We are getting ready for our yearly week on the Delaware beaches, and that is time I sorely need. Besides a guitar and some pencils, there is the questions of how many more books than i need should i bring. Photos of the place reveal a full bookshelf, so perhaps there will be some good local history or natural history resting there. 

I have settled on the poetry: Vita Nova, by Louise Gluck; The Opening of the Field, Robert Duncan; Ann Carson’s God, Irony, and Glass. And T.S. Eliot. I often read poems as if putting on 45’s or listening to an album, which is why i am bringing single books of poems rather than anthologies. Writing poetry has dried up for me. There is something gone off in the well. Maybe some Kurt Vile will push me to play loose and true on my old Epiphone and my favorite slim and dense volumes of poetry will refresh perspective. I am bringing one little art book (glossy prints of Paul Klee), and some Patrick O’Brian novels that center around the British Navy in the Napoleonic period. And some others, because I always bring more than I need. 

A number of years ago I was visiting friend who was recovering from a terrible illness. The night before I returned home i found myself wide awake, all night. Usually mind training martial arts forms and silently chanting Buddhist texts would be enough to tire me out, but instead the wide awake continued. Not anxious, or worried. Increasingly resigned to a night of meditation but also to a grind of a 5 hour drive the next day. I finally settled on listening (over and over again) to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, something I hadn’t read in a couple decades. After all those years of Zen training and now being the age at which he wrote it, i could hear what he was saying.

This is from East Coker, part III:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

These lines strike me as from man with Buddhist, especially Zen, intuitions but feeling his away out of an Anglo-Catholic frame of reference:

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Eliot had long engaged with Eastern, especially ancient literary, spirituality. I never experienced him as doomy as he was taught, and his verse has a lightness and quickness (and humor!) that I value these grim and absurd days. He seems to be circling around what can’t be said, like in the beginning of the Dao De Jing (“what can be spoken of, is not the Dao”), but also feeling it without fear, and noticing that hope and love might be misdirected feelings, if pointed towards a future rather than the present.

He seems to be sensing that faith in the present, whatever is present, is enough. It is a pause, an emptiness, an opening. “The darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing”.

There is a moment in Zen meditation where there is that stillness. It isn’t a goal, and it isn’t something to make effort to stay with. But it does hint at the gentleness of death and absence, and being alright with that is peace with the present. That moment also can be brought along into the day. It really can be, in the form of compassion and generosity, receiving and giving, both forms of emptiness. Allowing the suffering in... to do this i need to be empty of what i’d rather be true. Giving away what i hold dear... to do this i need to be empty of what i want.

My older cousin, an uncle of sorts, Albert Ryle Kezel, died this past weekend. He leaves his brother and best friend, John. Please pray for them in the old-fashioned way. They are Catholics of the Eliot sort: intellectual, sensing something much deeper, with a great love of our shared classical culture. We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert... rest peacefully.

Cloud whisp above Little Ravine,
A heron's so-slow wings along.
How does such a span not get tangled in the trees?

Dark yet lively other songs,
Heart moved by what is heard
and never seen.

Take care... P

Zen is no better than any other pursuit,
its path clogged with ignorant people.

How else to explain the obscurity of Miaodao,
as middling males with no sense of humor
are remembered for a thousand years?

She pointed out:
"Before you've even crapped, you've fallen in the hole!"

This is about many different things,
not just Zen things.
	
It isn't just that ignorance has rotted into evil,
or that rats have now overrun the offices 
from the basement.

It's the people who trust nothing,
who smash and grab, 

while cutting off a pittance 
that is the difference for so many 
between merely suffering and dying.

The small and the mean 
imagine themselves heroes.

The stupid and the crass 
burn libraries and paint gold on bronze.

Pausing for moment here to reflect
on how absurd it is to gild with paint
the patina of bronze.

There is no meaningful difference between
the man who wears Zen to seduce students

and the greedy cynics 
who fanfare ridiculous achievements
for a secret payday.

The rest of us, we rest on hope:
the "empty proposition" of receiving the world as it is,
meanwhile seeking justice, not revenge.

The universe is ridiculing these people.

I've been meaning to get back to the poetry of Chang Sik Kim for a while. This points to something I wish to do in the next couple years: organize an online conference or presentation about Master Kim's poetry, his Buddhist teaching, and his career. I don't know how possible this is. Regardless, with that in mind I have been reflecting on particular themes of his, and one of is something a student of mine long ago pointed out: that in a number of poems there is "dreaming" and there is "pinching". We would talk about it at times, but I've never thought about it formally.

These four poems appear one after another in the middle of the volume The Sky is Blue, The Water is Clear. I am assuming the order is deliberate, and the poems immediately before and after these do not mention "dreaming". So, as a place to start, I am starting here... let's see how "dreaming" functions in these teaching poems. I have reformatted for clarity, as I sometimes do.

1.

The blue sky and the blue ocean make dreaming,
The mountain stands straight up on that point.

The mountain makes a bed and takes care of that dreaming for a trillion years.

The flower understands.
The perfume flies into the blue sky and the blue ocean
and talks about the mountain's love and compassion.

The blue sky and the blue ocean learn from the flower again,
They open their mouths and don't know how to close them.

2.

People meet.
They bring their own dreams.
They exchange their dreams.
They understand that each dream is different.
They turn around and go back.
The dreaming wants to wake up.
They ask each person's thinking.
The day and night turn and look back to each other.
Dreaming wants to make no-desire-dreaming.
The day and night dreaming presents a mirror to everybody

3.

Thinking holds on for a long time and appears one by one.
Thinking shoots out from behind the mountain, behind the earth.
Thinking circles around, returns, and sits on the mind,
    point by point thinking sews in the mind.

Thinking goes to sleep, 
Thinking makes dreaming looking for the past present and future.
Thinking wakes up, thinking hides again in the mind.
Thinking makes new dreaming again.

Thinking and love are in the mind.
Thinking never divides the day and night

4.

Last night was so quiet, tonight may be quiet, too.
I hope the quiet continues and appears tomorrow night.
Check and check, find out that, moment by moment,
the night is not there.
How can you hold on to the night?
The night moves to midnight;
midnight pushes to the middle of the night.
The middle of the night looks out to night's end
then the night disappears.

What is the point?
The night is dreaming.
Who is concerned about that?


I would like to pull together all the published poems and index them for these two terms, "dreaming" and "pinching". In his poetic world, everything is a living being and "makes dreaming", and sometimes these dreams drift over to others, provoking more dreaming or some changed awareness. Sometimes, "pinching" happens, which startles another form of awareness. It is an elaborate, playful, and at times melancholy, interdependence. In Master Kim's poetry world, everything is alive and interacting, and awareness of this is joyful. But every so often one of these beings is saddened by their own isolation or by the isolation of another. The isolation is a delusion of separateness. 

For now, I am seeing "dreaming" in Kim's poetry as something living beings do, and in his poetic world, everything is living. Dreaming emanates, wafts like the scent of flowers, emerges from living. In a way it functions as karma does: it is a natural part of living, it connects all beings in awareness, and produces new awareness, which come to think of it might be the "pinching" we will look at next time.

1.

“To see good, be good.”
But the good sees evil, too.
and suffering.
Evil suffers
and does not see good,
and does not see suffering.

This is true, but not always,
cause nothing is always.

2.

A nun named Yuxin asked Zhaozhou
“What is the ‘deeply secret mind’?”

The formidable master squeezed her hand.
She asked, “Do you still have this?”
He answered, “You are the one that has this.”

One day each of us will see
where evil goes for nourishment.

War is coming to us,
Evil is coming for the good,
or so it appears. 
But evil cannot see the good,
only trample it blindly, in panic,
and fear. 

Community Zen tonight at 6... Free, all are welcome.

(Rain)

Mountain rains do not make mud.
The river clouds thin into fog.

Clear skies have a crane flying halfway up the ridge,
The wind blows wildly trees on level sands.

Light faint on the isles, appearing and disappearing;
Hidden and then seen, the cliff’s shape comes through.

Feeling the blues, I go wandering out my gate.
The utter expanse engages what eyes pass over.


With my diabetes I am daily bedridden;
I was lying down so long my shoes got dusty.

Of course I could get a palanquin,
But I can’t make out the road that will take me home.

Weapons spread far and wide, never put down;
Vipers look all around at one

Far in the distance the frontier moon wanes;
Welling with care as the years drift past


Needle and moxa block me from friends;
With chaff and bran I face my children.

           - Du Fu, c. 760 c.e. (trans. Stephen Owen)


This poem was written towards the end of Du Fu’s long writing life across the mid-8th century.. He was weary, and the massive rebellion against the Tang Dynasty by a wealthy, entitled self-styled” outsider” had cost perhaps millions of lives. Fu and his family were pressed this way and that by events, and the search for employment, and the search for safety and some minimal sustenance, drove them to the outer reaches of what they knew of China.

Our poetry gathering Saturday evening was settling, soothing. It was cold, dark, and rainy, and the breeze that headed downriver on the Delaware gave the darkness a different sort of chill.

Anyways, we meditated and then we shared a few poems we brought with us. Some of us spoke in poetic reflection, I made up a simple poem that followed hand gestures. Most of all, we listened. Our host was the acupuncturist and Buddhist teacher Matt Branham… the poem above made itself obvious as I paged through the 5th of 6 volumes of Fu’s poetry the next morning.

The poem presents itself in paired lines of parallel and contrasting moods and image. Du Fu moves quickly from a rather general, but perplexing, opening to the specifics of what he sees, to his daily pains, to how unlikely a change in circumstances seems. The terrors of total war accumulate, and he is so tired. Medical care, the needles of acupuncture and the mugwort of moxibustion, isolates him, and he has little to offer his family but the gleanings of the field: some discarded chaff, and the fibrous bran that will fill the stomach but offer little in the way of nutrition. 

One more note on the poetry gathering: we will do it again, and I would like to try this online, too. Let me know if you are interested. I hope to find new ways to center poetry in Buddhist, and otherwise spiritual, practice. As the next Poetry Sangha is July 25th, I would love to do one or two of them online before then.

Thank you, again, for participating, and thank you to Matt for hosting. I look forward to hosting this later this summer.

Frenchtown, NJ... Saturday, April 25 at 6pm. We are hosting a poetry listening, writing, and reading meditation with my friend, the teacher & traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, Matt Branham. Free... please join us. See below for details.

(-)

The Book of Serenity is a collection of koans, ironic and uncanny interactions often centered on some well-known charismatic teacher from China’s Tang era. I don’t know the book well, so I have begun to play with it a bit. Recently I have been reflecting of the way I might see and experience the independence of things, whether with patients and clients and students (which is intense and busy these days) or at home and in the garden (where the rate of change is suddenly spectacular).

The field of action, the whole thing of life, is movement and change. But what is change? What does change arise from, is it an “it” at all? Where does it enter? Once we ask, the answer is clear. Don’t try to grab “change” with all your mental strength and wrest it from life or life from change… there is nothing left there to think on but change and you’ll just have a mess on your hands.

When the moon disappears for a day or so, we know its there. We even know it hasn’t substantially changed much, but from our view… so much change! Small changes drive our sense of time, and though nothing repeats exactly, we celebrate returns. Time isn’t anything, it opens towards space, unique for every being. We are our own time, and my time does not displace your time. My saying “Hello” does not trample your saying “Hello”. Time is like that, too. Co-exisiting with all times. All beings are just as they are going.

Koans come with commentary, and with warnings not to take things too seriously, despite life and death being at stake. I open the poem with a back and forth between Baizhang and Huangpo. It isn’t supposed to make sense or resolve. It points to being present.

(-)

“Magnificent! Clearly outstanding. What did you come for?”
“Magnificent! Clearly outstanding. Not for anything else!”

Restoring, recalling, calling, storing,
recollecting & dispersing,
replete with letting go.

It is the field of action.
Every moment leading to the next…
a vulture’s eyrie, 10 dimensions of possibilities.

Empty, self-emptying:
the moon between us & the sun!
The dark side is facing us,
the bright has turned away,
a disappointed sun-faced Buddha.

Yet tomorrow as the birds remember
and dawn soaks through the last edge of night,
a hook is lowered for those spiritual fish
leaping clear of the dark
untiringly responsive ocean.

Fearless

Spring lace incense smoke
braiding with hyacinth & magnolia.

Woodpecker rhythm tak tak tak,
valley dawn singing several songs as one.

Daylight, owls give way to mourning doves.
Daylight, dreaming retreats and work appears.

Dirt in the nails, paint on the arms,
yesterday ended with wine.

On the drizzling first day of spring we burned the year's altar offerings of garden flowers. On this cool day of passing clouds we cleared plots for green-grey sage and nodding blue flax. On a day of budding peace, we spy on high pink swelling magnolia buds, sprays of red maple tree flowers, and below, purple helleborus heavy as fruit. 

One day a fragrant breeze arrived, so I crushed early sprigs of mugwort, rue, tansy, and yarrow, and breathed a little. On this daily reminder of evil war, the strange men who chose it died to themselves. Day was equal to night for a time, and during that long day i took to rifling my fingers into the dirt, all of it still cold from those days of sun visiting so briefly. I reminded ourselves that there are potatoes, carrots, and onions in the dirt, somehow, 
that we got through winter, 
that we are in love, 
and we, 
for now, 
choose peace.
There is also hyacinth blooming in the yard, on those breezes.

Community Zen tonight at 6 pm. All welcome.
Buddhist Psychology afternoon one hour workshop starts April 14 at 12 noon. This will be monthly on the 2nd tuesday (May 12, June 9). Contact peter.j.ryan.zenlessons@gmail.com for details.

(-)

Stirring

Winter melts, soaks, mucks the paths.
Spring greens, lifts, shows direction, laughs.

The Sky says, I am cold and old
And you are young, so warm...

and the heat will pass from your form
into the cold, aimless mud.

Sun lifts into the cold sky.
Even the salamander 
under the potted willow stirs.

She says, my belly is cold,
and my eyes sense the heat 
of a distant star.

Beneath the next willow pot,
The rolly-pollies tumble slowly 
with the worms.


(-)


The stirring of action is very much the feeling of Spring. We can feel it, we trust it. Perhaps it is true that many very old people sense Spring stirring and know they cannot lift their heads up for yet another cycle of living and dying. The rest of us move along with the flow.

That glance backwards, that pause we enact, when someone dies, can’t we feel the flow moving past us? At once we are still and sensing all the movement, like a stick vibrating in an eddy, not quite still and not quite moving. Then something changes and we are released back into life.

One of the first moments of feeling-deeply-understanding occurred early in my Zen training. I hardly knew my teacher. He was then for me a distant, mildly exotic figure. His brother had just died suddenly on an airplane. He was just giving a dharma talk when he mentioned this, and for a moment became very, very sad. 

And it passed through him, he passed through it, and on they went. That little stick in the eddy letting go and being let go. Spring is like this, too.

Zen practice is a way of letting the contradictions of living speak to us a whole song. Even the word contradiction, “words against each other”, implies that the problem we experience is more with the words than with the world. It isn’t a contradiction to be deeply sad and to let it go.

Spring is that, too. Every season is. Every change is. All those stirrings of life when it is very cold, or dark, or in mourning. Or after a long catastrophe, or a life altering betrayal.

Those stirrings are bodhicitta, that liveliness that nudges us to meet the world as it is. Sometimes it is a little confusing… situations that show some liveliness are often moving in several directions at once. This is where the notion of wu-wei comes in, “non-action”. It is sort of a very minimalist approach. Let things be, give everything room to breathe and develop on its own. Sometimes this simply means recognizing that “it isn’t time yet” to act. Sometimes it means putting a lot of effort into creating or restoring conditions for others to thrive within. Often, there are very few clues that one way or the other is the right one, which is itself a sign to step back, to pause and let the situation speak more clearly to you.

We live in an era of monsters, of small-minded people with gargantuan appetites and little taste. They fear death and obscurity and seek to be remote and admired. They are impatient and anxious and resort to violence to get their way, which is often little more than further opportunities to dominate others. 

Their counter-example is not just an aberration. It is also the world-as-it-is, speaking to us in a way that finally, terribly, gets our attention. We are part of it, and will not escape it. We could have fought harder for justice, for preventing the accumulation of such power. We could have yelled louder for those who attacked democracy on January 6th to be truly and firmly punished. There are many things we did not do, allowing this gruesomeness to overtake us. But we hear it now.

Or, rather, some of us do. But what of those who do not? Well, at some point in the past, we did not see this, either. There is always an earlier or later time to awaken. But this right now is the only time to awaken further, to answer that stirring into the world-as-it-is... with action.

Time

Time never stops.
It looks forward and runs.
Time carries all of nature,
It keeps going.
Nature cannot argue with time,
it cannot ever win.
Everything follows time
and becomes older.
Their shapes slowly disappear.

When was time born?
Time does not have a long life.
times lifespan is only a moment
Time lives continuously,
moment by moment by moment by moment.
Time is born in moment,
by following the moment
time never dies.
Time’s life is never ending.
The earth, the sky, and the universe
are born in time and die through time.
When all of nature
respects and submits to time,
they make their own dreams and run with them.

           - Chang Sik Kim

What is Right is Beyond Us for Now

The hunger they feel, the homelessness;
they grasp, they are pitiless & wasted.

Afraid of true companions,
always cold, lacking conviction to stay,

lacking courage for taking on the road
where mountain passes dissolve

into clouds, and the shrieks and roars
of unnamed creatures terrify them.

Those are just creatures, 
in family, in love, and in care,
warning of ravenous, trespassing devils.

Instead, they huddle, clinging to streets
that lead nowhere, or to hell,

and they snatch at children 
on their way to school,

they imagine their lives are in mansions,
they conjure images of vast wealth and wisdom,

they stink with sores of spiritual leprosy,
and their ancestors who sacrificed

they reject, and do not make sacrifice to them.
The legions of the dead are mostly forgiving,

a placid bunch, grateful for where they’ve arrived,
grateful for the prayers that remember them.

But some have not settled in, and they dive, sudden,
from heaven, like a soaring, placid vulture become falcon,

whose steep angle bursts the ground hare,
whose guts and fur now rot on the ground. 

These fantasy mansion rabbits are killed
before they realize that justice has struck.