Good evening. Welcome. I want to continue the talks I've been doing some of the time on early Japanese Buddhism or the Japanese Buddhism before Dogen, the founder of the branch of Buddhism we do, a Japanese monk who lived from 1200 to 1253. Tonight, I want to talk about Saigyo. monk poet who lived 1118 to 1190. So he died, he was in the century before Dogen. I've spoken of him a little bit before, but I want to focus on him tonight. And I've talked about him as a monk poet and a nature poet, but he was also a warrior monk poet. So I want to talk about his life and as an example of practicing practice in the context of difficult times.

[01:06]

So, in terms of our own practice, we sometimes talk about how our practice involves facing difficult social contexts, and Saegyo did as well. So, first a little bit about his poetry, the form of poetry that he did, which was the basic form of Japanese poetry in that period. There were also poets who did Chinese poetry, which was a different form. But the Japanese poetry was called waka with five lines of five, seven, five, seven, seven syllables. Some centuries later, that evolved into haiku, which is maybe more familiar. The last two lines taken away, just five, seven, fives, three lines of five, seven, five syllables. Anyway, Saikyo was from a samurai family.

[02:09]

His name before he ordained was Norikiyo. He was trained as a warrior. Actually, his father was part of a guard for one of the retired emperors. So this will involve talking a little bit about the society in the 12th century, 12th century Japan, which was evolving. in the, it's called the Heian period, from 800 to 1200. Heian was the old name for Kyoto, the capital. So there will not be a test, but I just want to give this context for talking about the situation that Sagio faced that in some ways led to him becoming a great poet.

[03:13]

And I'll be reading some of his poetry. He, the way the government was then. There were emperors and imperial family, but really the power was mostly in a noble family, the Fujiwara family, which was a very, very large family. And the Fujiwara, most of the emperors, the Fujiwara family arranged for their daughters to marry the emperors. So they were related. And often the emperors would retire. So there was this whole thing about retired emperors, and then there would be child emperors. But something happened in the middle of the 1100s, which affected Norikyo, who became Saigyo very much, which is that some of the retired emperors actually took power and became

[04:21]

actually powerful, more than the Fujiwara family. So what happened for Norikiyo, who was, again, trained as a soldier, basically. He had martial arts training. I don't know how much combat he saw. He became a guard of one of these retired emperors who was actually one of the retired emperors who had significant power. But he started to see the contradictions and I would say the hypocrisy of the way the society worked and of the power in his time. And that led him eventually to moved towards Buddhism. So all of these people were Buddhist. It was a Buddhist society. And actually, many of the retired emperors would eventually become monks.

[05:34]

So it was complicated. So just to give a context for this, Norikyo got to see firsthand not only the activities, but the contradictions. So I'm reading from this book, The Lifetimes and Poetry of Saigyo, Awesome Nightfall, by William LaFleur, whose other book I was talking about in terms of other aspects of early Japanese Buddhism. But anyway, Norikyo got to see firsthand not only the activities, but the contradictions in how things were articulated. structured and run at the social and political apex of his society. It was a component of what impelled him to investigate and practice, actually practice Buddhism. There were conflicts that arose among these noble families. in especially in the capital, and there was violence in the capital in 1156 and 1159, battles between the emperors and the retired emperors.

[06:55]

So this was going on in the palaces of the retired emperors. So let me read some more of this. within the hidden side of the culture during this Insei period. You need to go back a little bit. There's a whole complicated context for what was going on, and I don't want to get too far into the weeds. I want to get into what led Norikiyo to become a monk. Within the hidden side of the culture of the court during the Insei period, males having sex with other males was very much in vogue, according to one of the scholars, one of the historians. So Saigyo, so that we have poetry of Saigyo with data from his diaries.

[08:00]

and historical records of this period. These records name individuals who were erotically involved with the retired emperors Toba and Goshirikawa, who were especially two of the retired emperors who were very powerful. So that was part of the context that was going on. It doesn't mean, even though the floor goes on to say, this means also that what was going on in the palaces, however much in vogue privately, was not publicly condoned. So traditionally, it's understood that part of what might have led Norikiyo, Saikyo, he may have been involved in in those kinds of homosexual affairs, but it's thought that he may have been involved with an affair with a court lady, and that may have led him to have to become a monk, and it's even said that he might have been involved with the Empress herself, who was supposedly involved with many sexual affairs, and she was

[09:25]

She was connected with Norikiyo's family, and this is the case, even though she was 17 years older than Norikiyo. So this is a complicated, so if we look at the court in medieval European times, there's similar kinds of scandals. At any rate, we don't really know about this, just that there was this complicated world full of contradictions. What we do know, we do have some poems, though, from Saigyo about his leaving the world. So I'm going to read some of those. Caitlin, do you speak Japanese? So I was going to read some of the Japanese just to give you a feeling of the sound, but I won't read so much of that. So as the case for many of these Waka poems, the poets give prose introductions.

[10:33]

So Saegyo says, during a time when I was coming to a decision about leaving secular life, I was on the eastern hills, that's the eastern side of Kyoto, with a number of people, and we were writing verses expressing our sentiments about the gathering mists there. So he was involved in poetry even when he was in the court as a samurai. So he wrote, I'll just, I'll read this one in Japanese. Sora ni naru kokoro wa haru no kasumi ni te yoni arajitomo omoetatsu kana. A man whose mind is one with the sky void, or with the sky, steps into a spring mist and thinks to himself he might in fact step out of the world. And as the floor says, he plays here with the double entendre of one word, sora, which refers to the sky, but connotes as well Buddhist emptiness. So the sky, the same character that we use in the Heart Sutra, ku, for emptiness also means, for sky also means, for emptiness also means sky.

[11:41]

So he's playing with these words. So this was written while he was still very much in the court as a samurai, but he was torn by what he saw around him and his feelings of dissatisfaction. There's a poem when he petitioned the retired Emperor Toba to grant me his permission to leave secular life, and the translation, so loath to lose what maybe should be loathed, one's place in the world. We maybe rescue best the self by simply throwing it away. So he's talking about throwing away his status in the secular world. He had this, you know, he was not a noble, so he wasn't at the level of the aristocracy, but as a samurai. He had this position in the court.

[12:43]

So I'll read that again. So loathe to lose what maybe should be loathed, one's place in the world. We may be rescued best the self by simply throwing it away. So there's an obvious Buddhist context there, letting go of the self, throwing away the self, throwing away status. This was when he was asking permission from the emperor to ordain. So we know that he lived again 1118 to 1190. He ordained as a monk in 1140 when he was 23 years old. So this was a big decision. to actually leave the world. Again, later on in life there were many situations in which he was in the middle of situations

[13:49]

He was trained as a soldier. Again, we don't know a lot about his life. There's the poems, but we don't know so much about his actual life. But his name, his priest's name, Saigyo, means going west. And later on, he actually is known for his pilgrimages and traveling around. And maybe going west connotes going to the Western Pure Land, which was, even though this is before Pure Land Buddhism and Zen and Nichiren and the Buddhist schools that developed at the time of Dogen in the 1200s, there still was this context of Japanese Buddhism there. So LeFleur speculates about what he was trying to escape from.

[14:56]

And again, as I said, possibly this affair with a court lady. And that may have been part of why he had to leave the world. And there may have been some scandal. We just don't know. Another aspect of this, though, is Rather than becoming affiliated with a big monastery or temple, Sakyo lived his life outside of the big temple systems. He may have lived in some temples briefly, but the two main schools, there were numbers of schools of Buddhism in Nara, the old capital, and also in Kyoto and around Japan. The two main schools were Tendai, from which Dogen and all his contemporaries came from, which focused on the Lotus Sutra and kinds of meditation.

[15:57]

There was also the Shingon school from Kukai, a great founder figure, and Saigyo had a lot of connections with that school. Mount Koya, which is south of Kyoto, Huge mountain, hard to get to the top of. Dave, our treasurer, actually, was in Japan and spent some time up there in a recent trip. But Saikyo chose to live outside of these large temples or monasteries. There's a poem about him wanting to escape this competition. Having made my escape from a worldly way of life as a samurai in the court, I was in the interior of Kurama, which is one of the many sacred mountain sites, at a bamboo conduit, the water of which was frozen and not flowing.

[17:01]

Hearing from somewhere that this would be the state of affairs until the arrival of spring, I wrote this poem. It was bound to be my vow to be unattached to seasons and such. I, who by a frozen bamboo pipe now wait for water, long for spring. I'll read it again. Maybe I'll try and read the Japanese, too, just so you can hear the sound of the poetry. Waranashiya koru kake no mizu yu eni omoi sutete shi haru no mataruru. It was bound to be my vow to be unattached to seasons and such. I, who by a frozen bamboo pipe now wait for water, long for spring.

[18:03]

So he lived in kind of reclusive places. And he later on did pilgrimages, not exclusively, but he traveled around a lot. And he's known for poems, poems about the moon and about nature. Lafleur says, what we know of Saigyo through his poetry and the prose he wrote to accompany it, forcefully indicates that he considered the core of his vocation as a Buddhist to lie in the relatively solitary life of the monk, separated not only from the secular world, but also from the world of large temple or monastery. He was probably among those monks of the 12th century who profoundly disliked the competition cutthroat at times for rank and privilege among the monks within individual temples. and also between temples. Entire monasteries were at times in something of a state of war with one another.

[19:08]

So I personally can relate to this and being outside of large monastic That's one of the advantages of being in a small storefront, non-residential temple in Chicago. Anyway, the floor goes on. Physical fighting between bands of monks was anything but uncommon. Many of the larger temples kept at their disposal. Ruffians who dressed in robes could be directed to intimidate Other secular officials are rival temples and shrines. Not a few of these purveyors of violence and mayhem were themselves ordained monks, in spite of the fact that carrying anything like a weapon was strictly forbidden in the monastic regulations. Conflicts between the two major monasteries of the Tendai school took an especially overt form during Norikiyo's lifetime.

[20:13]

In 1121, three years after his birth, and then again in 1140, that is the exact year of his ordination, warrior monks from the Enryaku-ji, the big headquarter temples of Tendai, northeast of Amahie, northeast of Kyoto, burned Midera Temple on Joji, its bitter rival, another branch of Tendai. So this happened, and there were actually warrior monks or samurai who ran off to be ordained as monks and fought between different temples. This was largely a function not of sectarian rivalry, but of monks of different temples being affiliated with the different branches of the court families. So this was a function of these court battles. So this was the world in which Saigyo lived in, in the 1100s, and this was part of his wanting to become

[21:14]

a monk and of his becoming this kind of pilgrim monk. So Lafleur says, although he was not the complete recluse or constant pilgrim that some of the later hagiographies made him out to be, it seems quite clear that Sagio spent a good deal of time in hermitages that were relatively separate from society, and made journeys that, even if not constant, show him to have probably been the most wide-ranging pilgrim of his time, and later on, the great Poet Basho, who was famous for his haikus, who was not really a monk but wore monk's robes and was very connected with Zen later on in the 1600s, took Saigyo as his model. So there's more stuff I want to talk about, and I want to get to some of the overtly Buddhist nature poems.

[22:21]

Again, this is the context of just this world of Japanese Buddhism before Dogen and what it shows. So he spent a lot of time on Mount Koya, Koyasan, which had been the headquarters temple of Kukai and of the Shingon school, which is the Japanese Vajrayana school, Japanese tantric school. Here's a couple of examples of poems that he wrote deep in the mountains. Deep in the mountains, sitting upright on moss, used as a mat for himself, with not a care in the world, is a gibbering, chattering ape.

[23:38]

So this he wrote about himself in his meditation. Deep in the mountains, sitting upright on moss, used as a mat for himself, with not a care in the world, is a gibbering, chattering ape. Another one, deep in the mountains, no song of birds close to what we knew at home, just the spine-tingling hoots of owls in the night. So this was his experience of sitting up in the mountains. He went to a place called Mount Omine, another one of these sacred mountains that were affiliated with both Buddhism and Shinto, the native Japanese spirit religion that goes way back before Buddhism, where Saikyo did disciplines to emulate the sufferings of beings in the three lower realms of the six-tiered Buddhist cosmology, which I was talking about recently, hauling heavy burdens up and down

[24:53]

Such mountains gave one the experience of life as an animal. Receiving only meager provisions of food provided insight into the fate of hungry ghosts. Being tongue-lashed with accounts of one's every fault and physically beaten with canes produced a taste of life in hell. So Saigyo experienced that kind of experience. But this is from, he also, but then this is, but most, but even in this place, most of Saegyo's poems, are more positive, the after effects of this. So he says, I'm seeing the moon at the place called Shinsen on Mount Omine.

[25:55]

His poem goes, passage into dark mountains over which the moon presides so brilliantly. Not seeing it, I'd have missed this passage into my own past. Another one. So brilliant a moon up there that the clouds have sunk down into the valley, urged along by winds sweeping the peaks. I'll read that again. So brilliant a moon up there that the clouds have sunk down into the valley, urged along by winds sweeping the peaks. He's describing a scene. up in the mountains, but he's also describing his zazen and his interior experience, which is part of how these poems work. He did a far more extensive pilgrimage to the far northeast.

[27:03]

No small undertaking at that time, Lafleur says. It is estimated that if a person left the capital in the spring, he or she would reach that destination sometime in autumn. This route, at least by the time Basho retraced the footsteps of Saikyo much later, gradually became famous in part because it was arduous. In winter it was cold, so it probably wintered in this area. And records of having seen edifices of Horizumi, a small but elegant architectural transplant of the capital culture established in 1095. So he wrote a poem saying, the guardhouse of famed Shirakawa gate, now ruined, lets the moon filter in. Its shaft is like having another staying here, having a companion staying here. And then it talks about, I want to move ahead, it talks about how

[28:13]

Saigyo was affected personally by two great disruptions, social disruptions in 1156 and 1159. These were not peaceful times. There were disturbances where the that happened where the, that ended up where, these were like civil wars, that where the retired emperor who had been, the young retired emperor who Saigyo had served as a samurai was actually, deposed and then killed, and Saga returned to the capital to serve as part of his funeral. So he was very affected by that.

[29:17]

So these were not peaceful times. Read one of the poems from those. Oh, he talked about being away when this was happening. In one poem he wrote, Boulder encircled space so far from everything that here I'm all alone, a place where none can view me, but I can review all things. So he had word of what was going on in the Capitol, even though he was in a kind of reclusive space. So there's a lot more that I was going to read, but a couple more. This was one that was on Mount Koya, where Kukai had established his center.

[30:26]

Kukai was known as Kobo Daishi, that was his honorific name. So Saiga wrote, I was in the province of Sanuki and in the mountains where Kobo Daishi had once lived. While there, I stayed in a hut I had woven together out of grasses. The moon was especially bright, and looking in the direction of the inland sea, my vision was unclouded. And then he wrote this poem. Cloud-free mountains encircle the sea, which holds the reflected moon. This transforms islands into emptiness holes in a sea of ice. Let me read that again. Cloud-free mountains encircle the sea, which holds the reflected moon. This transforms islands into emptiness holes in a sea of ice." So Lafleur says about this, the fact that Saguio is positioned high enough to look down on an array of smaller islands themselves in a sea formed within two much larger islands is the positional

[31:46]

Starting point for this extraordinary poem, Saegyo does not so much record the natural beauty as turn what he sees into a transmogrified vision. The state of his mind appears to be ecstatic, perhaps because the nexus which Kukai had begun to suggest to him that what lies before his eyes is not unlike a mandala brought into being by natural forms. The unparalleled brightness of the moon creates an unusual limpidity in the poet's mind, resulting in a mode of visual and mental play. So I'll read the poem again. Cloud-free mountains encircle the sea, which holds the reflected moon. This transforms islands into emptiness halls in a sea of ice. So this is his vision of the sea of ice and the islands are like emptiness holes.

[33:01]

In 1185 there was a major civil war that is the basis of one of the great great prose works of Japanese literature. There's a poem about that from Saikyo. Well, I'll skip that. I want to get to... I just have time for some questions or comments. I could just keep reading many more poems. But just two more, both of which have contexts. It first happened on Mount Yoshino, which is a very famous ancient, ancient sacred mountain, very famous for its cherry blossoms.

[34:06]

When I was living in Japan, I visited there. It's a place where there were great ancient, you could say Taoist or Shinto sages, but there are also many Buddhist temples now. So Psyche has spent some time living on this ancient mountain. So he says, as an introduction, while undertaking religious disciplines, I was in a place that had attractive blossoms. So I'll just read the translation. If my rapt gaze would not give rise to rumor and disgrace, I'd want to spend all spring fixed here, feasting my eyes on these flowers. So he kind of felt like it would be a disgrace to just spend the whole spring just gazing at these flowers. If my rapt gaze would not give rise to rumor and disgrace, I'd want to spend all spring fixed here feasting my eyes on these flowers.

[35:15]

You know, part of the context is that Saigyo was living in this time when he had to relate to all the difficulties that were going on in the society. And even though he had left, he'd become a monk, he still was in contact at times with his old, the people he knew, had known as the samurai, and he would sometimes have to respond to them. So as we know in our practice, we respond to the world around us. So this former soldier, now a monk, did not want to get caught too much in this meditative state. Le Fleur has a longer comment on this, which I'll indulge in. It is, I think, not wrong to view Saegyo's efforts to make sense of his passion for the beautiful phenomena of the natural world, no doubt epitomized for him by the blossoms at Yoshino, as one of the major intellectual and religious concerns of his life.

[36:26]

It was especially so because in contrast to the intensifying strife and uncivility that was enveloping civil society, so civil in quotes, as we can feel, the locations where he placed his hermitages and carried out his religious practice seemed by contrast places of both peace and inherent beauty. I think he employed multiple strategies from within the Buddhist tradition in order to affirm the basic goodness and value of the natural world. Among these was the, it's called Hanji Suijaku concept. This is the relationship of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to the nature spirits of Japan. The logic appears to have been as follows, since the Shinto kami or spirits are indeed manifestations of Buddhahood or of bodhisattvas, and since such kami or spirits are somehow present within all natural phenomena that impress us humans with their beauty and sacredness, then there need be no contradiction between even our most intense feelings for such things and efforts

[37:41]

to move along the Buddhist path. Natural beauty is indeed an articulation of the enlightened state." So this is part of Saikyo's, in some sense, indulgence he might have felt in some ways with traveling around and writing all these poems about the moon and these beautiful natural sights, even amidst all of the civil wars going on in this time. Here's another poem from Yeshino. Do the white blossoms on my mountain take the place of snow on the holy Himalayas? I wish to enter the profound inner depths of Mount Yeshino. OK, last excerpt, which also gets to the tension between responding to the world, which we can feel in our practice, too.

[38:56]

which was part of this context for Sagyo. And again, this background that is, you know, is there in Dogon. And the question of, that we chanted in the Jolnir Samadhi, literary, near literary, how does it go? To describe it in literary, form is just to defile it. So the whole question of poetic activity, does that take away from intense meditative practice? And here we have this warrior poet monk. So I'll read this. excerpt from LaFleur talking as an introduction to, well, I'll read some of LaFleur and then including, that leads into a poem by Saegyo as a way of concluding.

[40:09]

In Saegyo, even the sensibility-shaping verse has been weaned away from the value-stack polarities of ordinary society. Saegyo's sensitivity to the irony in human affairs is related to his awareness of what goes off track. When we dichotomize reality, he was forced to see that even his own attempts to leave the world were, if naively misconstrued, attempts to find private peace in another such dichotomy, to transcend that habit of mind of duality became the project of both his Buddhist practice and his writing of poetry during the later decades of his life. The world, unquote, he had left behind was the world that bifurcated all things into what one subjectively liked or wanted on the one hand and what one disliked and disowned on the other. Therefore, even solitude had become tolerable and in its own way an aspect of reality to be cherished. So the floor sees this in the following poem by Saegyeok.

[41:26]

An ancient field and in the sole trees starkly rising to its side sits a dove calling to its mate the awesome nightfall. I'll read it again. Maybe I'll read it in Japanese. Furu hatano. Soba no tatsuki ni iru hato no tomo yobu koe no sugoki yugure. An ancient field, and in the sole tree, starkly rising to its side, sits a dove calling to its mate, the awesome nightfall. And a little more. So he's talking about the multiple and often subtle links between Saigyo's verse and the practice of Buddhism in 12th century Japan. The representations of the full moon or the full moon itself served as the focal point for extended meditations.

[42:33]

In these meditations referred to There's a prize, especially within the Shingon school. So these are formal meditation practices on the full moon. The mind heart, or kokoro, of the practitioner was visualized as progressively filling with light. Objective of such exercises were visualizations on the moon itself, included an enhanced ability to recollect the past, greater powers of memorization, and in the most literal sense, enlightenment. There was even a sense that through such practices, something like a personalized luminescent moon would take up residence within the interior of the body-mind of the committed meditator. So poems otherwise easily mistaken as banal became interesting, even fascinating, when we realized this dimension of Saigyo's preoccupation with the moon.

[43:38]

So I had, in college, I knew the biographer of Kukai, and I heard him give a talk about this form of meditation where one actually has a scroll of the round full moon and meditates on it. So there's a formal meditation in Shingon, So just one last poem from Saigyo that relates to this. Experiences of drawing the moon and its luminosity were drawing them into the very inner being of the poet monk. Clouds thickly mantle these mountains, but the blocked moon had already taken up residence in my mind, so nothing now prevents me from seeing its serenity there. Again, clouds thickly mantle these mountains, but the blocked moon had already taken up residence in my mind, so nothing now prevents me from seeing its serenity there.

[44:49]

So I'm sorry, I sometimes tend to try to cover too much in one talk, and I did that again tonight. But I wanted to talk about Saigyo. I've talked about him before. Both his struggle to get free from his warrior background and what that involved. And this is the background and society he lived in, but also then this meditation which featured mountains and nature and the moon. So I'll stop. Comments, questions, reflections, responses? Ed?

[45:51]

Yeah, I mean, I thank you for that. I mean, I'm drawn to the collection, maybe because in some ways, it makes an effort at addressing maybe a more genuine or more apparent equality or separateness in the imagination of what is observed in the world. So the separation between what is observed and the world? Yes.

[46:56]

It's an example of that. So I enjoy that discussion because it's very continuous with earlier discussions regarding separateness in Japanese art. Yeah. Part of the point of this is to see that the language is hard for this. But the ultimate beauty, and beauty And here we're talking about aesthetics. We're talking about the beauty that Saigyo sees in the moon, in cherry blossoms, in nature, that that's not separate from the difficulties of the world. That's the ultimate, that's the actual point, but it's a struggle. Yeah. Is that what you were getting at? Yeah, yeah. And that's the struggle we have too. How do we face the struggles of our world and our own lives and yet bring in the beauty that we also see in art, in music, in nature, and in the possibilities that we feel when we settle deeply in meditation?

[48:19]

Any other comments? Yes, Dylan. Yes, good, thank you. Right. And yet, you know, there are libraries. We have a little one in the back full of, you know, words about whatever this is that we're practicing. So poetry gets at it, you know, like koans get at it sometimes. Poetry maybe gets at it best.

[49:28]

because it's indirect. It demands something of us. We have to find some response in some way or sometimes maybe. That's why, you know, the Bodhidharma is saying, you know, it's, oh well, I don't know. Anyways, yeah. Yes, Ed? It's like saying don't cite it. Psycho, yeah. Psycho, to know his poetry, you must know his mood. Otherwise, his poetry is to sit that out. Yeah. So the language is unique to the individual, and the expression of it as well. And sometimes we do it concurrently, and other times not. Yeah. And that's part of being, as well, maybe a factor in experiencing it in language. Yeah. And certain poets may call to each of us differently and at different times.

[50:29]

Well, we are running a little late, but if anybody has any further, any last words? Okay, thank you. Let's do the four bodhisattva vows and then announcements.

[50:52]

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