The Golden Age of China, T’ang through Sung dynasties (A.D. 618–1279), began not long after the Western Roman Empire came to an end and lasted well beyond the First Crusade. One of the most cultivated eras in the history of man, its religious, philosophical and social ground had been prepared centuries before Christianity, and men perfected their lives and arts certain that they gave meaning to something higher than themselves. To artists of the time, numerous and skilled, poetry and painting were Ways—two among many, to be sure, but glorious Ways—to realization of Truth, whose unfolding made possible not only fulfilled life but calm acceptance of its limitations. They saw in the world a process of becoming, yet each of its particulars, at any moment of existence, partook of the absolute. This meant that no distinction was drawn between the details of a landscape—cliffs, slopes, estuaries, waterfalls—shaped by the artist’s emotions. Foreground, background, each was part of the process, in poetry as in painting, the spirit discovering itself among the things of this world.
On the rocky slope, blossoming
Plums—from where?
Once he saw them, Reiun
Danced all the way to Sandai.
HOIN
The artist’s visions were held to be revelatory; painting, poem meant to put men in touch with the absolute. Judgment of artworks was made principally with that in mind. Some might delight the senses, a few exalt the spirit, whose role was taken for granted to be paramount, the greatest artists respecting its capacity to discover itself anew in their works. Over centuries the West has deduced the guiding aesthetic principle of such art to be “Less is More,” and a number of stories bear this out.
One concerns a painting competition in the late T’ang dynasty, a time of many such events and gifted competitors, all of whom, brought up in an intellectual and artistic meritocracy, were aware of what success might mean. Judged by master painters, most carefully arranged, each painting had its theme, that of our story being “Famous Monastery in the Mountains.” Ample time was provided for the participants to meditate before taking up brushes. More than a thousand entries of monasteries in sunlight, in shadow, under trees, at mountain-foot, on slopes, at the very peak, by water, among rocks—all seasons. Mountains of many sizes, shapes, richly various as the topography itself. Since the monastery had been described as “famous,” monks abounded, working, praying, all ages and conditions. The competition produced works destined to be admired for centuries to come. The winning painting had no monastery at all: a monk paused, reflecting, on a misty mountain bridge. Nothing—everything—more. Evoking atmosphere, the monk knew his monastery hovered in the mist, more beautiful than hand could realize. To define, the artist must have learnt from the Taoism of Lao-tzu or the Zen of Hui-neng, is to limit.
Zen began its rapid growth in early T’ang China, a product of the merging of the recently introduced Buddhism of the Indian monk Bodhidharma, who reached China in 5 20, and Taoism, the reigning philosophy of poets and painters for some thousand years. Providing a rigorously inspiring discipline, insisting on the primacy of meditation, its temples and monasteries were havens for seekers after truth throughout the T’ang, Sung and Mongol-shadowed Yuan dynasties. Zen masters, religious guides, often themselves poets and painters, made judgments concerning the spiritual attainments of artist-disciples on the basis of works produced. Neither before nor since has art had so important a role in community life, and there are countless instances of poems or paintings affecting the development of the philosophy itself. One such concerns the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng, who was named as Hung-jen’s successor chiefly on the strength of his famous enlightenment poem:
The tree of Perfect Wisdom
Was originally no tree,
Nor has the bright mirror
Any frame. Buddha-nature
Forever clear and pure,
Where is there any dust?
Writers of such poems did not think themselves poets. Rather they were gifted men—masters, monks, some laymen—who after momentous experiences found themselves with something to say which only a poem could express. Enlightenment, the point of their meditation, brought about transformation of the spirit; a poem was expected to convey the essential experience and its effect. Such an awakening might take years of unremitting effort; to most it would never come at all:
One day Baso, disciple of Ejo, the Chinese master, was asked by the master why he spent so much time meditating.
Baso: “To become a Buddha.”
The master lifted a brick and began rubbing it very hard. It was now Baso’s turn to ask a question: “Why,” he asked, “do you rub that brick?”
“To make a mirror.”
“But surely,” protested Baso, “no amount of polishing will change a brick into a mirror.”
“Just so,” the master said. “No amount of cross-legged sitting will make you into a Buddha.”
Yet masters did their best to guide disciples: one device was the koan (problem for meditation), which they were asked to solve. As no logical solution was possible, the meditator was always at wits’ end—the intention. One of the koans, usually first given, was Joshu’s “Oak in the courtyard,” based on the master’s answer to the standard Zen question “What’s the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming to China?” These awakening poems, responses to this question of the masters, suggest the range of possibilities:
Joshu’s “Oak in the courtyard”—
Nobody’s grasped its roots.
Turned from sweet plum trees,
They pick sour pears on the hill.
EIAN
Joshu’s “Oak in the courtyard”
Handed down, yet lost in leafy branch
They miss the root. Disciple Kaku shouts—
“Joshu never said a thing!”
MONJU-SHINDO
Given their importance, it is not surprising to find in early Chinese enlightenment poems frequent references to koans. Most poems, though, deal with major aims of the philosophy—escape from space-time bondage, for example, a hard-won precondition of awakening:
Twenty years a pilgrim,
Footing east, west.
Back in Seiken,
I’ve not moved an inch.
SEIKEN-CHIJU
Earth, river, mountain:
Snowflakes melt in air.
How could I have doubted?
Where’s north? south? east? west?
DANGAI
Many express swift release from conventional attachments:
Searching Him took
My strength.
One night I bent
My pointing finger—
Never such a moon!
KEPPO
Need for such release, transcending of doctrine (finger pointing at the moon, never taken for the moon itself), was the theme of Bodhidharma’s historical interview with Emperor Wu of Liang, shortly after his arrival in China (by then some schools of Buddhism had been established there a few hundred years):
Emperor Wu: From the beginning of my reign, I have built many temples, had numerous sacred books copied and supported all the monks and nuns. What merit have I?
Bodhidharma: None.
Emperor Wu: Why?
Bodhidharma: All these are inferior deeds, showing traces of worldliness, but shadows. A truly meritorious deed is full of wisdom, but mysterious, its real nature beyond grasp of human intelligence—something not found in worldly achievement.
Emperor Wu: What is the first principle of your doctrine?
Bodhidharma: Vast emptiness, nothing holy.
Emperor Wu: Who, then, stands before me?
Bodhidharma: I don’t know.
Not long after this Bodhidharma wrote his famous poem:
Transmission outside doctrine,
No dependencies on words.
Pointing directly at the mind,
Thus seeing oneself truly,
Attaining Buddhahood.
As might be expected, awakening poems were held precious in Zen communities, serving for generations as koans themselves or as subjects for teisho (sermons). Interpretation was often made in the light of the master’s life, what led to his experience. Nan-o-Myo, awakened when asked by his master to interpret “Not falling into the law of causation, yet not ignoring it,” wrote:
Not falling, not ignoring—
A pair of mandarin ducks
Alighting, bobbing, anywhere.
Every utterance of a worthy master was thought significant. The late Sung master Tendo-Nyojo, an example, guided Japan’s great Dogen (1200–1253) to enlightenment, which alone made his death poem, simple as it is, glorious to the Japanese:
Sixty-six years
Piling sins,
I leap into hell—
Above life and death.
Zen death poems, remarkable in world literature, have a very ancient tradition. On their origin one can only speculate, but probably in early communities masters felt responsibility to disciples beyond the grave, and made such poems in the hope that they would help point the way to attainment, not only for disciples but for posterity. To some the final poem was not felt to be itself of much importance:
Life’s as we
Find it—death too.
A parting poem?
Why insist?
DAIE-SOKO
Many, however, considered it to be a symbolic summation, quite possibly preparing well before the inevitable moment. It would stand, every syllable pondered, and lives might well be affected by truth, absolute, whatever its message and worth as “poetry.” Differences between death poems give a sense of the variety of temperament among Chinese masters. Fuyo-Dokai’s vital self-assurance:
Seventy-six: done
With this life—
I’ve not sought heaven,
Don’t fear hell.
I’ll lay these bones
Beyond the Triple World,
Unenthralled, unperturbed.
Koko’s sense of release from a harsh existence:
The word at last,
No more dependencies:
Cold moon in pond,
Smoke over the ferry.
Shozan’s astringent mockery:
“No mind, no Buddha,”
Disciples prattle.
“Got skin, got marrow.”
Well, goodbye to that.
Beyond, peak glows on peak!
There is no way of telling, records being scant and unreliable (there are wild variants of birth and death dates), whether all wrote death poems, but given their solemn purpose they probably did. By 1279, when China was overrun by Mongols, Zen had flourished for almost one hundred years in Japan. There from the start death poems of masters were thought to have great religious meaning. Dogen left, exulting:
Four and fifty years
I’ve hung the sky with stars.
Now I leap through—
What shattering!
Centuries before the introduction of Zen in the Kamakura Period (1192–1333), Japan had been virtually transformed by Chinese Buddhism. Every aspect of life, from the Nara Period (710–84) on, reflected in one way or another the Chinese world vision. Painters and poets looked to China constantly, as did the greatest painter in the Chinese style, Sesshu, who crossed there for instruction and inspiration. Not all became Zenists like Sesshu, who was to join the priesthood, but most were guided by the philosophy, their works revealing the extent. In the earliest Zen communities enlightenment and death poems were written strictly in kanji (Chinese characters), in classical verse forms preferred by the Chinese masters—there is little to distinguish poems of the first Japanese Zenists from those written in China centuries before.
Here is the master Daito’s enlightenment poem, written when he had succeeded in solving the eighth koan of the Chinese classic Zen text Hekiganroku, which contains a reference to “Unmon’s barrier”:
At last I’ve broken Unmon’s barrier!
There’s exit everywhere—east, west; north, south.
In at morning, out at evening; neither host nor guest.
My every step stirs up a little breeze.
And here is Fumon’s death poem:
Magnificent! Magnificent!
No one knows the final word.
The ocean bed’s aflame,
Out of the void leap wooden lambs.
The Japanese masters composed not only enlightenment and death poems in Chinese verse forms, they often wrote of important events in the history of Zen, like Bodhidharma’s interview with the Emperor Wu. Here is Shunoku’s poem on the subject. (“Shorin” is the temple where Bodhidharma, on discovering that the emperor lacked insight, sat in Zen for nine years. To reach the temple he had to cross the Yangtze River.)
After the spring song, “Vast emptiness, no holiness,”
Comes the song of snow-wind along the Yangtze River.
Late at night I too play the noteless flute of Shorin,
Piercing the mountains with its sound, the river.
Even in writing on general themes associated with Zen life the masters employed the purest literary Chinese. Since only few Japanese knew the language, this practice made the Zen poems elitist, leading to the feeling on the part of masters like Dogen that an indigenous verse form, tanka (or waka), should be utilized. Such works would be understood in and out of the Zen communities, and surely it was possible to be as inspiring in Japanese, which, though using kanji, had a syllabary and was very different from Chinese. The most important collection of early Japanese poetry, the Manyoshu (eighth century), contains three kinds of verse forms: choka, tanka and sedoka, all based on arrangements of 5-7-5 syllable lines, the most popular, tanka, structured as 5-7-5-7-7 syllables—strictly, without any possible variation.
In the Heian Period (794–1185), which immediately preceded the first age of Zen, tanka was the favorite verse form at the courts. Toward the end of Heian, renga (linked verse) became popular: a chain of alternating fourteen and twenty-one syllables independently composed but associated with the verses coming before and after. By the fifteenth century, with renga expiring of artificiality, something more vital was found—the haikai renga, linked verses of seventeen syllables. Later came individual poems of seventeen syllables, haiku, the earliest authentic examples by writers like Sogi (1421–1502), Sokan (1458–1546) and Moritake (1472–1549).
Basho, thought by many Japanese to be their finest haiku writer and greatest poet, lived from 1644 to 1694. Like almost all noted haiku writers he was a Zenist, practicing discipline under the master Butcho, with whom, according to Dr. D. T. Suzuki, he had the following exchange:
BUTCHO: How are you getting along these days?
BASHO: Since the recent rain moss is greener than ever.
BUTCHO: What Buddhism was there before the moss became green?
Resulting in enlightenment and the first of his best-known haiku:
Oldpond,
leap-splash—
a frog.
Whether or not they undertook discipline, haiku writers thought themselves living in the spirit of Zen, their truest poems expressing its ideals. To art lovers the appeal of haiku is not unlike that of a sumie (ink-wash) scroll by Sesshu, and many haiku poets, like Buson, were also outstanding painters.
Zenists have always associated the two arts: “When a feeling reaches its highest pitch,” says Dr. Suzuki, Zen’s most distinguished historian, “we remain silent; even seventeen syllables may be too many. Japanese artists … influenced by the way of Zen tend to use the fewest words or strokes of brush to express their feelings. When they are too fully expressed no room for suggestion is possible, and suggestibility is the secret of the Japanese arts.” Like a painting or rock garden, haiku is an object of meditation, drawing back the curtain on essential truth. It shares with other arts qualities belonging to the Zen aesthetic—simplicity, naturalness, directness, profundity—and each poem has its dominant mood: sabi (isolation), wabi (poverty), aware (impermanence) or yugen (mystery).
If it is true that the art of poetry consists in saying important things with the fewest possible words, then haiku has a just place in world literature. The limitation of syllables assures terseness and concision, and the range of association in the finest examples is at times astonishing. It has the added advantage of being accessible: a seasonal reference, direct or indirect; the simplest words, chiefly the names of things in dynamic relationships; and familiar themes make it understandable to most, on one level at least. The haiku lives most fully in nature, of great meaning to a people who never feel it to be outside themselves. Man is fulfilled only when unseparated from his surroundings, however hostile they may appear:
To the willow—
all hatred, and desire
of your heart.
BASHO
White lotus—
the monk
draws back his blade.
BUSON
Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers.
ISSA
In the West, perhaps as a result of fascination with the haiku (its association with the development of modern poetry at one extreme, its universal appeal in schools at the other), it arouses as much suspicion as admiration. It looks so easy, something anyone can do. A most unfortunate view, for haiku is a quintessential form, much like the sonnet in Elizabethan England, being precisely suited to (as it is the product of) Japanese sensibility, conditioned by Zen. For Basho, Buson and Issa, haiku permitted the widest possible field of discovery and experimentation.
The Zen experience is centripetal, the artist’s contemplation of subject sometimes referred to as “mind-pointing.” The disciple in an early stage of discipline is asked to point the mind at (meditate upon) an object, say a bowl of water. At first he is quite naturally inclined to metaphorize, expand, rise imaginatively from water to lake, sea, clouds, rain. Natural, perhaps, but just the kind of “mentalization” Zen masters caution against. The disciple is instructed to continue until it is possible to remain strictly with the object, penetrating more deeply, no longer looking at it but, as the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng maintained essential, as it. Only then will he attain the state of muga, so close an identification with object that the unstable mentalizing self disappears. The profoundest haiku give a very strong sense of the process:
Dew of the bramble,
thorns
sharp white.
BUSON
Arid fields,
the only life—
necks of cranes.
SHIKO
To give an idea of the way haiku work, without making an odious cultural comparison, here is Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” perhaps the most admired (and for good reason) haiku-like poem in English:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
A simile, the poem startles as haiku often do, but much of what is said would, to a haiku poet, be implied. Incorporating the title (haiku are never titled), he might make the poem read:
Faces in the metro—
petals
on a wet black bough.
If asked why, he might answer: the first few words, “The apparition of these,” though sonorous enough, add nothing. Nor does the reference to “crowd,” metro stations usually being crowded—besides, the “petals” of the simile would make that clear. His revision, he might claim, transforms the piece into an acceptable haiku, one rather like, although perhaps less effective than, Onitsura’s:
Autumn wind—
across the fields,
faces.
Without using simile, Onitsura stuns with an immediacy of vision—those faces whipped by a cold wind.
For centuries haiku has been extremely popular, and there are established schools with widely differing views. Typical is the Tenro, truly traditional, working with the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern and a clear seasonal reference, and possessing a creed—Shasei, on-the-spot composition, with the subject “traced to its origin.” There are around two thousand members all over Japan, and it is usual for groups to meet at a designated spot, often a Zen temple, and write as many as one hundred haiku in a night, perhaps only one of which, after months of selection and revision, will be adequate. It will then be sent to one of the school’s masters and considered for the annual anthology, representing poems of some thirty members.
Untypical, by comparison, is the Soun (free-verse) school, which feels no obligation to stick to the seventeen-syllable pattern. Its poems, short and compact, are written in the “spirit of Basho.” Their creed is more general—Significance—and is very close to Zen, as many of the members are involved in this discipline. They follow an ancient dictum, Zenshi ichimi (Poetry and Zen are one), and Kado, the Way of Poetry. As they strive for the revelatory, fewer poems are written than in the Tenro. Both schools, while opposed in principle, relate haiku to Zen, as do all other schools. Yet very few contemporary haiku could have pleased Basho, for however lofty their ideals they are generally derivative.
Kado, the Way of poetry to self-discovery, is similar in aim to other do (Ways) of Zen: Gado (painting), Shodo (calligraphy), Jindo (philosophy), Judo (force). Haiku teachers and Zen masters expect no miracles of disciples, yet maintain that with serious practice of an art, given aspirations, men perfect themselves: farmers and professors make their haiku, the most egalitarian of arts. To those who find art a mystery engaged in by the chosen, the sight of a haiku-school group circling an autumn bush, lined notebooks and pens in hand, can be sharply touching. Only a cynic would fail to respond.
Only the few, of course, achieve true distinction in the skill and are known to all who care for poetry. Usually they echo early masters, but some find that language cramping and consciously introduce the modern—factories, tractors, automobiles. They will admit, without derogating, to taking little pleasure from old haiku. They are, however, generous readers of one another’s work and that of certain contemporary poets. One in whom many are interested, despite his not being a writer of haiku, is Shinkichi Takahashi, who, until his death in 1987, was regarded throughout Japan as the greatest living Zen poet.
On a stone overlooking the sea in a fishing village on Shikoku Island, a poem is carved:
ABSENCE
Just say, “He’s out”—
back in
five billion years!
It is Shinkichi Takahashi’s voice we hear. He was born in 1901, and the commemorative stone, placed by his townsmen, is one of many honors accorded him in recent years; another is the Ministry of Education’s prestigious Prize for Art, awarded for Collected Poems (1973). In Japan poets are often honored in this way, but rarely one as anarchical as Takahashi. He began as a Dadaist, publishing the novel Dada in 1924, and defied convention thereafter. Locked up in his early life a few times for “impulsive actions,” when his newly printed Dadaist Shinkichi’s Poetry was handed to him through the bars of a police cell, he tore it into shreds.
In 1928 Takahashi began serious Zen study under the master Shizan Ashikaga at the Shogenji Rinzai Temple, known for severity of discipline. He trained for seventeen long years, doing zazen (formal sitting in meditation) and studying koans—on which he wrote numerous poems. He attained enlightenment (satori) for the first time on reaching the age of forty. In 1953, when fifty-two, he was given inka (his awakening testified to) by Shizan, one of seven disciples so honored up to that time. In addition to some fiction and much poetry, he has written books on Zen highly regarded by Zenists, among them Stray Notes on Zen Study (1958), Mumonkan (1958), Rinzairoku (1959) and A Life of Master Dogen (1963).
Takahashi has interested fellow-poets and critics, East and West. A Japanese poet writes:
Takahashi’s poetry is piquancy itself, just as Zen, the quintessence of Buddhism, bawls out by means of its concise vocabulary a sort of piquant ontology. … Where does this enlivened feature come from? It comes from his strange disposition which enables him to sense the homogeneity of all things, including human beings. It is further due to his own method of versification: he clashes his idea of timelessness against the temporality of all phenomena to cause a fissure, through which he lets us see personally and convincingly the reality of limitless space.
The American poet Jim Harrison comments in the American Poetry Review on his “omniscience about the realities that seems to typify genius of the first order,” and goes on:
Nothing is denied entrance into these poems. … All things are in their minutely suggestive proportions, and given an energy we aren’t familiar with. … Part of the power must come from the fact that the poet has ten thousand centers as a Zenist, thus is virtually centerless.
Philosophical insight is uncommon enough, but its authentic expression in poetry is extremely rare, whether found in T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” or in Shinkichi Takahashi’s “Shell”:
is born,
dies, the shell says again
and again
from the depth of hollowness.
Its body
swept off by tide—so what?
It sleeps
in sand, drying in sunlight,
bathing
in moonlight. Nothing to do
with sea
or anything else. Over
and over
it vanishes with the wave.
On one level this is a “survivor” poem, inspiring in its moral grandeur; on another, surely important to the poet, it expresses dramatically Zen’s unfathomable emptiness. Here is the Chinese master Tao-hsin, Zen’s Fourth Patriarch, in a sermon on “Abandoning the Body”:
The method of abandoning the body consists first in meditating on Emptiness. … Let the mind together with its world be quietened down to a perfect state of tranquillity; let thought be cast in the mystery of quietude, so that the mind is kept from wandering from one thing to another. When the mind is tranquillized in its deepest abode, its entanglements are cut asunder … the mind in its absolute purity is the void itself. How almost unconcerned it appears. … Emptiness, non-striving, desirelessness, formlessness—this is true emancipation.
According to the great Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu, his admirer, Tao-hsin said, “Heaven and earth are one finger.” In the poem “Hand,” Takahashi writes, “Snap my fingers—/time’s no more.” He concludes, “My hand’s the universe, / it can do anything.” While such a poem may show indebtedness to masters like Tao-hsin, in a piece like the following, deceptively light, the poet’s grasp is equally apparent:
AFTERNOON
My hair’s falling fast—
this afternoon
I’m off to Asia Minor.
Always in Takahashi there is evidence of profound Zen, in itself distinguishing. His appeal, though, is by no means limited to Zenists, for his imagination has dizzying power: cosmic, surging through space and time (“Atom of thought, ten billion years—/one breath, past, present, future”), it pulls one beyond reality. At times, among his sparrows, he resembles the T’ang master Niaok’e (Bird’s Nest), so called because he meditated high in a tree, wise among the creatures.
Yet Takahashi is never out of this world, which for Zenists is a network of particulars, each reflecting the universal and taking reality from its relationship to all others: it has otherwise no existence. This doctrine of Interpenetration, as known in Zen and all other schools of Mahayana Buddhism, cannot be understood without being felt: to those incapable of feeling, such ideals have been thought mere “mysticism.” Poets and philosophers have attempted for centuries to explain interdependence. Here is the late second-century Indian philosopher Pingalaka:
If the cloth had its own fixed, unchangeable self-essence, it could not be made from the thread … the cloth comes from the thread and the thread from the flax. … It is just like the … burning and the burned. They are brought together under certain conditions, and thus there takes place a phenomenon called burning … each has no reality of its own. For when one is absent the other is put out of existence. It is so with all things in this world, they are all empty, without self, without absolute existence. They are like the will-o’-the-wisp.
For one who believes in the interpenetration of all living things, the world is a body, and if he is a poet like Takahashi, troubled by what the unenlightened inflict upon one another, he will write:
Why this confusion,
how restore the ravaged
body of the world?
And against this confusion he will invoke the saving force of Buddhism, the layman Vimalakirti who “at a word draws galaxies to the foot of his bed,” and Buddha himself, in a poem like “Spinning Dharma Wheel,” which ends:
Three thousand years since Buddha
found the morning star—now
sun itself is blinded by his light.
The poet once wrote, “We must model ourselves on Bodhidharma, who kept sitting till his buttocks grew rotten. We must have done with all words and letters, and attain truth itself.” This echo of Lao-tzu in the Taoist classic Tao Teh Ching (“He who knows does not speak”) is, as truth, relative: to communicate his wisdom, Lao-tzu had to speak, and Takahashi’s voice is inexhaustible. No one would question his seriousness, the near doctrinal tone of some of his work, yet his best poems pulse with Zenki (Zen dynamism), flowing spontaneously from the formless self and partaking of the world’s fullness:
CAMEL
The camel’s humps
shifted with clouds.
Such solitude beheads!
My arms stretch
beyond mountain peaks,
flame in the desert.
Such are the three major phases of Zen poetry, spanning nearly 1,500 years from the earliest examples to the present, and displaying distinctive characteristics: the Chinese master Reito would very likely have appreciated Shinkichi Takahashi, much as Takahashi values Reito. This consistency, while very special, is by no means inexplicable. The philosophy underlying the poetry is today, in every respect, precisely what it was in T’ang China: it worked then, it works now, in the face of all that would seem bent on undermining it. In Japan, where industry is king, the need for Zen intensifies, and particular care is taken to preserve its temples and art treasures, numbered among the nation’s glories.
Perhaps today Zen’s spirit shines most purely in its poetry, some of which is familiar to all, wherever they happen to live and however limited their knowledge of the philosophy. Yet consciously or not, those who care for Fuyo-Dokai, Issa or Shinkichi Takahashi know Zen—as much as those who revere Mu-ch’i and Sesshu. For to respond strongly to poetry and painting is to understand the source of their inspiration, just as to relate fully to others is to understand Zen’s interpenetration—more completely than do those who, though familiar with its terminology, are incapable of attaining its spiritual riches. Walt Whitman, a poet much admired by Zenists, wrote in “Song for Occupations”:
We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say
they are not divine,
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out
of you still,
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from
the earth, than they are shed out of you.
Zen always traveled well in time and space, through denying them. Its poetry will continue to move some to heroic efforts toward light, constandy delight others—which is as it should be. “Zen is offering something,” the master Taigan Takayama said, “and offering it direcdy. People just can’t seem to grasp it.” Zen not only offers itself directly, but everywhere, and nowhere more authentically than in poems written in its name and honor, as the Chinese layman Sotoba realized nearly a thousand years ago when he wrote in his enlightenment:
The mountain—Buddha’s body.
The torrent—his preaching.
Last night, eighty-four thousand poems.
How, how make them understand?
LUCIEN STRYK