And this one's Tricycle. You've seen it? Oh, well, in a minute. Jane Hirshfield and somebody else write about the poetry of Basho. I, too. And it may be just serendipitous, or what do you call it? Synchronistic, that we have so many people interested suddenly in the same... And they even quote in it here the poem of Wallace Stevens that we... Didn't we talk about? Snowman? You didn't? I recited it. Oh, I guess I did that in Texas. Anyway, they quote it in here too. So either we're all a lot more caught by certain ideas and images of what we think Zen and poetry is about, and there's some unanimous feeling there, or it's just a coincidence.

[01:07]

Being in perfect dharma is related with even a hundred thousand million kaphas. Having to see and listen to, remember and accept. I vow to face the truth of the Tathagata's words. I see we have a basket full of fresh produce. Greenwood. Fresh greenwood tonight. And we can read some of those later in the hour. So tonight... You know, for two weeks, the last two weeks, we've pretty much been looking at or suggesting what poetry in the tradition, the Chinese and Japanese tradition, and the particular mood and culture in which it gives rise to, has in common.

[02:21]

And we'll look at one more poet tonight, translation of one more poet tonight of that ilk. And then beginning next week, we're going to move up to our time with our contemporary poets and see if this makes some connection between the particular context in which we think those poems were written and the mindsets of those poems and how they may or may not at all jibe with what we think this particular aspect of being a wanderer, a dropout, an iconoclast, a dissatisfied but poetic and highly sensitive individual informed by the teachings of the Buddha, who happens also to find great memorable poetic expression how that particular idea that we have is just that, our particular idea.

[03:25]

And tonight I want to look at ryokan with a great fuo, daigu. How many people have heard of Ryoka? See? Of course. We have an authority tonight, so if I make a mistake, you can correct me, okay? Yeah. Um... You see, Ryokan is extremely popular with Zen students. In fact, the writings, the publications concerning this particular individual, both in Japan and in the West in the last 25 years, is enormous.

[04:30]

Not only his poems, as they appear in anthologies or in collections, but scholarly works about him. Because it seems with Ryokan, we come to some kind of quintessential... I will almost say archetype or an individual who exhibits all of these characteristics and just how do we pen down those characteristics and then how does that actually influence our idea of who we are as Zen practitioners maybe. So in view of that approach, I thought it might be a good idea if I read allowed a few poems. I don't have them duplicated this week because I just got back from a trip and we were busy today with many things, including a long meeting this afternoon. But what I would like to do is mention a few things about Ryokan and then read some of his poems.

[05:37]

And as you listen to the poems, I want you to think of how you see this person, if you can find a maybe salient or characteristic feature that you'd put into one definition of what you hear in this particular person as his work from the 18th century is translated into our 20th or 21st century English idiomatic translation and what the implications of that whole thing is and then kind of check back with the other poets we've also looked at particularly Hanshant and later Santoka okay did I do that sound all right

[06:39]

Before I do, I want to say a couple of things. One of the poems that Ryokan is famous for is this one, which goes, Who says that my poems are poems? My poems aren't poems at all. When you understand that my poems... When you understand that my poems really aren't poems, then we can talk about poetry together. Who says my poems are poems? My poems aren't poems at all. When you understand that my poems really aren't poems, then we can talk poetry together. Well, what does he mean, his poems aren't poems? So maybe you'll catch... some essence of this guy, and then we'll talk a little bit more about his life, some true little biographical things about him. And see if you get a whiff of something in here that might already be there in your life.

[07:56]

Walking along, I follow the drifting stream to its source. Did you read Wang Wei's poem last week? Sound familiar? Walking along, I follow the drifting stream to its source, but reaching the headwaters left me stunned. That's when I realized that the true source isn't a particular place you can reach. So now, wherever my staff sets down, I just play in the currents, eddies, and swirls. Where you have beauty, you have ugliness, too. Where you have right, you will also have wrong. Knowledge and ignorance are each other's cause. Delusion and enlightenment produce one another. It's always been so. It didn't start now. You get rid of this, then grab hold of that. Don't you see how stupid it is? If you're determined to find the innermost truth, why trouble about the changing face of things?

[08:59]

Those are two didactic or teaching poems, as it were. Doesn't have a name right now. I might find it up here. But most of these don't have names. Well, see me after. I'll talk about him in a minute. I'll talk about him and his life. But first, before I... I already set up the context in which you'll come at the poems. Let the poems speak for him, for himself, and then we'll talk about who it is a little bit. Empty bowl. Remember the empty bowl of Santoka? Clear skies ring with a honk of wild geese on deserted hills, leaves swirl in the wind, twilight on a smoky village road, carrying an empty begging bowl and walking home alone. Will my stupidity and stubbornness ever end? Poor and alone, that's my life.

[10:03]

Twilight on the streets of a ramshackle town, going home again with an empty bowl. That's one mood. All day I gaze on smoky villages, walking and walking, begging as I go. Night falls and the long mountain road stretches before me. The wind bitter enough to tear out your whiskers. My threadbare robe trembles like swirling fog. My wooden begging bowl grows ever stranger with age. I've never minded hardship and cold. Such has always been the lot of people like me. Go, go, go, go on. It's a measure of rice. It's a place that he called his hermitage. It's plain and simple, go, go on. Inside a room that's utterly bare.

[11:05]

Beyond the door, a forest of cedars. A few sutra hymns are placed on the walls. The rice pot often gathers dust. The steamer simply sits unused. Only the old man from the village to the east now and then knocks at my door in the moonlight. Now notice that these poems move in many... Who is that old man that knocks on his door? Is Ryokan being literal? Is Ryokan being metaphorical? Is he being contextual? How are we to interpret these poems about him, knowing something about his life? Here are a couple more. I think you already get the drift, but... Delusion and enlightenment, two sides of a coin, universe in particular, just parts of a whole. All day I read the wordless scriptures. All night I practice no practice meditation. On the riverbank, a bush warbler sings in the weeping willow.

[12:09]

In the sleeping village, a dog bays at the moon. Nothing troubles the free flow of my feelings, but how can this mind be passed on? And maybe one or two more. And then let's get a feeling. Write down a word, any word that strikes you about this guy. Where did my life come from? Where will it go? Meditating by the window of my tumble-down hut, I search my heart absorbed in silence. But I search and search, but I search and search and still don't know where it all began. How will I ever find where it ends? Even the present moment can't be pinned down. Everything changes. Everything is empty. And in that emptiness, the, quote, I exists only for a little while. How can one say anything is or is not? Best just to hold to these little thoughts.

[13:10]

Let things simply take their way and so be natural and at your ease. What does that remind you of? Anybody that I've given you any readings about? Who was it said, names are the guests of reality? Now this is really central to our argument about names. Who was it said, names are the guests of reality? These words have come down to us from ancient times, but even if people know that names aren't real, they still don't see that reality itself has no root. Name, reality, both are beside the point. Just naturally find joy in the ever-changing flow. Who was it said, names are the guests of reality?

[14:17]

There's a footnote that will tell you who it was. These words have come down to us from ancient times, but even if people know that names aren't real, they don't see that reality itself has no root. Name, reality, both are beside the point. Just naturally find joy in the ever-changing flow. Now what? You think he's always going with the empty flow? Listen to this one. Sitting alone in my empty room, my mind restless and downcast. I saddle my horse and ride far, far away. Climb to a height and gaze out over the distant scene. A whirlwind springs up, shaking the earth. In no time at all, the sun sinks in the west. Broad rivers churn with foaming waves. Fields stretch endlessly past the horizon. Black monkeys call to their companions with melancholic cries.

[15:21]

Wild geese wing their way south. A hundred carers line my brow. Ten thousand troubles rid my heart. I want to return, but I've lost the way back. Here it is, the end of another year. What am I to do? Whoop. Rags and patches, patches and rags, rags and patches, that's my life. My food is whatever I beg by the roadside. My house is completely overrun with wild grass. In autumn, gazing at the moon, I recite poetry all night long. In spring, entranced by the blossoms, I wander off and forget to come home. I left the temple and this is how I ended up, a broken down old mule. And finally, maybe one more. Ever since I quit the temple, my life has been completely carefree.

[16:22]

My staff is always at my side. My robe is worn completely threadbare. At night, in my hut, through the lonely window, I hear the falling rain. On spring days, when the flowers riot and bloom, I'm playing ball out on the street. If anyone asks what I'm doing, I say, the most useless man there ever was. Who was Ryoka? A real person. What do you mean? He seems real. He doesn't seem like, you know, some kind of... He seems real. Okay. He feels real. Anybody else? Romantic. Why? Because everything has this, like, this feeling. Colorful. Lots of rich feeling to it.

[17:24]

What else would mark it as romantic? Longing. A kind of melancholy. But that's hung over all of these poems to some extent, hasn't it? The sense of loneliness. Sabi. Sometimes depressed. Seems to have a great need to be exposed to wrong. need to live on the edge yeah he needs to and you know he doesn't have much of a choice okay now some of the biographical stuff about rio con is that he came from upper middle class family His father was village elder and he was very important kind of family connections. He had brothers and sisters at his early age since he was supposed to inherit his father's role as a kind of mediator in disputes.

[18:25]

He lived, by the way, about the time of our revolution in the 18th century. He died in the 1890s, 1790s, I think. Um... He went to a monastery at an early age, and according to what we understand from the notes that he's left behind, that he studied for years in a very rigorous, even severely rigorous practice for a number of years. And at some point, he had an awakening and went to his master, and his master gave him the name of Ryokan. But he also called him Daegu, Great Fool. Now, he has become such a legend in his own country that we can't separate the legend part and what he might have really been like.

[19:27]

But according to the legend, He left the monastery because he was dissatisfied after this particular point with what he saw was a kind of decadence settling into the religious establishment, not unlike Saigyo 500 years before. And he wandered about begging, making his life by begging. We think, right? That's how it sounds like, that he went about begging from door to door, making his livelihood that way. And would go back to his little grass shack on the shores of Waikiki. No, that's the wrong century. To his little grass hut up in the mountains and... and live on the edge, kind of a hand-to-mouth existence. He was also called Great Fool because he loved to play with children for hours on end, hide and go seek. There are many stories about him going to close his eyes or hide, you know, not look as the children run and hours later, six, seven hours later, he's still in the fields holding his hands over his eyes.

[20:37]

So there's something in the myth of Ryokan about great naivete, it sounds like, the sense of not being very sophisticated. Yet, at the same time, his literary capacity, he wrote kanji poems in Chinese. Many of those poems were written in Chinese. He wrote many in Japanese. His calligraphy is today priceless as a collector's item. He was known even at his time as a great collector and a wonderful poet, and people would try to stop him on the street to see if they could get him to write something, and he would put them off. Now, if you read the letters that he wrote to people, which are, by the way, in this book, which, by the way, is also in the library, you will see that he sent home or sent to various people requests for numerous things, such as sake, tobacco—he loved to smoke— So as for rice, as for materials with which to write his poems and so on, and lived very often in the shadow of a larger establishment.

[21:44]

So although he sounds like a very romantic figure and so on, Ryoka, and he practiced very hard, what this archetype, this person that finds some resonance and response in what? In our own hearts. Because he is what? He's free. The thing you feel about Ryokan is, I'm free of it. I'm free of the establishment. I'm free of following any particular way of being other than letting the winds of the moment blow me now this way and now that way. Does that kind of... Do you have ever read anything or felt something like that's how you would like to study... Read it. I'll tell you a story to break in for a moment. I wanted that life too and I got it. And it was the most miserable nine months I ever spent in my life.

[22:49]

Why? I mean, here, for years I had read Rio Kahn's The image of having a little shack, almost no needs, having your life informed by a Buddhist practice. Romantic, yes, because it's rustic. Romantic, yes, because it's kind of back to nature. It's kind of counter-establishment. It has a sense of the earthiness of things, the eternality of the myth of the earth and all of this. Back to nature, back to a simpler life form, and so forth. So I spent nine months in a hut that wasn't much bigger than his that you could barely stand up in, had one sink in it and two tatami mats. And every day I had to face myself about how real this idea was and how romantic it was in our heads because as has been pointed out in more than one book, that when we take these Japanese and Chinese poets, we unconsciously, as Westerners, sift them through our own romantic ideas.

[24:00]

That is the romance that comes down from someone like Rousseau, that which countered the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. We color it with our own ideas of being a dropout, of being footloose and fancy-free in a world of phenomena in which we can be great fools and have no more particular need to do anything but wander about. But what would happen to you if you did that in our time? If you got a staff in our time and acted like Ryokan did, you'd probably be given a handful of Prozac and sent to a homeless shelter. And then analyzed, maybe for a while, to find out why you were so neurotic that you couldn't conform. Which reminds me of a poem. What? I was just going to say, actually, they don't pay that much attention to homeless people. You would just be one of the homeless people. But if he was just one of the homeless people, he wouldn't be Ryokan.

[25:01]

Why not? monastery for 20 years. Well, that's one of them. Even if you practiced in a monastery for 20 years, why would you still have this particular mood wandering in the fields and streams of America? Huh? You're not Japanese. You're not part of that context. There is a whole context in which this is possible to be this way. Now, read one of those Hanshan poems. And you'll hear exactly, it sounds like the same voice, and of course he read Hanshan. That was one of his favorite poems, poets was Hanshan. He was carrying on this myth of the dropout wanderer holy man. Excuse me. But himself, his great contribution was that in his poetry as a Mahayana poet, Ryokan managed to not take sides on being enlightened or being unenlightened, in being poor or being rich.

[26:11]

In any of the dichotomies that are hidden within our language itself, Ryokan exposed those dichotomies in his life, in the way he lived, and manifested what, at least one argument is, a real exemplar of non-duality. Yesterday, did I tell you this poem? Yesterday they got Basho. You know that one? This is if they live today. Yesterday they got Basho. They already, as you know, picked up Hanshan, Milarepa, and Lipo. And Latsu, that old coot, they sent to Napa long ago. You know what Napa is? Right. the state mental hospital or the county mental hospital. As for Bodhidharma, he got busted for illegal entry and is cooling his heels in El Paso.

[27:13]

But yesterday, damn it, yesterday after all, they finally got poor old Basho for writing a haiku on a restroom wall. That's one of mine. But what's interesting is that in some way I had to take the feeling of how it would be today if you tried to be Basho. Another time I put in my backpack... Basho's poetry, Hakuin's poetry, and I think Philip Whelan, maybe, something like that. And was walking up the mountain roads with my staff, quoting them and so on. Basho, you know, or Hakuin, or... Sandoka, and so I'm thinking of that kind of life, and suddenly coming over the hill was Kawasaki. And Yamaha.

[28:22]

And I met Yamaha and Kawasaki on the road, and I'm quoting Basho. And they're sitting on Yamaha, and so you see, we brought these. What I'm trying to say is, if we update... If we update teachers, poets, to conform to our idea of who we think they were, not to mention in their own context who they thought they were in terms of the practice, then there is no difference between what we consider to be what they realized and what we realized. And if that is the case, that is not a Buddhist teaching of dependent co-arising and the impermanence of all things, is it? Yes. If we think that we can live the life of Basho, just as Basho thought that he could live the life of Hanshan, and we try to update the model of the teacher, to conform to or to fit our preconceptions of whom we think that person's enlightenment is, then what we think that person experienced as enlightenment in our experience is no different.

[29:34]

And if it is no different, it means it has, what, an entity, an integral self that has not changed according to context through time. This is not understanding what he was actually writing about. I think. It's mimicking. It's being a little phony. So if we try to act like, even in our poetry in our day and age, we have to invest, or what should I say, we have to inculcate into our words, into our expressions, those cultural signs and symbols and signals and so on, that show us who we are, linguistically, as a culture, because culture is language. You see what I'm saying? So, here's what I want from you for next week. Try to write the following kind of poems. One, try to write a poem that's didactic.

[30:39]

That is to say, it just has something to do with the lesson about how you understand the practice. I think I tried to write one myself to see what I meant by that. Well, it was something like, all the Buddhas and ancestors are nothing else but the transmission of this face-to-face meeting at this moment, something like that. Whenever you're coming up with... a sudden insight into what you're studying, that what the Buddhas and ancestors are about are not people living at some other time at some other place. They're the arising of your own mind at this moment in that kind of condition. Anything like that that is revealed to you as you're doing your study, write it down.

[31:42]

Make it like a didactic poem. What's the matter? You're frowning right there. Is that okay? Oh, fine. No, I thought maybe you were saying, no, no, no. But that I mean, it's not clear what I'm asking for. And just, it's not clear. I mean, it's clear, but it's not clear. How about birthless I am born, deathless I die. Something like that. In which, possibly, if you can turn the two sides of the image back on itself. Another one I thought of was this robe of liberation is also a straitjacket and a charade. Turns around. Try to find an image that turns and shows both sides of the story.

[32:46]

In as short a way as possible. You understand what I'm saying? And then as we build longer poems as we go on through the weeks, we can use these particular conceits. I think the main thing I'm trying to get at here for myself and for all of us is that there's no way you can write an authentic poem with the same kind of feeling that, because we don't know what his feeling was that Ryokan had. We don't know what Hanshan really felt. We're only guessing, and we're guessing it through the filter of our own interpretation. As long as we're constantly doing that and we're always updating what that means. In other words, we're keeping that spirit alive. How that really applies to us in our own way. How we really respond to being that particular kind of individual who goes his or her own way. This is a big thing in Zen. Is the tension, you see it here, is the tension between the collective as the church and so on and the individual within those forms.

[33:49]

What is that tension? How do you manifest it? where yourself as an autonomous feeling individual expresses himself within the context of the greater whole that made you who you are. In this case, it would be the Soto Zen Buddhist church that gave him the form by which he could feel himself. You follow? This is contextual, looking at the context in which we... So find phrases... that means something to you. They can even be slang phrases. And try to be as concrete with those phrases as possible. Is it personal? Yeah, it can be personal. Watch how you use the pronoun I. Of course, with this kind of language, Japanese and Chinese, you don't need pronouns as much as you do in English. But you can still... You can still... You can still give a presentation without actually putting the I in there, and you can even have feelings in your poetry that don't express who the I is, but is implied, such as a phrase, alone with the wind and the cry of the hawk.

[35:12]

You could say, well, I'd like to go out to nature to be in solitude, and that's very abstract. But if you say, alone with the wind and the cry of the hawk, you get all that feeling. You can feel the wind, you can hear the audio part of it, and you can feel the spaciousness of it. You look for those kind of images that bring disparate sides of our experience together to form the emptiness, for example. Any questions? I have a poem about real time. Shoot. Lonely bastard, drunk on emptiness, get a life, break school. That's right. When Ryokan writes, those who say I'm a poet don't understand me.

[36:23]

What he's suggesting, at least to me, is that, in fact, he said it outright. He said, there's three things I dislike. Poetry by poets, cooking by professional cooks, and calligraphy by professional calligraphers. But this is always taking a position that one has against some established culture. position in the world. And I have a feeling that a lot of us come here out of a need to do that, to find ourselves over and against what any particular establishment, whether it's art, whether it's sciences, whether it particularly is religion and so on. Out of that tension between who you should be as a practitioner within the form, mimicking the forms, imitating the forms that are passed down and where you feel your own when you feel this edge of yourself come in friction or in tension with those traditions, that tension, if we keep that tension alive, if we can give expression to that tension, that's where poetry, that's where language begins to redefine the meanings inherent in the traditions that have come before.

[37:41]

We find a new way to express something. But it is a new way. The way that we will express ourselves will not be the same way that Hakuin expressed himself or Ryokan expressed himself in terms of our practice. These are only models. Okay. And then next week, I want to bring some up-to-date poems, as I said, that actually pick up issues, social issues. Buddhism as... Buddhism as kind of social activism. Some of those poems by people like Kerry Snyder. And where they seem to fit with this kind of tradition and where the points of departure are. There's one he wrote that comes to mind right away, Smoky the Bear Sutra, remember that? And our own Norman. and several other people.

[38:43]

The book from which we will be looking at, and you can get it in the library, and maybe you can even get it in the bookstore, is called, What Book? Have you seen that book? It's about poets from professionals and amateurs and people within children and so on, all writing about different aspects of Buddhist practice. And for the next two weeks I want to do that, write and begin to write longer poems. maybe eight lines or so, maybe even ten lines of poetry that begin to, using these ideas of immediacy, one hit, maybe as a starting point, a didactic point. Notice how he'll use the didactic idea of impermanence and so on, all, you know, if you have good, you have bad and so on. Then he'll suddenly switch in about the third part of the poem to the wisteria or some, what's called objective correlative, something that physically, some physical detail that recapitulates, that shows that idea in the phenomenon at large, so that you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it.

[39:54]

That's important for us to do, to come alive with us. The reason we love him, even in translation, is because he feels very human. We can almost step into his shoes, we feel. We feel. We feel. Okay, we've got a few minutes, so we're going to read some poems here tonight, right? And I wanted to ask you, when it comes time to make up our little chapbook, do you want your names on them, or should it be anonymous? How many want anonymous? Anonymity. How many want their names? There's nothing wrong to have your name... Okay. Okay, so some people, I guess, I don't know exactly how we're going to do this... To what? Those who wanted their names on them had the names on them.

[41:10]

Yeah. One of the things I said in the beginning, and this is very interesting, it's part of our practice actually, is to begin to look how our egos begin to get involved. And this is a question about You know, I think I'm pretty good. Do I want to come forward and show it? I don't think I'm very good at all. And, you know, begin to see this comparative mind come up as we express ourselves in language, which is a pretty good way to express yourselves. We're doing it all the time. And the name of the game is what? Yeah. Who said that words aren't real? Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Baloney. You'll heal from sticks and stones, but names can wound you forever, right? So, always in Buddhist practice, there's right speech. How do we use language in a way that tells the truth, is open? How do we use language?

[42:13]

What is right speech as poets? Does Charles Bukowski write right speech? Does right speech only mean it has to be circumscribed by certain moral standards? What is right speech for a poet when it comes time? Yeah. Taking responsibility? Good point. As long as you put your name on it, you're taking responsibility, right? Right. Any other comments on this? We need a way to proceed because one of these days we're going to have to get to work on it. And I'm also thinking that we can't maybe print every poem. There's an awful lot of work to be done if we did it all, right? I don't know if we could do every one.

[43:14]

But then how do we call through them? Should we just grab them on a hat? I mean, what's fair? Are we going to edit them? See how this becomes... We have to put them all on a computer, right? It's going to take forever. We get a busy man on that. So I think we need to call through them some way. And I'm not quite sure how we're going to do that yet. Not to talk that over. All of us could. Mm-hmm. That doesn't mean it needs to be here. Or just one night, right downstairs, call him. Well, Mick offered to be the putter together of this. I'd be happy to designate him the editor as well.

[44:16]

You know, and as far as... What if it was just one manuscript copy? One manuscript copy of that? Okay, right. Well, I see that the mechanics of this has yet to be worked out. And this is... Now, anybody who's inspired to actually take this very subject as something to write about... My poems are not poems. Whoever calls them poems don't understand me because I'm not about poetry, says real God. What am I about? I'm about living my life freely and openly, in which poetry is part of the expression of how I do that. But don't call me a poet first. On the other hand, I'm known for my poetry. And always, always, always by that which is absent, by that which you can...

[45:23]

you know, expressed as the opposite that sparks your inspiration, that part of the establishment, you have to realize without that, without having the very thing he wanted to drop out from, the very thing he dislikes, without that there's no ryokan. So what is that thing we push against, fight against, object against, write about? I'm not this, I'm not that. Trying to find the conflation of the self and other in one line, in one poem. Our language itself is set up with dualities, isn't it? Our language is already set up with good and hierarchies. Good, bad, male, female, black, white, so forth. And always the second of those pairs are unconsciously of lower status. And these are already implied in our language. that we have hierarchical signs built into the way we express ourselves.

[46:25]

By writing poems, since we don't have... You know, we don't have masculine and feminine forms particularly in our nouns, verbs and so on as other languages, adjectives that other languages might. They're more implied than made explicit. So by taking on forms of poetry and writing about them, we begin to see what our attitudes are. Unconsciously they come forward. Give a name to the way you feel. Name it. And once you name it, you're taking the whole history of all the language and bringing it forward into your life and expressing it. We have to express ourselves some way in order for this tradition to keep changing and growing. And if we get caught in only being one way and understanding one way of being in the world...

[47:26]

we're soon not going to have a practice or a practice place. Unless we are inspired to come here and practice and have been inspired by the past, by those figures of the past, want to discover something that they had to say and then bring it forward into a new way, a new language, a new code. One way to be inspired in our practice is to come forward and articulate our point of view. Freshly, by taking these words and freshly expressing ourselves. And not just mimicking. My mind is not Dogen Zenji's mind. If it's one mind, one taste from the beginning, and we understand one taste to mean one thing, there's no telling what they meant by one taste, what the context was. What do we mean by it, then? You know, what I'm saying is this is an exercise that we're constantly faced with.

[48:33]

How to articulate and bring forth the teaching in the here and now as ourselves. Not some dead thing. Sit like your hair is on fire even if you're too green to burn. Splitting freshly cut too green to burn, eucalyptus rounds, green juice spurts out. I heard a bird sing. the tall stately redwood trees blue-tagged for cutting, too green to burn. Too green to burn.

[49:34]

Try a didactic poem. Turn 360 degrees and see with the mind picked up. Can this class help bring the immediate into focus? No. I swear I said those exact words, but it's not my writing. Somebody's listening. Too green to burn, yet here I am. Please scatter my ashes over the sea. Now I understand. Without these white plum blossoms, the world falls apart. A patch of sunlight moves slowly across the wall. The birds grow quiet. The cry of a hawk meets a sunbeam, both pierce the heart.

[50:35]

Mountains bristle brush after the rain, and you take sworn careful step. Spring breeze caress the grass, passing wind always cracks me up. A smiling face for lunch, tofu for dinner, a dew drop in the sun, every tooth a diamond. A breeze caressing me at the reservoir, the wind chases the waves. Rain hits the sky like trees alive in the breeze. Water wakes to be turned to paper. I'm on fire, you said. You're too green to burn, I said. Oh, really, you asked? No, not really. Did I hear Too Green to Burn in that?

[51:42]

It's nice, but I didn't hear... This is good, but I'm looking for Too Green to Burn poems at the moment. Fresh mint, cool light, the streams wide of the fire, too green to burn. Read it again, please. Fresh mint, cool light, the streams wide of the fire, too green to burn. Wide of the fire? Wide of the light? Wide of the fire. Too green to burn, eyes bright, heart warming.

[52:57]

This dove's gonna fly. Too green to burn, fawning over nighttime nukes. I tried to stroke his back. Instead, I felt a puddle. You know, read it slowly and clearly. Sometimes it's hard. It would really help if you printed these poems so they were easy to read. Arrived at these gates 24 years ago, too green to burn. I am not yet ready to be head student, but find I am ready for joy, for meeting, for knowing you. Ready or not, here I come. Maybe one more here, and then we'll go on.

[54:06]

California March All the sweet young monks Too green to burn California March All the sweet young monks. The Greek to burn. Pedals on the path. February monks in shorts. The Greek to burn. Let's have a muffin now. Oh, doesn't have to be the bread. Can I still read this?

[55:23]

Yes. Can I have a muffin? Incept before dawn. Broken moon on rippling pond. Moonlight on the path. Read that last one once more. Incense before dawn, profane moon on rippling ponds, moonlight on the path. There's actually another one that we'll put some more. Moonlight on the path, carrying the kaboku. Now the break begins. Try to see also if you can write, you don't have to do it for next week, but before we're done, to write a poem that has no adjectives or adverbs. And even if possible, to write... No, I don't know if it would be possible.

[56:32]

No qualifiers, in other words. Nothing to describe... the action itself other than the verb, the qualifier, nothing to modify the person or the nominative, the noun, the thing. In other words, thing in action, thing in action, thing in action, and bringing two maybe two elements into the thing in action. Something abstract about your teaching and something concrete. Try that. Without adjectives, without adverbs. What this does is help us to, instead of trying to describe something, find those very things and those very actions that suggest it. Could you give an example of something abstracted? Yeah. Just as that, you know, you could say plum blossoms, you know, sprinkled on the muddy path, right?

[57:46]

I'm not feeling very good myself or I'm feeling something about my own passing or something in which All things are impermanent, plum blossoms on the... Something in which you find, at the moment I can't come up, I'm not very creative at the moment, but something that... Yeah. Rather than just have a totally didactic poem, have a didactic poem and then find the correlative that expresses it without adjectives. Well, I did. I said I'm not feeling very creative right now. I'd have to sit down and... So that should be the didactic poem should have no adjective. The what poem? Didactic? No, well, you can write a didactic, but try to write also a poem. I just said throw this in as an extra exercise, trying to write without qualifying words like adjectives or adjectives. Exactly.

[58:52]

That's a good idea to do that with painters sometimes. They have to use their hands, their elbows, their knees. You have to come up with new ways to paint. there's another quality in this kind of poetry that it's a quality of taking the stance of being humble of writing yourself off in a sense like rags and patches patches and rags and then he calls himself at the end this broken down old mule but there's there's a kind of praise in that

[59:53]

is a kind of exalting the self, in some sense, and presenting yourself in negative terms. That doesn't go always over so well anymore in our poetry because if in those terms because it's become self-conscious becomes a way of setting yourself up for comparison as I'm just this old wreck rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and this is how I lead my life and he used it because he was actually apologetic that he could not help out with the family fortunes, for example, that he let things go in the world at large. And there's a certain amount of asking for forgiveness within the social conditions of his time. I don't think people in the West feel that way particularly, that we feel we have to apologize. Humility.

[60:57]

Humility. I think another thing about writing poetry like this is that it can be embarrassing the next day or even the next hour. And why is that? It's because it's that at a certain moment that we express ourselves, it seems real enough when we put it down. But as causes and conditions in the next two minutes or days and so on change, we look from a different perspective back there and we see, well, that's not really how I feel. That's not exactly how I feel. And if one were to ask Ryokan if these poems really, really, truly were a true description of the way he felt, he would probably have to answer like, you know, what's the Miloš, the Polish poet today who says that poetry is, he calls it a lie that tells the truth.

[61:58]

I think he quotes somebody else with that, but... No, I think it's actually Picasso. But maybe Picasso was quoting somebody. But, you know, the thing about writing out and putting your name on it, too, is that here is one flash of how you see me or how I see myself. But this is the whole picture. It's just this look in the mirror, you know. You stand in front of the mirror and you say, is that face and figure in the mirror really me? And you get that one look. And then if you want to start thinking about, because next we're going to write a little longer, more personal poems, and you're going to write longer descriptions of yourself and your practice.

[63:05]

But putting the roots down into some graspable, understandable, seeable, feelable, smellable, tasteable objects in your life that we can all relate to rather than totally abstract. I'm feeling... Very poetic today. I'm feeling that I understand what Nargajuna meant by emptiness and so on. I don't understand. I want to know what happened to you at this moment that makes you feel like that. Any questions? What life do you want us to be working with that's here? Well, make the didactic poem and the one without adjectives and so on short, four lines. But then start writing something maybe that has a little more narrative to it. And begin to use longer lines, longer sentences.

[64:10]

Begin to bring other images together and maybe we can just begin to move into metaphor. Similes and the like. Are you reading the poems that are on the bookshelf right now? How many people have read any of those poems? There's a whole list of books, a bunch of books up in the library on the shelf. We don't have a tremendous amount. Just didn't study, but you're studying other things. So is writing poetry a form of samadhi? Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Zazen is a poem. When you're sitting in Zazen, maybe you should let the poetry go for a little while, if you can.

[65:10]

But sometimes by letting it go, you know, the best stuff comes up. And then you're going to sit the whole hour thinking, I've got to remember that line. Let's see, what was that again? There is an edge where What is real at the moment for us is our practice. He talks about just the flow of everyday events, just as they are. There is that edge that we can give voice to. And... Yeah. In fact, there are no restrictions on what you want to write from now on.

[66:18]

Just write it and bring it in. But if it's too long, it's just going to take us longer to reproduce it. Anybody have a poem they want to, anything else they want to recite? We've got to go on a minute or two. Mm-hmm. Ruth Rowe, Forever in the Valley, and Bill Coleridge. And Bill Coleridge. Anybody else? Once more. Okay. Now try to do that same poem... without the adjectives. Try to find some way to express the same thing. Oh. Dry breeze.

[67:21]

Okay. Leaf on breeze. Teacher writes poem. Play with that. Play with it. That's what I mean. Take these lines. Try a different... Move them around. Drop this part out. Suddenly something will come forward that you didn't know until you make yourself available to the process. And in that act, in that moment, there's an authenticity that rings in the poet itself. I'm not trying to be a poet, he's saying. I'm not trying to express something. I find it's just this moment and I express it. In order to do that, we have to practice a lot. So it comes out spontaneously. For every hundred poems you write, you maybe get one that actually seems to hit the nail on the head. Well, it's 20 of, yeah. It's 20 of, we have to be over there in, what, five minutes? Anything anybody has to say about tonight?

[68:26]

Yeah, that's what we're here for. Every thought and every touch and every yearning fuel to the lowly realm. But this feeling itself to dream. Now write three more almost exactly like that. With the same idea. See what you can do with it. You know what I mean? Take that same idea, that same impulse and try it. Try two or three ways now. Too green to burn, they say. I wait, slowly drying, gathering patience, getting ready for that fire. Yes. Yes.

[69:30]

What do you say about, you know, trying to write a poem, as opposed, there's trying to write a poem and there's the poem happening sort of spontaneously. Personally, I'm just, I'm really into trying to write a poem because it's like part of Turn the light around and study itself. I just feel like I'm a maniac that maybe look at it like, maybe I should look at that poem now. But anyway, I just feel like that's the only way. Well, you have to try to write the poem, but by trying, by continually doing it and so on, by making yourself present to the process of writing the poem. Suddenly the spontaneity within us, like playing the piano or painting or anything else, you try and make yourself sensitive to that. And then at some moment when you're... I think of it when I'm shaving. The moments when I can't get to a pen...

[70:35]

or to a brush or something, or the moments when these things suddenly occur to you, you're walking down by the ocean or something, you got the perfect idea, perfect expression for that moment, and it's gone. And that's okay. That's okay to not have to carry a pen and a pencil or a camera or a paintbrush and try to catch everything that arises at the moment and is perfect for you. So obviously you're going to lose it sometimes. And that losing is also part of the process. Not being available to, not having something around that you can capture it with. that kind of frustration. I remember I used to always carry a pen and a pencil with me whenever I went because I wanted to jot down. But when I carried the pen and pencil with me, these spontaneous ideas did not arise as much because, that's what I mean, because I got the idea that I'm going to be alert and catch it when it arises. But the more I'm aware of that process, the more those things will naturally arise.

[71:38]

Why? Because we've set up the context, we've set up the idea in which that stuff can happen. Until we make the effort and set up a context for it, nothing will arise. Am I right? Or am I wrong? Tell me. You're right. You're wrong. Do you follow what I'm saying? Yes. oh yeah mine was related because once i did that and actually i was pretty successful i wasn't writing poetry but i was writing these i mean these little snapshots of thing it was the first time i came here i drove from minnesota and you know i mean everything was so alive and so awake and so wonderful and every now and then i had to stop the car and write and the next thing you know I quit because I was spending all my time grasping these images. And it just like ruined things. And I think about that. It's like there's a reason I didn't bring my camera, you know.

[72:41]

I think that sometimes about writing is if it's grasping. Remember in the beginning we talked about the fact that we're supposed to finally give up words. This is a transmission outside of words. Without relying on words, and yet that very thing is relying on the words that was just expressed to us, not rely on words. So we do rely on words, but the thing is there's a difference between relying on words and deciding that you're going to encapsulate your whole life into them. What is that tension? That's what I'm interested in. Not getting caught by some final description of something, but still describing it. We've got to go. Intention.

[73:24]

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