There might be a little activity here over the next few days- if I can get to a computer. We are off to Boston, for a black belt test and a wonderful visit with friends and fellow travelers up in Shim Gum Do world. On the coldest weekend of the year...
I love winter. When I am cold, I store the cold in my bones, and release it slowly throughout the summer. David Hinton, one of my favorite translators of Chinese poetry, refers to what he calls "a Taoist ecology" that emerged fully in the eighth century poems of Wang Wei:
"...all things arise and pass away as nonbeing burgeons forth into the great transformation of being. This is simply an ontological description of natural process, and it is perhaps most immediately manifest in the seasonal cycle: the pregnant emptiness of nonbeing in the winter, being's burgeoning forth in spring, the fullness of its flourishing in summer, and its dying back into nonbeing in autumn."
He write of "tzu-jan", which he transliterates as "self-ablaze", the myriad things of this world "emerging spontaneously from its generative source, each according to its own nature...each dying and returning into the process of change, only to reappear in another self-generating form".
Hinton states that "tzu-jan recognizes the earth, indeed the entire universe, to be a boundless generative organism..."
Wang Wei was one of the most influential painters and poets of all of Chinese history. Hinton's translations are among the best.
Ending a cold watch, drums announce dawn.
A clear mirror gazes into my haggard face.
Wind startles bamboo outside my window,
and outside the gate, snow fills mountains,
its empty scatter in a deep lane all silence,
its white drifting my courtyard all idleness.
I'm wondering abou the old sage master:
are you content there, gates buried in the snow?
There is alot more to Asian poetry than haiku. Poetry is absolutely at the heart of zen. More on that sometime.
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