reminded on Cage’s celebrated piece 4’33” (1952).  In another image, Bankei notes that one withdraws the hand from hot fire without thought, prior to conscious perception.

6.  Case 2 Mumonkan.  The phrases here quoted are from Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida and edited and introduced by A. V. Grimstone, p. 31. 

7.  This is quoted from the above edition of the Mumonkan, Case 23, p. 81. This story appears as well in the Sung version (the Hui-sin edition) of the Platform Sutra.  The questioner’s Chinese name is Hui-ming.

Steven Hirsch's Demon Commuter

 

Steven Hirsch’s Demon Commuter from Giant Steps Press is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere for $19.95.  Further information on Hirsch and his work is available at the Giant Steps site https://giantstepspress.wordpress.com/steven-hirsch/.

 

      Steve Hirsch’s readers expect a lot: great poems of corralled consciousness barely contained in words stretched to the breaking point.  Hirsch captures the unique moment, but his imagistic precision mingles intimately with the recognition of the socio-political-historical dimension of the scenes of his life, and with a view longer yet, his lines are lit with glints of what does not change, the illumination which is for him less a conviction than a habit of vision, nothing more than the way things look.  

     In its most literal reading the title refers to Hirsch’s (and many other workers’) daily routine, the commute to earn a living, the mental “drivenness” imposed by the reality principle.  Taking a step back, Hirsch makes it clear that his own sometimes ill-fitting vocation is embedded in an inescapable system that privileges greed and aggression, giving the demonic the face of war and exploitation.  Yet in his final vision, everything is transformed, redeemed even, and “demon” can regain a numinous glow.  But even once the demon of the title has appeared in beneficent form as the sort of interior muse of which Socrates spoke, now and then he seems more closely to resemble S. Clay Wilson’s Checkered Demon in his frantic, barely controllable impulsive energy.  

     With a Mahayana impulse toward sympathy with all sentient beings, Hirsch imagines what burdens may weigh on the psyches of his fellow citizens.

 

the dark bags you carry

the persnickety boss, the wear of

gravity, knees chafed by

seat backs, groveling and

fruitless weekend prayers to a god

that simply is not there

as maddening as a crossword

missing a critical clue

 (from “Demon Commuter”)

 

Often the hurrying lines of Hirsch’s poems overflow in catalogues, words falling as in a cataract.  In “Supplication to the Muse of a Dark Age” specific signs of the season lead to the definition of a psychic hunger and then to a masterful concluding image, so natural it seems a proverb.

 

 

Full force fall in a rain of leaves, crops trimmed

& drying in large bins, shrink wrapped sanity

convenient and hermetically sealed.

Last little green tomato at risk to ripen or rot before

winter frosts the cold stovepipe and eaves.

Try to talk sense so I hear you through the rain on the gutters

the sirens, derailments, hurricanes, flak —

A mask surrendered is a

mask traded for another mask that masks the mask Jack

 

     For Hirsch current events are as much an element in the phenomena boiling all about him as the autumn.  He reacts to his local nuclear plant and the Mueller investigation and reviles “Vlad the scum-paler,” but in the end these are the fleas of the world, the social projection of the comedown inscribed in miniature on every waking day.

 

At 5:58 again

no matter what the song

clockradio curdles spirit

sours mind, kills dreaming

slays the composer writing aubades

in lazy morning afterglow.

On the dawn-chilled depot platform

(“Transgressions”)    

 

Yet the dreaming may be overcome, seen past, transcended with high thoughts and the illuminated dreams of art.  A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Hirsch has studied what he calls the “blank book of Zen” and realizes that irritation and desire do not vanish, but rather assume a place in a whole and perfect picture.

 

Deer ticks leap from tree bark

to truck their miniature dose of Lyme

into the truck stop of loose socks hanging

over a row of hiking boots.

Hold cosmic mudra below my navel

for another quiet hour until the gong

and then Kin Hin walking like mountain

(“Zazen Weekend at the Grail”)

 

We all travel together as demon commuters, all passengers on “The Train to the End of the World.”  No need for sighs. 

 

No muscle can lift

the unsurpassable.

                                                            (“Zazen”)

 Yet there is beauty and solace and vision in Hirsch’s small machines made of words, one all the more necessary for frantic commuters, anxious householders, and those terrified by the evening news.

 

[This poetry is a rescue

from the death of all dreams.]

(“Urban Verses”)

Wang Wei

 

     I write here as a reader of English translations of Tang poetry.  I have always felt altogether at home among these poems so distant in time and language.  To reflect the experience of those like myself who have not mastered the Chinese, I quote from a number of the translators I have read over the years.  Each, of course, offers a unique Wang Wei.  See on this same site “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei” for multiple takes on the same quatrain, including a couple of my own.

     The poems translated by Wu Fu-ning is from Robert Payne’s The White Pony, those by Burton Watson from in Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second tom the Twelfth Century, Pauline Yu’s from Pauline Yu in The Poetry of Wang Wei

 

    Among the classic poets of the Tang Dynasty Wang Wei exemplifies the gentleman-poet of his day, somewhat as Sir Philip Sidney did for his.  Successful in his examinations, Wang served as a government official as well as writing poetry, but then, in later life, withdrew to a contemplative retirement (not to a hermitage but to his country estate).  In visual art he is regarded as a founder of the Southern School, called literati painting, known for free calligraphic strokes.  [1]  

     He excelled in the paired couplets of five or seven syllable lines called jueju [2], a highly demanding form requiring a set syllabic count for each line, rhymed abcb. [3]  Apart from these demands, the jueju must also conform to certain  prescribed tonal patterns (thus its name “regulated verse”) [4].   A caesura is expected and tonal as well as semantic parallelism is admired, particularly in the middle lines of a quatrain.  Furthermore, this poetry of scholars was replete with allusions and subtler associations reminding readers of earlier verses.  Imagery likewise observed a set of conventions, with Images were often meant to suggest conventional meanings (such as the plaintain for physical frailty and the moon in the water for unreality).  [5]

     In this form the genteel might display wit, imagination, and ingenuity and gain recognition among those of their own class, as their work could only be appreciated only by those sharing a similar education.  These highly sophisticated poetic texts, in an ironic reversal, appeared to many Western readers unfamiliar with the Chinese originals to be direct impressionistic sketches of a natural scene.  The immense influence of Ezra Pound and his edited version of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry [6] encouraged the view that Chinese poetry mirrors ordinary consciousness by emphasizing visual perception.  Thus Fenollosa maintained that Chinese poetry embodies a “simple poetic outlook on life” by presenting the reader with “vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature.”  In sum he claimed that “Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure.”   “The Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue.”

    Though Fenollosa’s pioneering account is now largely rejected by Chinese scholars, Pound’s promotion of his ideas fertilized the Imagist movement and subsequent developments through Objectivism, Beat, and Deep Image poetry.  The fact that very few translators have even attempted to preserve the Chinese rhyme patterns, though similar patterns are common in English, has aided this misapprehension.  The use of free verse by many reinforces the impression that Chinese poetry is an immediate record of experience.  As a non-specialist reader of Chinese poetry in translation unable to appreciate the subtleties of pitch patterns and allusions, I continue to consume a poet like Wang Wei while much of his art remains inaccessible to me.  The immense growth in accessible information in English concerning Chinese literary history has enabled deeper readings of the images though still without broadening the appreciation to other elements of the writing.   Indeed, just as African sculpture almost entirely shorn of its meaning in context enriched European art in the early twentieth century, Chinese poetry refreshed English writing with little attention to the vast and learned tradition that underlay it.  Some of the most influential translators, such as Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth, had very sketchy knowledge of the language. 

 

Morning

 

The peach blossom is redder because rain fell overnight,

The willows are greener in the morning mist.

The fallen petals are not yet swept away by servants.

Birds sing.  The guest on the hill is asleep.

                                     trans. Li Fu-ning 

 

     This poem might pass for a journal entry simply recording the data observed by an early riser.  In this case it might seem a simple appreciation of the beauties of nature, flowers and greenery amid the melodious calls of birds.  A fructifying rain descends like grace.  Those who have no eye for beauty may still be asleep, but the author has included the reader in his delectation of the scene.

     This appreciation of nature is, however, perfectly consistent with Daoist and Buddhist belief.  With this in mind, the “fallen petals” may be a reminder of the transience of this world, and the sleeper may be a soul caught yet in delusion.  These associations are not dependent on association with earlier poems, but peach blossoms have, since the Book of Odes, been a symbol of love, its red blossoms suggesting human passion as well as the returning vitality of springtime.  Yet, the willow suggests for the Chinese the longing resulting from the separation from a loved one (as in Li Bai’s “Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang”) and the mention of “fallen petals” seems surely a momento mori.  The willow  connotes separation while the singing of the birds is a testament to the continuing delight of nature, implying that the properly attuned human consciousness will sing as well.  Yet here the observer, the “guest,” is asleep, unaware of the grand machinery of creation and destruction evident on every side.

     The fact that one may read the lyric as a direct observation of the scene, a verbal cinema verité, and simultaneously as a highly allusive and philosophical rumination constitutes the strength of Wang Wei in common with other poets of his tradition.  The poems may be rewarding regardless of the reader’s degree of sophistication.  They offer a comprehensive and wise-sounding world view while holding all philosophical questions in suspension, an attitude the Pyrrhonian skeptics called ἐποχή. 

  

Visiting the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance

 

I didn’t know where the temple was,

pushing mile on mile among cloudy peaks;

old trees, peopleless paths,

deep mountains, somewhere a bell.

Brook voices choke over craggy boulders,

sun rays turn cold in the green pines.

At dusk by the bend of a deserted pond,

a monk in meditation, taming poison dragons.

                            trans. Burton Watson 

     Again, it is quite possible to read this poem as a simple record of a trek, wandering the hills in search of a remote monastery.  Yet it is also an image of a life-pilgrim restlessly in quest of enlightenment.  The harsh rocks, the chill, the close of day all conspire to suggest the suffering of this life that motivates the poet’s quest.  While the monastery bell in the distance and then the sight of the monk in meditation place liberation at a remove from the speaker, it is nonetheless in view. 

     Just as in “Morning” Wang has managed to be precisely and concretely immediate and at the same time applicable to all humanity.  The facts that the paths are “peopleless” and the pond is “deserted” imply the high isolation of the spiritual striver.  Scholars have differed over just which passage describing poisonous dragons Wang had in mind, but it scarcely matters as it is clear that they represent such hindrances as desires and illusions.   If not full-fledged bodhi he has at any rate gained the equipoise to confront suffering with open eyes and go on living, confident that release is as much a part of the scheme of things as enslavement to passion.

     Such experiences, both the direct sensual ones and the contemplative speculations, may indeed be quite solitary, even private records of subjective consciousness, but, as a court poet with some duties similar to those of British Poets Laureate, he wrote public verses in praise of the rulers.  Unlike the fulsome rhetoric of seventeenth and eighteenth century European dedications, Wang is elegant and oblique in his compliments.

  

Written at the Prince’s Command on the

Emperor’s Having Lent to

the Prince of Qi as a Retreat from Summer Heat

 

The emperor’s son bids farewell to the distant Red Phoenix 

        Turret:

An imperial edict has lent the faraway palace of blue-green 

        mist.

Outside the window vaporous clouds cling to our clothes;

With curtains rolled, streams and mountains come into the 

        mirror.

Below the woods the water’s noise resounds over talk and 

        laughter;

Between the peaks colors of trees obscure houses and 

        dwellings.

An immortal’s home would not perforce be finer than this 

        abode:

Need we play the pipes, looking toward the azure sky?

                                                 trans. Pauline Yu 

  

     Though explicitly written at royal command and including the obligatory glorification of the imperial family who enjoy accommodations equal to the immortals’, the poem’s real focus is the rewards of a retreat in the mountains.  Clouds and mist that surround the Jiucheng Palace not only cool the climate, they suggest as well its remoteness from the urban court and create an air of obscure mystery.  The outdoors and indoors mingle both visually as “streams and mountains come into the mirror” and audibly with the resounding “water’s noise.”  The “houses and dwellings” that mark a mundane human presence are obscured (though, unlike those strenuously pursuing enlightenment, the courtiers talk and laugh).

     The concluding lines certainly praise the emperor and his son, placing them on a level with the immortals.  The reference to Wangzi Qiao, a crown prince under Zhou Ling Wang, associates the current royal line with semi-divine antecedents.   Prince Qiao, called Jin, played pipes (and imitated phoenix cries), as he wandered the mountains. Ultimately, he mounted a crane and ascended to heaven. [7]  While complimenting his social superiors and thus assenting to the worldly order, Wang implies that removal from the distractions of the city are likely to prove beneficial for all.  The fine-spun fancy about a legendary prince signifies the spiritual uplift all might gain, even those who never ride a bird to the sky.

      On the other side of the social spectrum, Wang’s “Six Casually Written Poems” concern those who pay no heed to wealth or prestige, the sort of enlightened eccentrics far more commonly admired in Asia than in the West.  For them poverty naturally accompanies a life lived with integrity, but this need not preclude joy. 

  

One of Six Casually Written Poems

 

In a farmhouse lives an old man

With drooping white hair, in his humble retreat.

Sometimes when finished with chores in the fields,

He summons his neighbors with a jug of wine.

Noisily beneath the thatched eaves

They sit around and then stand up again.

Coarse woolen clothes are not too mean for him

And garden sunflower seeds delicacy enough indeed.

If he stirs, it’s just to bring up sons and grandsons;

He has never once gone to the city market.

The Five Emperors and Three Kings

Since ancient times have been called Sons of Heaven.

Compare using arms with polite abdication—

Which way is right after all?

If wishes gained make up happiness,

How then can a rustic farm be scorned?

For now I’ll set my mind at ease and go,

And travel on ‘til all my teeth are gone.

                                         trans., Pauline Yu 

One thinks of the penultimate poem of the Dàodé Jīng in which such an isolated life is seen as ideal.

 

Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them.

I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords (instead of the written characters).

They should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment.

There should be a neighbouring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.                                               

                                                             trans. James Legge 

 

 Similar sentiments are, of course, available to Westerners more conveniently from Vergil and Horace.  The general idea is that, not military skills, but agriculture is the essential human activity. And that those engaged in cultivation of the land have a more satisfying, a saner and wiser life than those who engage in politics, war, and commerce.  The other poems in this series include one the “crazy man,” Lu Tong, who pretended to be mad to avoid serving an unjust lord, one expressing the longing to retreat from a man still entangled in affairs, another on the poet Tao Qian who preferred drinking to his bureaucratic post, on eon the “husband of the girl from Chao” who drinks and gambles without regard for worldly reputation, and concludes with the touching poem of Wang on his old age, “too lazy to write poems,/ I have old age as my sole companion.”

      One of Wang Wei’s quatrains exemplifies his method in brief. 

  

Deer Park

 

Empty hills, no one in sight,

only the sound of someone talking;

late sunlight enters the deep wood,

shining over the green moss again. 

trans. Burton Watson [8]

 

      The Deer Park in Sarnath near Varanasi is the site of the Buddha’s first sermon following his enlightenment.   The “emptiness” of the first word is a Buddhist term (kong in Chinese, in Sanskrit śūnyatā), here instantly qualified by a vague “sound of someone talking,” though that may be understood as the voice of the poem itself.  The sunlight filters to the forest floor illuminating the moss “again,” implying the cyclic recurrence, reminding the reader of “the great return” which occurs with death.  

     The Chinese poets, far more frequently than those in Europe, pay tribute to the importance of friendship.  Poems on the occasion of parting are common.  Among the most affecting Tang poems are those describing the separation of men who had been close, often on the occasion of one receiving an official appointment in another region of the vast empire.  The pain of parting is then an illustration of the inevitable suffering that life entails, though a testament as well to the warmth of their relationship. 

  

Farewell to Senior Officer Yang

Going to Office in Guozhou

 

Baoxie Valley will not hold a carriage:

Where then will you be going?

A bird’s path for a thousand miles,

And gibbons’ cries all hours of the day.

By the official bridge, travelers offer wine;

Amid mountain trees, a shrine to the Young Maid.

After parting we will share the bright moon:

You should hear the cuckoo’s call.

trans., Pauline Yu 

 

The wildness and presumably the hazards of the journey are suggested by the reference to a narrow gorge, making travel difficult.  “A bird’s path,” after all, is no path at all.  The poet suggests that “for a thousand miles” his friend will be lost in nature.  The mention of sacrifices of wine is another reminder of the dangers of the trip.  The mention of the shrine to the daughter of Zhang Lu, the military leader who, despite his Daoist insight (as a “Celestial Master”) and reputation for humane wisdom, saw much of his family executed for political revenge and himself brought to surrender to Cao Cao, reminds the reader of the tumultuous turns of the wheel of fortune. 

     In a phrase that sounds like it comes from a love poem the concluding couplet with grace and poignance suggests that even in separation “we will share the bright moon.”   The call of the cuckoo became a conventional motif in poems of parting as it was imagined to resemble the words “It’s better to return” (bu ru guiqu)

 

      Perhaps this sample is sufficient to indicate the principal characteristics of Wang’s style and the basis for his appeal.  I and many others have felt such sympathy with him, Bai Juy, and others among ithese old poets?  For me the appeal is the direct recording of experience which, though seeming almost like improvisation, hints at intimations of a universal order, a Dao implied in all the phenomena that swirl about us, a finger on the pulse of the universe independent of revelation.   One need not translate culturally specific mythological terms into philosophic equivalents.  The Tang masters present moments of consciousness, compounded as they are of sense experience and the mind’s treatment of those data, but shaped in their expression by all the poems that went before.  Western lyric tradition is not far removed from the formulation attributed to the “Great Shun” by Liu Xie “Poetry is the expression of sentiments,” [9] but it is Daoist and Buddhist world-views that color the Chinese poets’ emotional reactions in a way rare in the West. [10]  Poets like Wang Wei seem easily assimilable because their concerns are our own.    

 

 

 

 

1.  Named by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636), the terms are not really geographical, but rather an analogy to the Northern and Southern forms of Ch’an Buddhism.

2. A type of regulated verse or  jintishi ("modern form poetry").

3. It is a sign of the level of artifice in the form that rhymes might be based on pronunciations no longer current but accessible in a rhyming dictionary. 

4. Guoyu or Mandarin has four tones.  Such tones play a significant role in a great many of the world’s languages (especially in Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian American) 

5.  Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, 171.

6.  Published in 1919.  Among Pound’s changes were the suppression of references to Buddhism and to the importance of sound patterns. 

7.  The story appears in the Book of Immortals (Lie xian zhuan).  Jin on the crane’s back is a popular motif for painters.

8.  For a fascinating translation study, see Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese poem is translated.”  I add two more of my own in “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei,” available on this site.

9.  Liu Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chapter VI. 

Notes on Buddhism and Poetry

 

Can poetry be Buddhist?

     The existence of any Buddhist aesthetics may be questioned.  The tension between the enjoyment of art and the ideal of the Great Renunciation is evident in many East Asian poems.  For one scholar of religion [1], Buddhism is wholly aesthetic in its apprehension of the world.  “The goal of life for Buddhists is aesthetic.  It is the enjoyment of life itself as intrinsic value.”   Contemplative withdrawal is in fact that focus on intrinsic enjoyment.  “Nirvana is the complete willingness to accept this world as it is as the best of all actual worlds.”  “Nirvana is the aesthetic enjoyment of what is as it is.”  However, this apparent total embrace of beauty is accompanied by a lack of interest in privileging any specific object as better, more meaningful, or more pleasing than another.  Since Buddhist meditation consists of the pure “enjoyment of self” (presumably recognizing at the same time the non-existence of ego), any experience of a work of art will introduce a “distinction between subject and object” which is “not only irrelevant but even a hindrance to its enjoyment.”

     As the end of Buddhism is enlightenment, one might conclude that the twentieth-century American philosopher is correct that any distraction is an obstacle, yet traditions of Buddhist practice contradict his conclusion.  The fact is that Buddhist art has flourished from the earliest periods, from the reliquaries in which the Buddha’s remains, we are told, were distributed to groups of devotees to be placed in stupas. [2]  Since that time Buddhist arts has proliferated in all the countries where the religion was practiced, in architecture, painting, carving, literature, and dance. [3]

     These works were by no means made as part of a secular milieu, but rather as a form of spiritual practice.  The makers of Buddhist devotional objects clearly intended for their works to serve as meditative aids in individuals’ progress toward enlightenment.  Just as chanting the poetry of the sutras was a form of worship, so might shaping original poetic images or graphic forms direct the consciousness toward its liberation.  Representation of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is meant to awaken the sufferer to the possibility of nirvana.  The koans of Zen are obstinately concrete and specific as are the lyrics of Wang Wei and Han Shan.  The destruction of the sand mandalas in Tibet, while intended to underline the evanescence of phenomena, is as well an aesthetic signifier as modern artists such as Banksy have realized [4].  all are meant as upaya, “skillful means,” with the ultimate goal of guiding spiritual development.

     Finally, of course, the Buddha recommended a Middle Way in the very opening words of the discourse regarded as his first after enlightenment, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, avoiding both sensual indulgence and asceticism.  Anyone possessing a body will tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain and to feel lust, hunger, and anger.  Even the bhikkhu remains human and must taste and welcome food, however frugal the meal.  Therefore, a blanket condemnation of aesthetic experience seems out of character compared to a measured use of art which may even embrace the accomplishment of religious ends. [5] 

     I can scarcely deny the often expressed ambivalence, though, of Buddhist practitioners, of which this passage from Bai Juyi is representative.

 

Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,

I’ve learned to still all the common states of mind.

Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer—

let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle droning. [6]

                                                                             

 

The appearance of the dharma in American literature

     Though it competed with Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, for American devotees, Buddhism has been an influence in American literature for as long as the Asian texts have been available.  At certain periods Buddhism shaped the broad mainstream of American poetry, while isolated points of contact from individual writers occurred at all periods.

     The Transcendentalists introduced Buddhism to American readers.  In 1844 the Buddha was ushered into the drawing room of American thought when the Dial, at the time edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, printed a translation of The Lotus Sutra which had only that year appeared in a French version, the first access Europeans had to this seminal text.  [7]  The old East-West mythologies persisted in part (as they do yet today), and this new knowledge of authentic Buddhist thought was fragmentary, leading Emerson to refer to the “Bhagvat Geeta” as “the much renowned book of Buddhism,” [7] and to note vaguely that “all tends to the mysterious East.” [8]

     Still, respectful mentions of Buddhism became widespread.  Thoreau referred to “their Christ” in contrast to “my Buddha” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [9] and Melville wrote a poem addressed to Buddha asking for nirvana. [10]  Far from the Transcendentalist Northeast, Lafcadio Hearn converted to Buddhism and translated Japanese poems and stories.  Buddhism is thereafter never absent from the stream of American literature.  During the second half of the nineteenth century its most prominent contribution to American literature was to create an enlarged space for mysticism during a time when the Theosophical Society (whose Col. Alcott was a Buddhist), Spiritualism, and eventually the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago were among the popular manifestations of a similar interest.

    In the early twentieth century, during the time of High Modernism, Buddhist poetry shaped the Imagist movement through Pound and Buddhist convert Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.  [11]  Among those later influenced by these were William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists,  Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen and Rakosi.  Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali, took a course in Japanese Buddhist philosophy, and concluded that Indian philosophers make European thinkers “look like schoolboys.” [12]  Though there had been converts for decades, genuine Buddhist institutions receptive to non-Asians such as Christmas Humphrey’s Buddhist Society of America (established 1931) were appearing.  The main effect of this era’s Buddhist influence was, however, reflected in Williams’ slogan “no ideas but in things.”

     The writing of the Beat coterie in the fifties is surely the most prominent example of Buddhist influence.  With several prominent poets with Buddhist gurus (such as Allen Ginsberg), some who were actual monks (Philip Whalen), and a great many other practitioners (Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder), the appearance of Black Buddhists such as Bob Kaufman and, today, the fiction writer Charles R. Johnson, as well as a great many more who took a sympathetic interest, this group brought Buddhist ideas and texts to millions. 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg on Buddhism and poetry

     As the most influential and prominent Buddhist American poet of the last century as well as a founder of the Buddhist Naropa University with its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,  Allen Ginsberg is a case of particular significance.  Since Ginsberg is a scholarly man, familiar with a great deal of poetic and religious texts, as well as being a serious follower of Buddhist practice, his delineation of the intersections of poetry and Buddhism are uniquely revealing. 

     In the most general way, Ginsberg identifies poetry as a whole with meditation, saying “breath spirit is the vehicle for poetry and song as well as the air horse/ The mind rides during meditation practice.”  Thus, “fine art and other meditation practices are brother-and-sister-related activities.” Great poetry is “a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.”  The goal of such “probes of consciousness” is the “purification of mind and body” [13]  

     Yet he specifies certain of his own practices, in particular “spontaneous mind, on-the-spot improvisation,” poetry as the “art of spontaneity in the void” [14].  For Ginsberg, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s formula “first thought, best thought,” or, in slightly elaborated form, “the first thought you had on your mind, the first thought you thought before you thought you should have a formal thought,” defines poetry’s proper subject. [15]  For readers who fear the loss of the pleasures of meticulous craftsmanship, this method would substitute “the total delight in chance.”  [16]

     Drawing on several generations of translations of Chinese poetry including versions by Pound, Waley, and Rexroth, Ginsberg also emphasizes a focus on concrete objective imagery.  He quotes Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves,” and advocates “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” [17] 

     Thematically, both “first thought, best thought” and the deep focus on the object of meditation arise from the Buddhist conviction of the ephemeral and ultimately misleading experience of reality.  According to Ginsberg, the “transcendental wisdom” of the insight that life is “both real and dream, both once at the same time,” the realization of “dream as the suchness of the universe,” is the central theme of “the ‘Golden Ash’ school, as Kerouac qualified existence.”  [18]  The phantasmagoria of poetry is explicitly “daydreams,” [19]  but consciously recognized as such and thus pointing the way to an accurate assessment of all perception and leading the reader toward enlightenment.  Every poetic detail of a Buddhist poem signifies “the eternal gateless gate which if it has ‘form’ has an undescribable [sic] one – images of which are however innumerable.” [20]

     While Ginsberg’s Buddhism inspired a body of great poetry, his theoretical writing was always polemic, uninterested in the claims of other world-views and compositional techniques.  Like other partisans, he maintains the universality of his approach, saying that “’Form is no different from Emptiness, Emptiness no different from Form’.  That formulation is one that Keats and all subtle poets might appreciate.” [21]  He maintains that “beauty itself is the realization of simultaneous ‘emptiness and form’” [22] as though there were at bottom but one variety of beauty.   

 

 

final thoughts

     In that overgeneralization lies the difficulty with Buddhist poetics.  Not surprisingly, it is similar to the limitation of Christian or Marxist poetics, each of which may couch in comely terms a certain world-vision but which has difficulty accommodating any other.  The dialectic of form and emptiness in the dance of eye and object may constitute beauty indeed, though not necessarily any more than the contemplation of form alone, whether one’s beloved’s thigh or the cadences of meter. Impermanence has its own aesthetics as well, reflected in Bernadette Mayer’s stream-of-consciousness or John Cage’s verbal compositions.  With a sufficient metaphorical imagination a non-Christian reader can appreciate the value of a Christian poem, so likewise a non-Buddhist may delight in Wang Wei, or a bhikkhu might relish Milton.  Poetry is the record of moments of consciousness which, even for an advanced spiritual practitioner, does not reside always at the highest of altitudes. 

     The thematic contributions of Buddhism, the conceptual space for describing meditative revelation and the ambiguity of perceived reality, remain significant and lasting.  The study of East Asian poetry, one of the oldest and most sophisticated poetic traditions in the world, immeasurably enriched American poetry, particularly by encouraging a disciplined focus on imagery.  As for Truth, I dare say Gerard Manley Hopkins might bring a reader an illuminated moment just as surely as Han Shan might.  Furthermore, many poems are careless of theme and impress rather with ingenuity or sensuous sound beauty or powerful passion. 

     We are only just beginning to assimilate (and transform) the artistic and philosophic achievements of Asia.  Priceless though they be, they cannot govern American poetic practice in the twenty-first century while they certainly will contribute to it.  In fact Buddhist poetry from a dozen countries of the East has already both broadened and deepened American writing in both form and content.

 

 

 

1.  See Archie J. Bahm, “Buddhist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec., 1957).

2.  See the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta.

3.  A suggestion of iconoclastic fundamentalism is apparent in the reluctance for several centuries to represent Buddha himself.  Now, of course, images of the seated Buddha are the most common and recognizable theme of Buddhist art. 

4.  Banksy’s self-destroying work Girl with Balloon was more notorious than original.  Gustav Metzger had been making such works since the late 1940s.  See his article "Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art," Ark, summer 1962.  In 1962 Jean Tinguely presented Homage to New York in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, an assemblage composed primarily of objects collected in garbage dumps and wired to explode and burn immediately after its unveiling. 

5.  Even Augustine, who had been so ashamed of his fondness for the theater, came to feel that there was a place in Christianity for art which encouraged the soul toward God. 

6.  Translated by Burton Watson (who uses the form Po Chü-I) in cThe Selected Poems of Po Chü-I. 

7.  The French was by Eugène Burnouf; he had written it in 1839, but did not publish it until he had completed an introduction in 1844.  The English translation from French, once attributed to Thoreau, is anonymous in the text but by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.  The sutra appears in the Dial immediately preceding a translation of a Hermetic text.  For a full account, see Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism.   

7.  Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17 1845, Letters III, edited by Ralph L. Rusk, 290. 

8.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 1: 12.

9.  “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”

10.  “Buddha” includes an epigraph from one of the more Buddhist passages of the Greek Testament, James 4:14 “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” 

11.  Pound’s preference for the social ideals of Confucianism led him to mock Daoist and Buddhist holy men, yet his poetry is not thereby affected.  Arthur Waley’s translations and critical writings were a major transmission source (including for Pound) as was the work of D. T. Suzuki.

12.  Spender said Eliot “almost became a Buddhist.  See Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 35, no. 2 (Apr., 1985).

13.  These passages are from two pieces, both titled “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, 152 and 262.

14.  From Deliberate Prose, “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” 251.  Compare also Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” which recommends “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.”

15.  Ginsberg, Allen. “First Thought, Best Thought,” Composed on the Tongue (1971), 106–117.

16.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 258 and 272.

17.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 266 and 268.

18.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246 and 247.

19.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 152.

20.  “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 250.

21.  “Meditation and Poetics” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 265.

21.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246.

A Take on Plato’s Parmenides

 

     The informality of the title of this essay is meant to convey that I here make no pretense to scholarship; indeed, my notions have little ambition even to be called philosophical.  My reading of Plato can only be justified by a reader who finds it poetic.  Yet I have always found that the subjectivity of poets offers an access to truth unavailable to logicians. 

 

     Plato’s Parmenides is to many a puzzler.  One modern reader has called it the philosopher’s “most enigmatic” work, [1] while another, equally Hellenic but preferring more contemporary jargon, finds it "aporetic." [2]   In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors follow their guru like sheep, chorusing “of course, Socrates” and “how could it be otherwise, Socrates?” while at the same time the reader may be shouting, “but no!”  In the Parmenides the roles are reversed, and a youthful Socrates accepts the lead of the elder philosopher.  Parmenides even scolds like an indulgent parent, telling Socrates, “you are still young; the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you.”  [3]  Plato’s point of view can always be elusive, given the dramatic dialogue format and the Socratic pose of knowing nothing, but where is the authority here?   The reader of this dialogue scarcely knows what to think as Socrates allows himself to be passively led first through a rejection of his own opinions and then to what looks like a strange sort of apologetic reconstruction of them, making the second portion if not a refutation a weaker reflected mirror image of the first.  Finally, through the entire dialogue the argumentation is so abstract, abstruse, and repetitive that even receptive readers may find themselves dizzy with fatigue after only a page or two, on the edge of concluding that the whole thing is gibberish. 

    If one persists, the effect soon becomes incantatory, hypnotic, at times an astonishing juggling act, at others more a magic charm or mantra, never a usable map of ratiocination.  Perhaps some savant might be able to lock in on the concepts here and follow the funabulistic thought, but could the effort of leaping and dancing and graceful turns lift a contemplative to the sublime?  A good many Hindu, Buddhist, and Scholastic logicians have constructed similarly grand and taxing mental gymnastics based on the conviction that it can.  Perhaps following a moment of surprising grace a certain sort of mind can only heap up argument after argument despite their never quite measuring up to the original flash.  (Does such a dynamo underlie Aquinas’ voluminous productivity?) 

     For me the Parmenides induces not active cognition, but rather its opposite, a surrender of logic in the face of mystery, a submission to circumstance, and a recognition that a human mind cannot encompass the cosmos.  The Milky Way simply will not be swallowed.  Yet that does not doom the philosopher’s equanimity.  In singing the song of powerlessness, in asserting obeisance to the unknown, in insisting on seeing reality naked, and then proceeding to make an exceedingly abstract yet shapely song of what cannot be understood, Parmenides and Socrates and Plato and the reader following along as well dare to affirm, to celebrate even, these borders and limits of humanity. 

     I imagine Plato winking over the centuries, acknowledging that the cumbrous superstructure of Forms (later overlaid with Neo-Platonic Emanations and by the time of Iamblichus crowded with deities and spiritual beings) is only a pastime, a high intellectual amusement.  In Plato’s wink, though it may exist only in fancy, the reader returns to the One, very much the same One that recurs so obsessively in the Parmenides.

     (Another Platonic actor may provide a parallel.  Gorgias had enthralled Athenians with his rhetoric while maintaining a rigorously Skeptical position.  Having concluded that nothing can be shown to exist; that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and that if anything were known, it could not be communicated to anyone else, he then spent his time weaving fabulous tapestries of words.  Sitting on a Mediterranean terrace in mid-life, he found he could entertain himself and his tasteful fellow-citizens with such playful projects as a defense of Helen or of Palamedes.  Behind such pleasant theatricals, though, there shone always the One, the Atman, the Ultimate Reality from which each person arises, though only temporarily.)

     This notion is not entirely a vagary of my own.  There is some evidence and a great deal of speculation about the Indian influence on Parmenides himself.  As early as 1894 the author of an article “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy” found “the most striking resemblance – I might almost say sameness – is between the doctrine of the All-in-One in the Upanishads and the philosophy of the Eleatics.”  He believed in actual influence from India “without intending to pass an apodictic decision.” [4]  Since then a variety of scholars have examined specific correspondences between Parmenides and Shankara and Nagarjuna. [5]  At least one professor of Buddhist studies argues that Parmenides must have traveled to study in India. [6]  

     While Plato’s precise position must remain ever obscure, considering the Parmenides I cannot avoid thoughts of his “unwritten teachings.”  Though no Rosicrucian or Theosophist, I thought of the old notion of Plato’s esoteric doctrines [7]  One reader, at least, of the Parmenides imagines a spark of the glory of absolute Enlightenment passing from one wounded human psyche to another, diluted and diverted by every possible imp of ignorance, yet casting still a clear light over thinkers of ancient Greece, already struggling, like their South Asian cousins, for a way to live in a cold world.  

 

 

1.      1.  Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul. Princeton 1986.

 

2.     2.  R.E. Allen, Plato's Parmenides: Translation and Analysis (Minnesota 1983).

 

3.      3.  I use Jowett’s old translation.  The Greek is “νέος γὰρ εἶ ἔτι . . . καὶ οὔπω σου ἀντείληπται φιλοσοφία” (130ε).

 

4.      4.  Richard Garbe, “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy,” The Monist Vol. 4, No. 2 (January, 1894).

 

5.      5.  See, for example, Chiara Robbiano, “Self or being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides” in Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought ed. Richard Seaford; Nathan Tamblyn, “Parmenides and Nāgārjuna: A Buddhist Interpretation of Ancient Greek Philosophy” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 4; and Kelly P. Dugan, Understanding Parmenides as a Numerical Monist: A Comparative Study, a University of Kansas dissertation that discusses Shankara in particular. 

 

6.      6.  Ferenc Ruzsa, “Parmenides’ road to India,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 42 (2002).

 

7.      7.  Though for a period little discussed, the issue has been revived in recent decades by Irmgard Männlein-Robert and others.  Plato's disputed Seventh Letter declares that the truth of the highest matters cannot be expressed in writing.  "And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man's written compositions—whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form,—these are not his most serious works, if so be that the writer himself is serious: rather those works abide in the fairest region he possesses.”  Also “Whosoever, then, has accompanied me in this story and this wandering of mine will know full well that, whether it be Dionysius or any lesser or greater man who has written something about the highest and first truths of Nature, nothing of what he has written, as my argument shows, is based on sound teaching or study. Otherwise he would have reverenced these truths as I do, and would not have dared to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment.”

 

8.      8.  Aristotle in his Physics explicitly refers to such unwritten doctrines (“ἄγραφα δόγματα”) of Plato.