First of, I think, what, five? Six, yeah, six meetings. Zen and Poetry, or Zen Poetry, or Zen and Question Mark Poetry. I have each week a number of different handouts I'll be bringing in, but before I hand them out tonight, I'm going to say a few words. An overview about what I conceive of this class as being, and the kind of material we're going to look at, something about that, and also maybe a few words about what I feel I don't want this class to be. Take a look at it. About. Let's just start with the word poetry. I mean, obviously, this is the largest class I've ever

[01:10]

had, teaching sutras and doctrinal materials. I'm lucky if eight or nine people show up. The fact that we talk about something called poetry, and the fact that it draws such interest from people, I think is a pretty clear indication of the importance that that word has in our life. The importance that the poetic disposition is, in fact, crucial to culture and to an individual. To the way we express ourselves in the world in maybe the most intense and insightful way possible. I think of poetry as being, in general, the heart and soul of language. Language can serve many functions, analytical functions, rational functions, of course,

[02:12]

and so can poetry. And I don't mean to try to take this word poetry and compress it into some final definition. That would be the same as trying to compress our life into some final and meaningful description. What I conceive of this class aiming toward is a kind of a reawakening or resensitizing, you might say, our sensibility to the onslaught of phenomena, and how we respond to phenomena, which is a crucial question for us as students. And it's crucial on a number of levels.

[03:12]

We're dealing in poetry with what is known in Buddhism technically as concept designation. And concept designation is the way we explain the world to ourselves, the way the world has been explained to us in terms of language. And from the very beginning, almost from the cradle, you could say, we have learned how to break up the world into convenient bits or bites of information, phenomena to which, in its broad spectrum, we give names to. Now, this is important because as we study, and as you will be studying also with Rev, I think during this practice, we're going to be talking about states of samadhi. Samadhi meaning, in this case, practice as a form of concentration or focus, a form of one-pointed mental activity.

[04:20]

And as we practice zazen, as we practice shamatha or the focusing of the mind, the allowing the mind to form a particular place of, or image of, or locus of the bringing together of the disparate forms of consciousness, the sense and those fundamental objects into one-pointedness. According to the various stages of practice in the old schools, long before Buddha, there comes a place in absorption, probably in what Rev is talking about, the third, maybe the fourth level of concentration, where the sense of the self and the other, the sense of the arising of the world, the sense of the separate self arising together with phenomena, suddenly drops away.

[05:25]

Sometimes the mind and body drop away. But what that also means in terms of language is that our linguistic, that our usual modus operandi of using language to understand reality, no longer is operable. So in Zen poetry, particularly in Zen poetry, although in Buddhist poetry generally, but most especially in Zen, we have what is called an awakening poem. And of course you are familiar with the Blue Cliff Record, or the Mumonkan, the gateless gate, the transmission of light. All of these books have, are filled in the Eastern, in Japanese and Chinese, with images about that moment in which concept designation is no longer operable and what happens at that moment. When language falls away, when there's just open space. Now there's a problem with this.

[06:27]

It's an odd book to bring to a poetry class, but I'm going to quote something from the Samdhita Uchara Sutra, in Cleary's translation, that is, I think, germane to this question of what, what do we mean by Zen poetry? What is the dialectic that is operating in that context? About self and other, about this question of non-duality. In this chapter, it's called the characteristics of ultimate truth. As you know, in Zen, as in all Buddhists, particularly in all the Mahayana teachings, there's two truths. What are they? Relative and absolute. Relative and the absolute, or the ultimate, and the relative or the conventional. Now, in the Mahayana, unlike in the earlier

[07:30]

teaching of the Hinayana, which still, in a sense, divided the world up into graspable, disparate dharmas or entities by which we can understand what makes up reality and the self, such as the five skandhas, form, feelings, perceptions, and consciousness, and so on. There was still a sense of duality in the early teachings. Doesn't mean that people didn't write poetry. They did. They still wrote poetry in the sense that there's a self and there's an other, and the impact of that experience of the arising of the onslaught of experience and how we record it in terms of our emotional experience, of course, has always been operable. But in Zen, we're at the moment when that particular means of expressing ourselves no longer actually is important or applies. At that moment, what happens? I don't know if anybody in this room knows what happens at that moment, including myself. So, in some sense, I'm talking a little theoretical here. But in order to get into what

[08:34]

enlightenment poetry is about tonight a little bit, and the forms in which that takes shape, and how we might use it as a practice in our own life, I think I need to talk just a bit more about this idea of concept, designation, and the deconstruction of that to our practice. How is it, is the quote here, how is it that the created is neither created nor uncreated and the uncreated is neither created nor uncreated? How is it that we on the one hand have form and we have emptiness, we have emptiness as form and form as emptiness? Unlocking the implicit intent of the profound doctrine, this is the name of something, replied, created is an artificial definition temporarily set up by the Buddha. As such, it is a verbal expression, assembled by conceptualization. Ultimately, it is a verbal

[09:36]

expression of various conceptualizations and not actually real. Therefore, it is not created. If you say it is created, this too comes down to a matter of words. If you talk about anything outside of the created and the uncreated, the same thing applies. That does not mean, however, that there is nothing being discussed. What is that thing? Sages, with their knowledge and vision, detach from names and words and therefore, therefore actualize enlightenment. Then, because they wish to make others aware of this nature that is beyond words, they temporarily set up names and characteristics and call something created. Now, there is a description of a mode of being in the world in which that description becomes heightened

[10:39]

or intensified or laced with a way of looking at the world as empty, the form itself expressing that emptiness at the same time. So all Zen poetry, in a sense, all poetry of awakening, tries to bring these two things together, form and emptiness. Form is no other than emptiness. Emptiness is no other than form. Of course, there is a history of monks struggling with this problem because if we become very interested in the question of how do I step back into the world and through language, which I'm working very hard to let go of, through language, through the heightened and intensification of language, can I make real the state which is ultimate, but by being ultimate without concept designation is unutterable, inexplicable,

[11:41]

unexplainable. So all poetry that deals with this question, in a sense, whether it's didactic or lyric or visual poems of awakening of insight, take this question as a serious question. And some monks have been actually tormented. One we'll read is Saigyo, a famous Buddhist monk poet who in the 11th and 12th century wandered all over Japan writing about the moon and about this question of, I'm going to look at a poem with you, in which the phenomena of things, the thingness of things and the emptiness or the thinglessness become wedded in the poem, in the experience of the poem. And as such, of course, always another way of

[12:45]

really defining this class is to say the finger that points to the poem. These are all fingers just pointing. Poets that were also good poets about this, in a sense that they wrote a lot, was Dogen. But Dogen, like Saigyo, went through long periods in his life where the writing of poetry was detrimental to the release of concept designation in his practice. I'm sure you're fascinated with words like this and the language whereby you can express the inexpressible, which is, of course, the heart of all poets, everyone, and all 19-year-olds, then it can be a kind of ethical moral question. So there's a history of some poetry stopping, never writing again, and some picking it up later in life.

[13:45]

But it is finally realized, I think, particularly in the Mahayana teaching, is that form and emptiness cannot be, although they're not the same, not exactly different, you cannot have one without the other. And so to put down phenomena, to put down the idea of writing phenomena was not a Buddhist activity, was again to plunge one right back into the hell realm of duality. So why not totally express, give oneself to words? After all, words themselves are the Buddha. And using language itself within the feeling and flow of the language itself to express the Buddha mind, not even to express the Buddha mind, is the Buddha mind as much as any other phenomena. But there's a, we're not going to go into it too deeply, but there's a long history of the ups and downs concerning this particular struggle that monks have had over the millennia. Oddly enough, those who struggle the most with trying not to write end up, not surprisingly, the ones who when it finally bursts forth,

[14:52]

it comes out like a ketchup bottle all over. They really finally get to express themselves. Now some of the poets we're going to study, and I'm studying with the Eastern poets, that is to say I'm studying with translations, English translations of Japanese and Chinese poets, and of course in the Chinese and the Japanese, particularly in the Chinese, where characters can be either adjectives, nouns, or verbs, depending on how they're used in juxtaposition with other ideograms and characters, has a whole sense of allusion and depths of meaning that in our particular language, in the linear way we write and so on, and the analytical way that our language is set up, subjects and predicates and so forth, that we can't actually capture. So even though we're going to work with some ideas that derive from the Eastern sensibility about capturing

[15:55]

the moment, as it were, we have to realize when we do look at the poems that the very thing that is not translatable is the poetry itself. Somebody said poetry is that which can't be translated. Okay, and so tonight I want to look at some, I'm going to pass these out a minute, and then these are the poems tonight, short, brief, actually a kind of transliterations of haiku by a certain Japanese wandering monk of our time, Sentoka, here this Sentoka Taneda, Mountain Tasting, from this book. And the reason I particularly enjoy starting at this is because this man, who was a typical

[17:00]

Japanese, fitted into the typical milieu of Japanese sensibility, in that he was a man who was, as a monk, was marginal in society. The three things he said he liked, walking, he walked 34,000 miles before he died, walking, drinking sake, and writing haiku. And because he was a man who had absolutely nothing, because there was a tradition of giving up the world and just being a wandering monk, and because there was also a literary tradition which would feed that particular kind of disposition of being wandering, of being impoverished, of being a kind of social outcast, and so on, one put oneself into a tough situation where the immediacy of experience, from moment to moment, living in the moment, not knowing where your next meal is coming,

[18:05]

not knowing where your next shelter is going to be, not knowing, making any provision for tomorrow whatsoever, no money, all being in your life, does put one in a position of experiencing the world with a very small gap, as you might say, a very small cushion between the input of experience and the recording of that. Now, one of the most famous, before I get to that haiku, that everybody knows, is this one, and it's by, of course, Basho, who is also in that tradition, 17th century, wandered all over Japan, and I think most of us are familiar with the old pond and the frog jumping in that moment. The thing is that what I would like to concentrate this week on, and maybe have you do a few of these exercises and poems for yourself during the week, is to find a single moment, a very vivid experience

[19:07]

in one moment, that in a few words or a few syllables, you can capture. Not a long, we can dispense with so far, metaphor, similes, and just give the thing itself, the moment itself, in its concreteness. And as we do that, we notice whether it is occurring through sight, it's sound, taste, touch, smell, what is totally abstract and intellectual, and what is a mixture of those things. This road, maybe along it is better. Along it, no one comes. This autumn eve. This road, along it, no one comes. This autumn eve. Now, this poem has been

[20:19]

translated a number of times, and in many cases, and I'm taking this from, by the way, from Robert Aitken's book, A Zen Wave. Incidentally, parenthetically, while I think of it, I'm going to take a lot of his poetry books, put them on a shelf in the library, so you can read them during study, and so on, and look at them for yourself. And that is one of them. I think there are some other copies. A Zen Wave, unfortunately, is out of print right now. One of the finest expositions of Zen and haiku I've ever read. But the point is, in Japanese it is, of course, kono michiya, and what it's really talking about. He's not talking about a road. He's talking about this road, at this moment, as I look up, and I see no one comes, and it's autumn. Everything is fading into darkness. It's just the immediacy, the spontaneity of that image, the concrete image. This road, along it, no one comes. This autumn eve.

[21:23]

Does everybody know what a haiku is? Anybody who doesn't know a haiku? Haiku is five, seven, and five syllables, but we don't have to worry so much about that. It's not more than 17 syllables. There's also a form called waka, which is five, seven, five, seven, seven, a little longer disposition, exposition that you'll find in Ikkyu's poems, which I've included, some of which I've included tonight. This road, along it, no one comes. This autumn eve, also, in most of these, this particular form, it has been characteristic of haiku that the season has usually mentioned, either directly or indirectly. You almost always have a feeling of the weather, and you almost always have a sense of some concrete image at the moment. There's nothing, there's not an elaborate, there's not a kind of an elaborate intellectual idea motivating it.

[22:33]

We're going to, as I say, as the first couple of weeks, we're going to look at Asian poems, but later we're going to look at people like Gary Snyder, others, our own Norman Fisher, who are poets, and how they take some of this tradition and use it in their own way. Another poem that I like a lot of haiku, that really gives you the feeling, is this one by Busson. It's a poetry that tells a story, instead of just syllables. I feel a sudden chill in our bedroom, my dead wife's comb underfoot. I feel a sudden chill in our bedroom, my dead wife's comb underfoot.

[23:46]

So that tells a whole story, doesn't it? You feel that, walking in that room and suddenly putting his foot down. But you notice there's no elaboration, there's no exposition, there's just that thing itself, that is in. Just give you the bare, minimal information. Always paring down to that sense of awakening. This gives to you, where you can imagine the emotions, the grief, the loss. Here's another one. This is a famous poem that's often used in tea ceremony. Gaze out, far enough. Now you can always see by this, gaze out far enough. So just by association, who knows what we mean by how far we can gaze out.

[24:50]

Beyond all cherry blossoms and scarlet leaves. To those huts by the harbor. Fading in the autumn dust. I think actually this is a waka. It's 57577 originally.

[25:51]

Gaze out far enough. Of course there was this convention, as we all know, that even by the 12th century was gotten a little syrupy and trite and stale about the cherry blossoms and the impermanence. One of the things in all Zen poetry is a sense of this impermanence that we're always talking about. The ungraspability of our experience, even as we have it. And of the phenomena that gives rise, seemingly gives rise, to the seeming experience we're having. Gaze out far enough beyond all cherry blossoms. Notice there's no pronoun in this particular one, although others say I gaze out. In Asian poetry, the context usually rather clearly indicates who's experiencing this. So this particular translator, which I like a lot, is that just gaze out far enough beyond the cliches

[26:52]

of our life, beyond the cherry blossoms and scarlet leaves that everybody's writing about in the impermanence, and what you see in the distance. But something that's also fading away by the harbor, those peasant huts down by the harbor. You've seen those Sumiye paintings from Chinese and Japanese, where you look at it in space. The spaciousness becomes almost as more important than the thing within the space itself. So the poetry, like Sumiye paintings, is important in giving the sense of spaciousness. It's clear enough, right? We all know that. We try to find the moment in which the word indicates the thing that is, even as we're indicating, passable. Now, I think I'm going to hand these out.

[27:55]

If there are any extra copies, bring them up. And if you're a guest, they're not going to be here after tonight. Please bring them back, because I had a little bit of supply. I also have some bibliography up here. I don't want to take too much time talking about the bibliography. I'm going to add to it, as we have a lot of books that you might find on your own. Okay. Oh, I need one of these. No, not one of those in here. And then... Now, years ago, I was taking a poetry class at the College of Minnetonka's extension class in the

[29:41]

evening. And what I disciplined myself to do was to begin to pay attention in my day-to-day ordinary activities to the minutia, to the small things that I saw, smelled, tasted, touched, and so on, as I went through the day. And it so happened at that time that I had this job, a part-time job in the morning. I believe I'm not selling newspapers on the street. It was great. It was down at 4th and Heatherton in San Rafael. And for two hours, I would stand there handing out chronicles. And everybody who met there to change buses and so on to go to the city, because I was kind of like a stationary island in this swarm of commuter-ism, everybody talked to me. And one time, as I'm studying this poetry, I began to realize that the very language that people use,

[30:44]

particularly in English, just the way they said it, if you would take it down, would make some wonderful poems in themselves. One morning, a guy got off the bus. I'd never seen him before. And he came up to me and he said, she's gone. She took the car and left me the cat. How do you like that? Now, as soon as I heard that, I got to remember the way he said that. And as soon as I got home, I wrote it down as best I could remember. And this is how I remembered it, at least.

[31:45]

And of course, the first thing that struck me was that everything was just in one syllable. Because all those just had bang, [...] bang. What's more, I like the way this course, how do you like that, with cat. But if you really wanted to pare it down, you could cross this out. And even this comment, let that comment go, and you have the whole situation in three lines. She took the car and left me the cat. She took the car and left the cat to me. Even in that case, in the kind of grammatical way, me, I've even become an indirect object. I'm not even a direct object. I'm an indirect object. She took the cat in the car and left me with what? So I thought there, it's just in those few words is the whole story. You see, it's a whole narrative as it were. And I began to pay

[32:49]

careful attention to the way people talk, the way we express ourselves, and how actually we're all poets. You don't know us. Our feet's short. Our feet's short. Do you ever think about putting it in music? Yeah, you can put it to rap. Which is a country word. Then maybe she took the truck. She took the truck and left me. So you're catching on, you see. One time I was driving, it didn't happen to be this road,

[33:53]

but it could have been. It was a person, a road in Moran in the hills. And I said to somebody this sentence. I said, no matter how many times I've taken this road, I always forget how many twists and turns it has, and how steep it can suddenly be. I always forget, or you could even say, I'm always surprised by how many twists and turns this road has, and how steep it can suddenly be. Now there would be a question, and I wrote that down. Oh, that's good. Why? Because it referred to very physical things in my life, but it also, of course, becomes kind of what? Yeah, kind of metaphorical for some other aspects of my life. Concerning this sense of something coming into view, and then disappearing into

[34:55]

dimness, darkness, and so on. In fact, in Japanese, it's called sabi-wabi. Sabi has the feeling of isolation and aloneness. Wabi has kind of the sense of desolation. Or let's say rusticity. These are Asian feelings about something that they don't like to define too clearly, but if you're familiar with these two terms, sabi and wabi, they're actually the opposite from what is modern, functional, smooth, useful, graceful, and so on. Something that is old and rusty. Walking along and seeing an old pot that's broken with some

[36:02]

grass growing on it is sabi-wabi. Living alone in a hut, which became, as I said, a familiar and important way for Zen recluses, the grass hut idea became very important with this sabi and wabi. Living alone, away from the hustle and bustle of the world, up with nature, in a little hut, in the grass hut. The grass hut being something that we can easily dispose of and build something else. So the impermanence, the instability of the world became particularly important in Japan around the 12th, 13th century because of all the natural disasters. They were already Buddhist. It also has always a Buddhist feeling of impermanence because of all the natural disasters in Japan that was going on at that time. The arising of a sense of that this world is not only impermanent, but that the Buddhadharma has

[37:02]

suffered a kind of eclipse called, what was it called? Marga, not Marga. Marga is the path. Mappo. Mappo. Mappo. The time when the pure practice is degenerated and the monks would go off by themselves and wander and like Ryokan and they'll also study. So they'll find a place for themselves and live from hand to mouth. That sense of being alone, sabi, wabi, very romantic notion for us. But I want to tell you personally I had a chance to do that once and once you're ready for it, it's pretty tough to live in a little hut someplace all by yourself and have nobody come around and see how you do. So it usually takes a person of some deep practice to become a hermit and live like this and still be creative, open, positive.

[38:04]

Because as you know, and this is important in our poetry and the way we notice phenomena in life, the middle phenomena. I forgot how I was going to put it, wasabi and wabi, maybe I can come back to it. What were the natural disasters? They had earthquakes, they had terrible famines, and they were invaded twice by the hordes of Genghis Khan and his troops. That's what kamikaze came from, the divine wind that in both cases in the 13th century sunk the fleets and the thousands of troops sent over from Mongolia to invade Japan. Both times were turned

[39:10]

back by these storms, divine wind. I forget the point I was going to make. Sorry, I'll come back to it. It's part of growing old, I think. Another friend, American this time, who was a soldier, wrote a poem that I thought sounded very Chinese. It went like this, Out of the glare and dust they come, column after column, only to fade away one by one into the purple haze. On wheels and on foot they pass anonymously towards some unknown place, their faces set, their eyes deep, their helmets catching a setting sun. So you just feel it rising and disappearing in front of you. That kind of movement in the poem. We didn't have that movement in the cat one. We had a kind of story, but in this one we actually see something.

[40:11]

Can you say it again? Out of the glare and dust they come, column after column, only to fade away one by one into the purple haze. On wheels and on foot they pass anonymously towards some unknown place, their eyes set, their eyes deep, their faces set, their helmets catching a setting sun. No, their eyes deep, their faces something like a pale, their helmets catching a setting sun. So you have a feeling of somebody watching this panorama of convoy of troops passing by. And of course it could have been back, you know, could have been back in the days of the border wars in China and so on back in the, before the Tang dynasty even. We don't know, but it just happened to be something that happened 50, 60 years ago. They wrote about it that way and had never studied Chinese poetry. That's why I thought it was very interesting. Who wrote that? I don't remember his name. So let's look at it now for a

[41:21]

moment. Any questions so far? Yeah, it seems like, you know, like mentioning autumn or spring is season seems to be important, but it doesn't seem like it's always in the know. What I would like us as a group to kind of exercise, and that's why I'm using these particular poems to start with, is that you don't force your poetry into using those particular references, seasonal references, or the 4-7 or the 5-7-5 scansion. Although if you want to, it's very interesting to try to make up a haiku and use five syllables, seven syllables, and five. I remember once in Tassajara, if you've ever been in Tassajara, unless many people in this room have, otherwise if you haven't, in the wintertime the sun doesn't begin to even throw any beams of light until about 10 or 1030,

[42:21]

11 o'clock in the morning, and then they land on the zendo deck outside. So you come out of the, after a zen talk, and you're walking along, and suddenly in a frosty morning, put your foot down and you feel that right there. So you can make a poem about that, something like after the zen talk, okay. Stepping, stepping into a panther, I step in a patch. Sun is at seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. This frosty morning. We just have this zen talk, stepping, and drop that. One of these ideas of,

[43:37]

there's this kind of break in most poetry where it shifts from, it's kind of the shift from one mode of perception to another. But anyway, if you, during your week, practice whatever activity you're doing, listen to the way people speak, the way these little incidents in our life, the small thing, that zen, stepping totally into the moment, capturing the authenticity of that fleeting moment, in a few words, that practice, is also the practice for us as students. Because for one thing, it helps our mindfulness, and it helps us to use language in a more precise way, rather than, because we're just using, we're working with dualities, but we're working with subjects and predicates. Nouns and verbs, nouns and verbs. Forget adjectives for a little bit, forget adverbs. That's kind of extra stuff,

[44:42]

nouns and verbs. You might say, that's the yin and yang, that is the subject and predicate, how you can't have one without the other, how they conflate. And then you can drop maybe the subject, I. See if you can write some of these things without the subject, just that you know what the subject is, as I've shown you in some of these other poems. Now looking at in the spring wind, one small digging bowl. Just that, feel the spring wind, he's setting out on the top, he's setting out, you know, springtime, those are now leaves, and it's a rope, right? But all I've got, as I set out, is this digging bowl here, and my digging bowl accepts the fallen leaves, nobody else has given me anything, he's not writing anything about what he's not getting, but it accepts, it seems to be accepting. What a lovely, it accepts the fallen leaves,

[45:49]

the fallen leaves accept everything. That reminds me, there is also the humorous haiku, you know what the humorous haiku is about? Senryu. Senryu is the humorous haiku where it turns on something unexpected, for example, this is from Irish Blythe in one of his books. Beside the road, the rose of Sharon, my horse ate it. Seven slopes. Beside the road, the rose of Sharon grows, my horse ate it. Or, you could even use something like this. Fat rumps, thin rumps, it pays them no mind. Now, by having that line in here, it pays them no mind, of course, it adds a little.

[47:04]

If I said something, it doesn't worry about it, or it accepts them, or something, beside it, no mind. Mushin. Actually, I'm going to talk about no mind here. Mushin. Snow stones, too, enter my begging bowl. So, autumn, hail, all the inclement, all the kinds of weather. Spring, walking with my begging bowl until the end. Now, here's a famous one, going deeper and still deeper, the green mountains. Waki itte mo, waki itte mo, ayo yama. As you see in Japanese, one of the things about Japanese is that it has consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel. That's why you can chant the heart Sutra in Chinese. It goes so easily, because there's clusters of consonants in English, so it becomes clumps. Waki itte mo, waki itte mo, ayo yama. Very simple Japanese, too. Very simple, kind of textbook Japanese.

[48:08]

Nothing deep about that. Although, one of the, here, the other thing, of course, about Eastern poetry is the calligraphy that goes with this. Like Ryokan, and like Ikkyu's Injin song, they were master calligraphers. And because in Japanese you don't only write with kanji characters and so on, but you write with hiragana, or you write with a syllabary, which is based on phonetic sounds, and has a much more sinuous kind of writing form. And so, of course, it looks like something like that when they write it. And they have to look at it very carefully and read it. The samples of his calligraphy with these poems, you appreciate, of course, Waki's sabi characteristics. Even the way he writes it reinforces the feeling of how the poem indicates. That's something,

[49:10]

of course, that we can play with, but it doesn't work so easily in English. Although, I think arranging the words like, she took the car, three or four, and then, and left me three, and then two syllables, the cat, just the way that's arranged. Sometimes we can do that and play with the order in which it strikes the eye and which our mind picks up, and then it just flows into meaning and reinforces the sense of what the poem is indicating, how it's laid out. It's not done in this particular sense. There's nothing else I can do. I walk on and on. Well, today, I gave myself, I said, okay, David, I don't call myself David. I said, I'm going to call myself Daigon. So, I said, an all-day read. Let's start with just something like an all-day read,

[50:24]

and then fill it in with everything you can think of. These are things all of us can do. And all day rain. So, what are some of the things I wrote? Very fast, just to show you. The sound of dripping fills the universe. All day rain, my feelings, too, are murky. All day rain, sparrows pecking on the sodden earth. All day rain, the roadside weeds gleam in the shadows. So, you see, you can, all day rain, black umbrella, a black umbrella, a red one, a blue one.

[51:26]

Just a couple of images, just a couple of images. Just to fill in there. Next week, when you come back, if you come back, bring some samples of what you have written. We'll do this every week, and we'll go from simple to more complex poems, didactic poems, polemical poems. So, I'm going to read from different poets, from different viewpoints and styles, and we can each try our own. And then, I want to ask you, you know, we could read them ourselves, or we might want to just put them in a hat and read them anonymously. It's always kind of ticklish, because the one thing you want to watch in this business of poetry is, especially as practitioners, right, is to not get possessive or hung up about is it good or bad. Because as soon as, and, and, use that also as a practice in watching your reactive tendencies,

[52:28]

about what happens to you when you start trying to write something. And kind of imagine yourself reading it to other people. Oh, gee, I don't think I, so, you can use even that aspect of Buddhist practices. Bring it back into how we work with, how we express ourselves. So, would you like to do that? Would you like to write little poems? And then, I'm thinking, at the very end, we have six weeks, right, maybe if we have somebody who's really fast and good at a computer, make up a little chapbook. Maybe taking a random, I don't know if we could do everybody's poem all day, but we could take, you know, something from everybody and make a little chapbook. If we have some ambitious, people have lots of time on their hands. I was asking for volunteers, but you got it. Yeah, he does, you can do it. Yeah, so that might be kind of fun, and then we'll see how this, how this works for us. Do you want us to start with the, that line?

[53:32]

Let's start. No, find one of your own. Find just some sentence or something, and then that's one lesson. That's one exercise. Find a simple line of something that's happening that day, and then just keep filling it in. Don't worry. First, Allen Ginsberg and Trungpa Rinpoche, as their teaching at Naropa used to say, first thought, best thought. First thought is first thought. First thought, just don't try to edit yourself too much. The main thing is to get, you know, there's a story of I think it was Flaubert talking to Mons. Passant about writing in France. Mons. Passant asked Flaubert, he said, what is the secret of writing? And Flaubert said, the first thing, above all, is get black on white. Black on white. So that's what you want to do, and not worry, and so write a lot of it. And because there's quick impressions, try to avoid like and metaphors.

[54:33]

If I had said, in all day rain, my mood is as murky as the weather, it wouldn't be the same thing. What did you say? It's my mood, my mood is as murky as the weather. But you actually did write. No, I just said, my, my feelings too are murky. Oh, right. I think you were saying something like that tonight. Were you talking something about having your feelings already made upset by the, or something? Oh, well, I. Yeah, by the weather. But that's the kind of thing I mean. Just that moment where you're thinking, I meant to turn right, but I turned left. And just catch that, you know, something about that aspect of our life. That is the beginning of all true poetry, in my opinion. You can build from that, but nouns and verbs. Now, slightly tipsy, the leaves fall one by one.

[55:46]

Here, of course, slightly tipsy, as we know, doesn't refer to the leaves. But the sense of the fallingness of the world. It feels falling away, and one actually tipping on one's feet. It's an interesting connection. Let's see if there's a few more here. Seventy-seven. Potato grew. It's worth. It's good taste. Autumn is here. And this one I love. The few flies that remain seem to remember me. Have you had that experience at Tassara? Flies? You want flies? Go to Tassara. Living alone, sleeping alone. The small Buddha statue rained down for the sake of human beings. I think that means, yeah, rained down for the sake of human beings. Sunset, the plowman's shadow grows deeper.

[56:48]

In the mountain all day, the ants, too, are marching. Aimlessly, buoyantly. Now, here we're using some descriptive items. Drifting here and there, tasting the pure water. Baggage I cannot throw off, so heavy, front and back. I received them and they served my needs. I put down my chopsticks. All day, I said nothing. The sound of waves. In this neighborhood, chanting the sutras cannot drown out the chanting. Late at night, the harsh sound of gambling heat. Had to put up, you know, a really cheap, you know, kind of skid, what we call skid row inns or hotels. Except in Japan, you know, they have the wonderful inns, which is a big part of the transient life. Where, whereas on one hand, you have the symbol and the mode of living in a grass hut up in

[57:57]

the mountains, away from everything secluded. There's also this sense of the traveler who passes through inns and meets other travelers, a sense of the transiency. Often a lot of connection took place in those inns, meeting people for a night and so on. And of course, a lot of drinking, a lot of very, they used to call them hot pillows. They were places for rendezvous for lovers and trysts and so on. So there was a lot of that kind of activity going on. And this is called the floating world. The world of samsara is the floating world in which there's a great deal of suffering going on. And so many times, particularly when you have a Buddhist orientation. And of course, I say a Buddhist orientation, I mean a Buddhist monk's orientation. One who's taken precepts, one who's familiar with at least some of the doctrine of the

[59:02]

Mahayana, looking at these situations versus just a poet like some of the others who were not trained monks, but whose vision of phenomena and experience was colored by Buddhist practice in Japan by that time. Meaning, of course, the ephemeral aspects of life. The floating world, the passing of all, the clinging to forms of experience that can only bring sorrow and so forth is a huge part of the general sensibility of the Japanese. Once I remember up in Hokkaido, they had done a double suicide called Shinju, I think it's called, Shinju. And somebody said, did they leave a poem? Oh, they didn't leave a poem? People were very disappointed. They didn't leave some record of that moment in the world.

[60:03]

Not that they leave a letter. A lot of people might say, did they leave a note? They don't know, did they leave a poem? And they didn't, and everybody was very disappointed by that. In the grass trampled by the horse, flowers in full bloom. To the mountains, to the sky, the Heart Sutra. As he walked along, he would chant. Each day, we meet both demons and Buddhists. That doesn't sound very interesting in English. Is there one person, Santoka, who wrote all this? Yeah, this is Santoka. He wrote all of these that you see in this kind of print. Then, if you look in the middle, you will see some American haiku, which I just threw

[61:06]

in from a book that I have on American haiku, and from haiku weekends with haiku associations. And if you look at them, they're actually five, seven, and five. But compared to what's on, I don't mean to actually use it as comparison, but this is just another example of how people take the ordinary experiences of their life, not particularly Buddhist. And jumping off the path, a field cricket bangs his head on the chain-link fence. Well, that's about a sound. Why his head, I would wonder, for example, rather than his. But a white tree fungus on the soft gray underside, several thousand holes. Deep inside the woods where the breeze cannot reach us, the mosquitoes bite. So these are just examples of things about travel. Then, the last part of this handout that I gave you, and maybe you can talk a little bit more about tonight,

[62:07]

is a course by another poet, much earlier poet, the 16th century Ikkyu Zeniji. All Zen students love the poetry of Hakuin and Ikkyu. Ikkyu, of course, because he was such an eccentric, trained man, said to be the illegitimate son of the emperor, as a matter of fact. By a lady waiting, one biographer said, apparently waiting too long. And fell into disfavor with the empress, and his mother was banished to one of the, some place, and Ikkyu was born, and sent to a temple at a very young age, and suffered under a very harsh teacher, with great privation, and so on, when he was just a child, and as he grew up, practiced with other teachers, and so on.

[63:09]

One night on a biwa, while rowing in the boat, he heard a crow caw, caw, caw, and he awoke. And from that moment on, he was hell on wheels. He was a man who spent a lot of his time in brothels. He ate meat, and drank a lot of sake, and when he was in his early 80s, he took a lover, a wise, traveling musician. And some of his more raunchy poems I didn't include here, because there might be a little too much of it. But actually, it's impossible to really translate Ikkyu efficiently, because Ikkyu's poetry moves with ideographs, Chinese poetry, in such a way that you can read it at many, many different levels of meaning, what he had to say. My favorite Ikkyu poem is, I'd love to give you something, but alas, in this insect,

[64:11]

there's nothing at all. He also wrote a book called Stub, and he used to parade around the city with a big stub, shaking it at people. He became the abbot of one of the great temples in Kyoto, and he was very upset by his purple robe, was very ashamed of it. He railed against the establishment of his day, which was, of course, by that time, handing love, well, it always was, in Japan with the government, and became pretty lax. The monks were mostly interested in raising money. And he, too, lived hand-in-mouth existence, but he had, because of his birth, he had access to high, high aristocratic circles, and of course, he was extremely learned.

[65:15]

Monasteries in the Far East, just as monasteries in the West were places, depositories of learning, literacy, and so on. People would come to learn, actually, the arts and calligraphy and so on, eventually, in monasteries. Ikkyu, this is the Ikkyu part. This body isn't yours, I say to myself. Wherever I am, I'm there. This reminds me of Alan Watts' poem a little bit. Alan Watts used to write these very short poems himself. One went like this. I'm that, you're that, everything's that, and that's that. I'm that, you're that, everything's that, and that's that. So, there again, because we have this, we have this, what would you say, colloquial phrase, and that's that. It adds, it's like a capping phrase to that particular poem, which is funny enough in

[66:19]

itself, but with, and that's that, really makes it into something more. My mind can't answer when you call. If it did, I'd be stealing your life from you. Now, these poems are called, actually, Doka. Doka, D-O-K-A, Doka. Doka are teaching poems, preaching poems. They have a little lesson incorporated in them. Whereas, you notice in Taku doesn't, in Doka, he doesn't incorporate usually a lesson so much in his. But Ikkyu definitely has an ax to grind. So, you can write poems that have an ax to grind, but we'll come to those a little bit later. Protest poems. So, are these written in the Haiku form of 575? They're written in the Doka form, I think, of 57577. Oh, but they're, but they're translated in couplets. Yeah, that's this particular version.

[67:20]

One of the books I'll put over there are books by R.H. Blythe called Zen and Zen Classics. And R.H. Blythe is wonderful. Eccentric Englishman who translated them somewhat differently talks about him. You can read about more of these. You can't be anyone but you, therefore, you are the other one you love. This boat is and is not, when it sinks, both disappear. I'm pure shame, what I do and what I say is never the same. It's like an old Christian saying, that which I would, I do not, and that which I would not, I do. So, we all are in that boat together.

[68:22]

But we have to quit in about five minutes, I think, because we have to put these chairs away and get over to the zendo for our evening closure for the day, for the refuges. So, this is a kind of introduction tonight to building up our susceptibility and our sensitivity to the flashing, the flashing tail of, you know, that hosu that you have carried in the way, that's the flashing tail of a horse, a palan that goes by. You see that go by. Catch that in a few words. You wake up from a dream, maybe, and you say, oh, it's just a dream, but I still got the goosebumps. Moving from one reality to another. And imagine what it must be for people who not only wake up from the dreams they have at night, and wow, that nightmare was just a nightmare.

[69:25]

Wow, what a relief. To the next step of waking up and dealing with this life. And in consequence of what I just said, there's one more thing I just, I did want to read you about that very point. And what I think is, although he's talking about the Bodhisattva, and this is, of course, D.T. Suzuki, it's a wonderful, it's beautifully written what he said. And this may also apply to poets, that is, the deepest part of ourselves responding to the force of our life. The doctrine of effortless and purposeless deeds, Anubhoga Chara, is rooted in the possibility of awakening a loving heart for all beings, even though they have, from a metaphysical point of view, no self-substance, and therefore only relative existential value. But the pitying heart that transcends the cold and severe contemplation of the reasoning

[70:26]

philosopher has no inclination to ignore the reality of particularization. No inclination to ignore the reality of particularization. It is determined to eradicate all the evils that are in the world and to save all the suffering ones in the sea of transmigration. This compassionate heart has no ulterior motive, except that it moves spontaneously and universally like the sun that shows on the righteous and unrighteous. This heart is called pure and undefiled because it is above the relativity of being and non-being, and yet never ceases to function out of its overflowing goodness. Beautiful. So, we can write our poetry on the sense and have faith in the overflowing goodness of our heart and of our perceptions, and not worry about it too much. When you finally practice zazen long enough, you always come to a place where only two

[71:34]

things can finally happen, paradoxically speaking, particularly when it's raw and terrifying and unpleasant. You either run away and turn away from the experience or you go deeper into the experience. By meeting that experience and so on, that kind of refinement of our sensibility to phenomena deepens at the same time, if we can do that, until eventually concept designations and words themselves fall away. And at that moment, we explode into language, back into the world. Step back and don't ask a lot. Don't spare ourselves when working for the common good.

[72:12]

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