First, if I think, what, five? I think it's six. Six, yeah. Six meetings. Zen and poetry. Zen poetry or Zen and question mark poetry. I have each week a number of different handouts I'll be dragging in. But before I hand them out tonight, I'm going to say a few words. I have an overview about what I conceive of this class as being. And this 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 particularly about. Let's just start with the word poetry.

[01:06]

I mean, obviously, this is the largest class I've ever 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 and 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, and so can poetry.

[02:13]

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 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. We're dealing in poetry with what is known as Buddhism, technically this concept designation.

[03:26]

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 and bytes of information, a 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 Reb, I think during this practice, but 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. And as we practice zazen, as we practice

[04:28]

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 the mental 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. Sometimes that 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.

[05:44]

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 flip record, or the ,, the gateless gate, the transmission of light. All of these books 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. It's an odd book to bring to a poetry class, but I am going to quote something from the Samhita-Mocana Sutra, the clearest translation that is, I think, germane to this question of what... What do we mean by Zen poetry?

[06:48]

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. Relative and absolute. Relative and the absolute or the ultimate. And the relative or the conventional. Now, in the Mahayana, unlike in the earlier 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 sthanas, or feelings, perceptions, and consciousness, and so on.

[07:49]

there was still a sense of duality in the early teachings. Didn'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 optimal. 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 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.

[08:55]

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 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.

[09:59]

That does not mean, however, that there is nothing being discussed. What is that thing? Sages with their knowledge and vision detached 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 creative. Now there is a description of a mode of being in the world in which that description becomes heightened 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 Zen poetry, all poetry of awakening tries to bring these two things together, form and emptiness.

[11:03]

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 constant designation is unutterable, inexplicable, 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 into, take this question as a serious question.

[12:05]

And some monks have been actually tormented. One we'll read is Saigyo, a Buddhist monk poet, who in the 12th century wandered all over Japan, writing about the moon and about this question of, well, 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 really defining this class is, say, the finger that points to them. These are all fingers just pointing. The 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 he thought that the writing of poetry was detrimental to the release of concept designation in its practice.

[13:15]

After all, you're fascinated with words 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 and moral question. So there's a history of some poetry stopping, never writing again, and some picking it up later in life. But it is finally realized, I think, particularly in the Mahayana teaching, is that form and emptiness, although they're not the same, it's actually 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.

[14:19]

and using the language itself, within the feeding and flow of the language itself, to express the Buddha mind. Not only 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 have struggled the most with trying not to write end up, not surprisingly, the ones who, when it finally bursts forth, it was all like a ketchup bottle all over. They really finally get to express themselves. And we've been looking at some. Now, some of the poets we're going to study, and I'm studying with Eastern poets. That is to say, I'm studying translations. English translations of Japanese and Chinese poems. And, of course, in the Chinese and the Japanese, particularly in the Chinese, what characters can be either adjectives, nouns, or verbs, depending on how they're used in juxtaposition with other ideograms and characters, has the whole sense of allusion

[15:28]

and depths of meaning that in our particular language and 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 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. OK. So tonight, I want to look at some, I'm going to pass these out in a minute, and then These are poems tonight, short, brief, actually kind of transliterations of haiku by a certain Japanese wandering monk of our time, Sintoka.

[16:44]

Here, this Sintoka Taneida of mountain tasting from this book. And the reason I particularly enjoy starting at this, is because this man, who was a typical Japanese, fitted into the typical milieu of Japanese sensibility in that he was a man who was, as a monk, was marginal in society. There's three things he said he liked. Walking, he walked three or four thousand 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,

[17:52]

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, not knowing where your next shower is going to be, not knowing, making any provision for tomorrow whatsoever, no money while begging in your life, does put one in a position of experiencing a world with a very small gap, as you might say, a very small cushion between the input of the experience and the recording of that. Now, one of the most famous, before we get to that haiku that everybody knows, is this one, and it's by, of course, Basho. who was also in that tradition, 17th century, wandered all over Japan, and I think most of us are familiar with the old palm 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 in one moment,

[19:08]

that in a few words, 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 occurring through sound, taste, touch, smell, whether it's totally abstract and intellectual, or there's a mixture of those things. This road, maybe along this road, along it, no one comes. It's not a need. This road, along it no one comes, this autumn eve.

[20:16]

Now, this poem has been translated a number of times, and in many cases, and I'm taking this, by the way, from Robert Aiken's book, A Zen Wave. It's going to be 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 and study the song and look at it for yourself. And that is one of them. I think we have 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 michi ya. 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's fading into darkness. It's just the immediacy, the spontaneity of that image, the concrete image, this road along that no one comes this autumn eve.

[21:23]

Does everybody know what a haiku is? Anybody who doesn't know 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 is the characteristic of haiku that the season, as you just 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... is not a kind of elaborate intellectual idea motivating it.

[22:33]

We're going to, as I say, 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 and others, our old Norman Fisher, who are poets, and how they take some of this tradition and use it in our own Another poem that I like a lot of haiku that really gives you the feeling. I got, I didn't remember it right. Is this one by Busson. It's poetry that tells a story. Instead of just syllables. This one. I feel a sudden chill in our bedroom. My dead wife's comb underfoot. I feel a sudden chill in our bedroom.

[23:43]

My dead wife's comb underfoot. So that tells a whole story. You feel that. He's 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 Zen. Just give you the bare, minimal information. Always paring down to that sense of awakening. In this case too, 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 already see by this, gaze out far enough, so just by association, who knows what we mean, on how far we can gaze out beyond all cherry blossoms.

[24:58]

and scum leaves to those huts by the harbor fading in the autumn dust. I think actually this is a waka. It is 57577. Gaze out far enough. Now, of course, there was this convention, as we all know, that even by the 12th century, it had gotten a little syrupy and trite and stale about the cherry blossoms and the impermanence.

[26:08]

One of the things in all Zen poetry is the 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 singing experience we're having. Gaze out far enough beyond all cherry blossoms, there's other, 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 makes it, I like it a lot, is that just gaze out far enough. Beyond the cliches 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. If you've seen those Sumie paintings of Chinese and Japanese where you look at it in space, the spaciousness becomes almost as important or more important than the thing within the space itself.

[27:21]

So the poetry, like Sumie paintings, is important in giving the sense of spaciousness. It's clear enough, right? I think we all know that. We try to find the moment in which the word indicates the thing that is even as we're indicating passive. Now, I think I'm going to hand these out. If there are any extra copies, bring them up. And if you're a guest, then I'm going to be here after and I please bring them back because I had a little bit of supply.

[28:24]

I also have some bibliography up here. I don't want to take too much time talking about bibliographies. But I'm going to add to it as we learn all the books that you might find on your own. Okay. Oh, I need one of these. No, not one of those in here. Now years ago, I was taking a poetry class at the College of Northern August Extension class the other evening.

[29:42]

And what I disciplined myself to do was to begin to pay attention in my day-to-day ordinary activities to the minutiae, 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 part-time job in the morning, not selling newspapers on the street. It was great. I was down and forth in Heatherton and San Rafael, and for two hours I would stand there handing out chronicles. And everybody who met there, they'd change buses and so on to move the city, because I was kind of like a stationary island in this swarm of commuterism. Everybody talked to me. And one time, as I'm studying poetry, I began to realize that the very language that people use, particularly in English, just the way they said it, if you would take it down, it would make some wonderful poems in itself.

[30:49]

One morning, a guy got off the bus, I'd never seen 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? She's gone. She took the car and left the cat. How do you like that? Now, as soon as I heard that, suddenly 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. And of course, the first thing that struck me was that everything was just in one syllable. Because all those just had bang, [...] bang.

[31:53]

What's more, I like the way this, of 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... Like that. She took the car and left... the cat to me. Even in that piece, 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. It's a whole narrative, as it were. And I began to pay careful attention to the way people talk. The way we express ourselves and how actually we're all poets.

[32:58]

No noise. A feet shot. A feet shot, because they're... If you don't think about putting it in music. Yeah, you could put it to rap, you know. Country, country music. Country music. Maybe she took the truck. She took the truck and left me. But so, you're catching on, you see. One time I was driving, it didn't happen to be this road, but it could have been. It was, of course, a road in Lorraine, in the hills. And I said to somebody this sentence.

[34:00]

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, if I wrote that down, would it hurt? Oh, that's good. Why? Why? Because, well, it referred to very... physical things in my life, but it also, of course, becomes kind of what? Metaphorical for some other aspects of my life. Concerning this sense of something coming into view and then disappearing into dimness, darkness, and so on, In fact, in Japanese it's called Sabi Wabi.

[35:06]

Sabi has the feeling of isolation and aloneness. Wabi has kind of the sense of desolation or Earth 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 grass growing out of it. It's Wabi. Living alone in a hut, which became, as I said, a familiar and important way for Zen recluses

[36:14]

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 a grass hut someplace. And the grass hut being something that we could easily dispose of and build someplace else. So the impermanence, the instability of the world became particularly important in Japan around the 13th century because of all the natural disasters. They were already Buddhist. It also has always a Buddhist feeling of incorrectness because of all the natural disasters in Japan that was going on at that time. Then the arising of a sense of that this world is not only impermanent, but that the Buddhadharma has suffered a kind of eclipse called, what's it called? The time when the pure practice is degenerated.

[37:23]

And the monks would go off by themselves and wander and like Ryokan. They'll also study. So they'll find a place for themselves and live from hand to mouth. That sense of being alone. Very romantic notion for us. But I want to tell you, personally, I had a chance to do that once, and unless 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 it. So it usually takes a person of some deep practice to become a hermit and live like this and still be creative, open, positive. Because, as you know, and this is important in our poetry, and the way we notice phenomena in life, the middle phenomena. I forget how I was going to put it, wasabi and wabi.

[38:38]

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. Thousands of troops sent over from Mongolia to invade Japan. Both times were turned back by it. 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, an 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.

[39:41]

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 the setting sun. So you just feel it rising and disappearing in front of you. That kind of movement, we didn't have that movement in the cat one. We had a kind of story, but in this one we actually see something in the sun. Can you say it again? Out of the glare in 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 helmet's catching a setting sun. No, their eyes deep, their faces something pale. their helmets catching the setting sun.

[40:45]

So you have a feeling you're sort of watching this panorama of convoy, of troops passing by. Now, of course, it could have been back, you know, it could have been back in the days of the border wars in China and so on, back in the, before the Tang Dynasty, and we don't know. But it just happened to be something that happened 50, 60 years ago. And wrote about it that way. And had never studied Chinese poetry. That's why I thought it was very interesting. Something like that? I don't remember his name. So let's look at it now for a moment. Any questions so far? Yeah. It seems like they're, like, finishing autumn or spring. This 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 is 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.

[41:59]

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 any people in this room have, well, if you haven't, in the wintertime, the sun doesn't begin to even throw any beams of light until about 10 or 10.30, 11 o'clock in the morning. And then they land on the zindo deck outside. So you come out after a zen talk, and you're walking along, and suddenly in the frosty morning, you put your foot down in the slits. You feel that right there. So you can make a poem about that. Something like, After the Zen Talks. Stepping, stepping into a path that I sketched.

[43:06]

in a patch. So there's that setup. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. This frosty morning. Which is F is then taught. Steffi, drop that. One of these ideas of, 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 sin, stepping totally into the moment, capturing the authenticity of that fleeting moment in a few words, that practice, is also good practice for us as students.

[44:18]

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 predicaments. Nouns and verbs, nouns and verbs. Forget adjectives for a little bit. Forget adverbs. That's kind of extra stuff. Nouns and verbs. You might say that's the yin and yang. That is the subject and credit, how we 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 so you know what the subject is, as I've shown you in some of these other poems. Now, looking at, say, in the spring one, in the spring wind, One small begging bowl. Just that.

[45:21]

You have the spring wind, you're setting out on the top. You're setting out, you know, springtime, those are melting, setting the roof, right? Well, I've got, and I said, I'll be just begging with you, all right? My begging bowl accepts the fallen leaves. Nobody else has given me anything. It's not writing anything about what it's not getting. But it'll accept, see if you can accept it. It's kind of lovely. You accept the quality, the quality accepts everything. That reminds me, there is also the humorous haiku. You know what the humorous haikus are called? Senryu. Senryu is a humorous haiku where it turns on something on a strike, for example. This is from Harish Blythe in one of his books. Beside the road, the rose of Charon. My horse ate it. Let me suddenly switch. Beside the road, the rose of Charon grows.

[46:26]

Or, you could even use something like this. Fat rumps. Thin rumps. It pays them no mind. It's awful. Now, by having that line in here, it pays them no mind, of course, has a little... If I said something that he doesn't worry about or accepts him or something, he'd cut the side of no mind. Mushin. We're talking about no mind here. Mushins. The stones, too, enter my begging bowl. So, autumn, hail, all these kinds of weather. Spring, walking with my begging bowl until the end.

[47:31]

Now here's a famous one, going deeper and skilled deeper, the Green Mountains. You can 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 hearts with it. It was so easy because it was clustered. Consonant to the images of the frogs. Very simple Japanese, too. Very simple. Kind of textual Japanese. Nothing deep about that. Although, one of the other things, of course, about Eastern poetry is the calligraphy that goes with this. Like this. Ryokan and, like, Ikkyu Zenji and so on, they were master choreographers. And because in Japanese you don't only write with, you know, 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 it first looks like something like that when I write it.

[48:50]

And they have to look at it very carefully and read it. And there's samples of his, of his, calligraphy with these poems that is being appreciated for Tewahti's solid character. Even what he writes reinforces the feeling of how the poem indicates. That's something, of course, that we can play with, but it doesn't 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 the twosome was the catch. It's the way that's arranged. Sometimes we can do that and play with the order in which it strikes the eye and in which our mind picks up and it just flows into the meaning and reinforces the sense of what the poem has indicated, 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. Now today, I gave myself, I said, okay David, I don't suck David.

[50:02]

I said, I mean, sorry, I need to call myself Diagon. Diagon. Diagon. So I said an all day rain. Let's start with just something, an all day rain. And then fill it in with everything you can think. 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.

[51:06]

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. Just a couple of inches to fill in. Next week, when you come back, if you come back, bring some samples. what you have written. We'll do this every week, and we'll go from simple to more complex poems, didactic poems, political poems, so on. We 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?

[52:16]

You just do not get possessive about, is it good or bad? Because as soon as that, and, and, use that also as a practice of watching your reactive tendencies. Because what happens to you when you start trying to write something? And then kind of imagining yourself reading it to other people. Oh, gee, I don't think I... So you can use even that aspect of those practices. Bring it back into the... 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 a little chapbook. Maybe take a random, I don't know how we can do everybody's poem, but we could take, you know, something from everybody and make a little chapbook. if we have some ambitious people with lots of time on their hands. What was that? Volunteers, but you got it.

[53:17]

Yeah, if he does, you do. Yeah. So that might be kind of fun, and then we'll see how this works for us. Do you want us to start with the... Let's start. No, find one of your own. Find just some sentence or something, and then that's one lesson, and 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 Trungpao Rinpoche, they're teaching at Naropa, used to say, first thought, best thought. First thought is first thought. First thought, just don't try to edit yourself, people. The main thing is to get, you know, there's the story of, I think it was Flaubert talking to Maupassant about writing in France. Maupassant asked Flaubert, he said, what is the secret of writing?

[54:19]

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, so write a lot of it. And because there's quick impressions, try to avoid like and metaphors. If I had said, in all day rain, my mood is as murky as the weather, it would be the same thing. What did you say? My mood is as murky as the weather. But you actually did write. No, I just said, my feelings too are murky. Oh, right. I think you were saying something like that tonight. Were you telling me something about having your feelings all day, made upset by the... or something. By the weather. But that's the kind of thing I mean. Just that moment when you're thinking, I meant to turn right, but I turn left. And just catch that. Something about that aspect of our life.

[55:22]

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. Here, of course, slightly tipsy, as we know, doesn't refer to the leaves, but the sense of the fallingness in the world, things falling away, and one actually tearing down one's feet. It's an interesting connection. We've got a few more here. 77, potato gruel. It's warm. It's good taste. Autumn is here. And this one I love. The few flies that remain seem to remember me. Haven't had that experience at Tassar.

[56:24]

Do you want flies? Go to Tassar. Bathing alone, sleeping alone. A small Buddha statue rained down for the sake of human beings. I think that means rain down for the sake of human beings. Sunset, the plowsman's shadow grows deeper. In the mountain all day, the ants too are marching. Aimlessly, boy, here we're using some descriptive letters. Drifting here and there, tasting the pure water. Baggage I cannot throw off, so heavy. 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 jazz music.

[57:29]

Late at night, the harsh sound of gambling. He had to put up, you know, a really cheap, you know, kind of what we call skid row inns or hotels. Except in Japan, you know, they have a wonderful... ends, which is a big part of the transient life, whereas on one hand you have the symbol and the mode of living in a grass hut up in the mountains away from everything secluded, there's also the sense of the traveler who passes through ends and meets other travelers, the sense of the transiency. Often a lot of connection took place And those ends meeting people for a night and so on. And of course, a lot of drinking, a lot of very hot pillows. There were places for rendezvous, for lovers, trists and so on. So there was a lot of that kind of activity going on.

[58:33]

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 said Buddhist orientation, I mean a Buddhist monk's orientation, one who's taken precepts, one who's familiar with at least some of the doctrinal Mahayana teachings, 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 epilogue aspects of life, the epilogue of the world, the passing of all They cling to forms of experiencing that only bring sorrow and so forth.

[59:35]

It's a huge part of the general sensibility of the Japanese. Once I remember up in Hokkaido, they had a double suicide called Shinju, I think it's called. Shinju. And somebody said, did they leave a poem? No. Oh, they didn't even pull up? People were very disappointed. They didn't leave some record at that moment of leaving the will. Not that they leave a letter. You might say, did they leave a note? They didn't even know. Did they leave a call? 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. These days we meet both demons and Buddhas. That doesn't sound very interesting in English.

[60:37]

Is this one person, Santoka? Hmm? Always? Yeah, this is Santoka. He... Huh? I don't speak all of it. Well, he wrote all of these that you see in this kind of craft. And then, if you look in the middle, you will see some American haiku, which I just threw in from a book that I have on American haiku. And some haiku weekends. Ha! and if you look at it, 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 on their experiences of their life, not particularly Buddhist, and jumping off the path, a few cricket bangs his head on a chain-link fence.

[61:39]

Well, it's about a stone twice his head, I would wonder, for example, rather than his, but... A white tree fungus on the soft gray underside of several thousand holes. Deep inside the woods where the breeze cannot reach us, the mosquitoes fly. So these are just examples of finicky depth trust. Then the last part of this handout that I gave you, and maybe you can talk a little bit more about tonight, is, of course, by another poet, much earlier poet, in the 16th century, E.Q. Zinerji. All this to this love, the poetry of Hakuin and Iti. Iti, of course, because he was such an eccentric. Trained. Said to be the illegitimate son of the emperor, as a matter of fact. Violated in waiting. One biographer said, apparently waited too long.

[62:41]

and fell into disfavor with the Icarus 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 one night on a bee walk While rowing in the boat, he heard a crow call. 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, some blind, traveling musician. And some of his more raunchy poems I didn't include here because it might be a little too much.

[63:48]

But actually it's impossible to mutely translate to you efficiently because EQ's poetry is 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 EQ poem is, I'd love to give you something, but alas, it was insect. There's nothing at all. He also wrote a book called Stilton. And he used to parade around Stilton. in the city with a big cell, 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. He was very ashamed of it. He railed against the establishment of his day, which was, of course,

[64:50]

By that time, Hanley always was in Japan with the government and became pretty lax and mostly interested in raising money. And he, too, lived hand-in-mouth existence. But because of his birth, he had access to high aristocratic circles. And of course, he was extremely learned. monasteries in the Far East, just as monasteries in the West were places, repositories 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.

[65:53]

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, a colloquial phrase, and that's that. It adds, it's like a capping phrase to that particular poem, which is funny enough in itself, and that's that. It 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. Doka are... teaching poems, preaching poems. They have a little lesson incorporated in them. Whereas you notice Sentaku doesn't incorporate usually a lesson so much in his. But Ikkyu definitely has an axiom.

[66:55]

So you can write poems that have an axiom, but we'll come to those a little bit later. Protest poems. Were these written in the hypoform of 575? They were written in the duocoform, I think, of 57577. But they're translated in couplets. Yeah, that's this particular version. 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 translated it somewhat differently and talks about having to read about mortals. It's... 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.

[68:08]

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. You know how I read that book? Get it. We have to put in about five minutes, I think, and we have to put these chairs away and get over to the Zendo for our evening closure for the day, for the refugees. So this is a kind of introduction like to building up our susceptibility and our sensitivity to the flashing lights The flashing tail of the horse 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.

[69:11]

Moving from one reality to another. And imagine what it must be Those people who not only wake up from the dreams they have at night, and wow, that nightmare was just, just a nightmare. Wow, what a relief. To the next step, we'll wake up and deal 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, this is, of course, D.T. Suzuki. It's a wonderful, it's beautifully written, what he said. And this may also be a quote that is the deepest part of our self-responding to the force of our life. The doctrine of effortless and purposeless deeds, Anabodha's 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.

[70:20]

But the pitying heart that transcends the cold and severe contemplation of the reasoning 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 and have faith in the overflowing goodness of our heart and of our perceptions without worry about it.

[71:21]

When you finally practice, as I said long enough, you always come to a place where only two things are going to happen, paradoxically speaking. Particularly when it's raw and terrifying and unpleasant. You can either run away, turn away from the experience, or you can 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. We can do that. Until eventually, constant designations and words themselves fall away. And at that moment, we explode into language. Back into the world. Back... and down half the mountain. Don't spare a thousand rupee for the calendar.

[72:12]

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