In this month's Tricycle, you've seen it, oh well, in a minute, Jane Hirshfield and somebody else write about the poetry of basho, haiku, and it may be just serendipitous, or what do you call it, synchronistic, that we have so many people interested suddenly in this, and they even quote in here the poem of Wallace Stevens that we, didn't we talk about? Snowman? Didn't we? Didn't we? No, you recited it. I recited it. No, you didn't. Oh. I guess I did that in Texas. Anyway, they quote it in here too. So, either we're all a lot more caught by certain ideas and images of what we think Zen and poetry is about, or there's some unanimous feeling there, or it's just a coincidence.

[01:06]

And I'm surprised at the training in perfect dharma, it is rarely met with even a hundred thousand million kalpas, having yet to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to face the truth of the Tathāgata's words. I see we have a basket full of fresh produce, fresh greenwood, fresh greenwood tonight, and we can read some of those later in the hour. So, tonight, we've, you know, for two weeks we've, the last two weeks we've pretty much been looking at, or suggesting what poetry, in the tradition, the Chinese and Japanese

[02:14]

tradition, and a particular mood and culture in which it gives rise to, has in common, and we'll look at one more poet tonight, translation of one more poet tonight, of that gilt, and then beginning next week we're going to move up to our time with our contemporary poets and see if there's, make some connection between the particular context in which we think those poems were written in, the mindsets of those poems, and how they may or may not at all jive with what we think. This particular aspect of being a wanderer, a dropout, an iconoclast, a dissatisfied but poetic and highly sensitive individual informed by the teachings of the Buddha, who happens

[03:14]

also to find great, memorable poetic expression, how that particular idea that we have is just that, our particular idea, and tonight I want to look at Ryokan, the great fool Daigu, how many people have heard of Ryokan, see, of course, we have an authority tonight, so if I make a mistake, you can correct me, okay, you see Ryokan is extremely popular with Zen students,

[04:20]

in fact the writings, the publications concerning this particular individual both in Japan and in the West in the last 25 years is enormous, not only his poems as they appear in anthologies or in collections, but scholarly works about him, because it seems with Ryokan we come to some kind of quintessential, I would almost say archetype, or an individual who exhibits all of these characteristics, and just what, how do we pin down those characteristics and then what, how does that actually influence our idea of who we are as Zen practitioners maybe, so in view of that approach, I thought it might be a good idea if I read aloud a few poems, I don't have them duplicated this week because I just got back from a trip and we were

[05:25]

busy today with many things, including a long meeting this afternoon, but what I would like to do is mention a few things about Ryokan and then read some of his poems, and as you listen to the poems, I want you to think of how you see this person, if you can find a maybe salient or characteristic feature that you'd put in the one definition of what you hear in this particular person, as his work from the 18th century is translated into our 20th or 21st century English idiomatic translation, and what the implications of that whole thing is, and then you can check back with the other poets we've also looked at, particularly Hanschand, and later

[06:31]

Santoka. Okay? Before I do, I want to say a couple of things. One of the things that, one of the poems that Ryokan is famous for is this one, which goes, Who says that my poems are poems? My poems aren't poems at all. When you understand that my poems really aren't poems, then we can talk about poetry together. Who says my poems are poems? My poems aren't poems at all. When you understand that my poems really aren't poems, then we can talk poetry together. Well, what does he mean, his poems

[07:33]

aren't poems? So maybe you'll catch some essence of this guy, and then we'll talk a little bit more about his life, some true little biographical things about him, and see if you get a whiff of something in here that might have, might already be there in your life. Walking along, I follow the drifting stream to its source. Did you read Wang Wei's poem last week? Sound familiar? Walking along, I follow the drifting stream to its source, but reaching the headwaters left me stunned. That's when I realized that the true source isn't a particular place you can reach. So now, wherever my staff sets down, I just play in the currents, eddies, and swirls. Where you have beauty, you have ugliness too. Where you have right, you will also have wrong. Knowledge and ignorance are each

[08:40]

other's cause. Delusion and enlightenment produce one another. It's always been so, it didn't start now. You get rid of this, then grab hold of that. Don't you see how stupid it is? If you're determined to find the innermost truth, why trouble about the changing face of things? Those are two didactic, or teaching poems as it were. Doesn't have a name right now. I might find it up here, but most of these don't have names. Well, see me after. I'll talk about him in a minute. I'll talk about him and his life, but at first, before I, I already set up the context in which you'll come at the poems, let the poem speak for him, for himself, and then we'll talk about who it is a little bit. Empty bowl. Remember the empty bowl of Santoka? Clear skies ring with a honk of wild geese on deserted hills, leaves swirl in the wind,

[09:46]

twilight on a smoky village road, carrying an empty begging bowl and walking home alone. Will my stupidity and stubbornness ever end? Poor and alone, that's my life. Twilight on the streets of a ramshackle town, going home again with an empty bowl. That's one mood. All day I gaze on smoky villages, walking and walking, begging as I go. Night falls and the long mountain roads stretches before me. The wind bitter enough to tear out your whiskers. My threadbare robe trembles like swirling fog. My wooden begging bowl grows ever stranger with age. I've never minded hardship and cold. Such has always been a lot of

[10:47]

people like me. Gogo, Gogoan. A measure of rice. It's a place that he called his hermitage. It's plain and simple, Gogoan. Inside, a room that's utterly bare. Beyond the door, a forest of cedars. A few sutra hymns are placed on the walls. The rice pot often gathers dust. The steamer simply sits unused. Only the old man from the village to the east now and then knocks at my door in the moonlight. Now notice that these poems move in many, who is that old man that knocks on his door? Is Ryokan being literal? Is Ryokan being metaphorical? Is he being contextual? How is, how are we to interpret these poems about him, knowing something about his life? Here are a couple more. I think you already get the drift, but. Delusion and enlightenment, two

[11:54]

sides of a coin. Universe in particular, just parts of a whole. All day I read the wordless scriptures. All night I practice no-practice meditation. On the riverbank, a bush warbler sings in the weeping willow. In the sleeping village, a dog bays at the moon. Nothing troubles the free flow of my feelings, but how can this mind be passed on? And maybe one or two more, and then let's get a feeling, write down a word, any word that strikes you about this guy. Where did my life come from? Where will it go? Meditating by the window of my tumble-down hut, I search my heart absorbed in silence, but I search and search, but I search and search and still don't know where it all began. How will I ever find where it ends? Even the present moment can't be penned down. Everything changes,

[12:56]

everything is empty, and in that emptiness, the, quote, I exist only for a little while. How can one say anything is or is not? Best just to hold to these little thoughts. Let things simply take their way and so be natural and at your ease. Who does that remind you of? Anybody that I've given you any readings about? Who was it said, names are the guests of reality? Now this is really central to our argument, about names. Who was it said, names are the guests of reality? These words have come down to us from ancient times, but even if people know that names aren't real, they still don't see that reality itself has no root. Name, reality, both are beside the point. Just naturally find joy in the ever-changing flow.

[13:59]

Who was it said, names are the guests of reality? There's a footnote that will tell you who it was. These words have come down to us from ancient times, but even if people know that names aren't real, they still don't see that reality itself has no root. Name, reality, both are beside the point. Just naturally find joy in the ever-changing flow. Now what? You think he's always going with the empty flow? Listen to this one. Sitting alone in my empty room, my mind restless and downcast. I saddle my horse and ride far, far away. Climb to a height and gaze out over the distant scene. A whirlwind springs up, shaking the earth. In no time at all, the sun sinks in the west. Broad rivers churn with foaming waves. Fields stretch endlessly past the

[15:16]

horizon. Black monkeys call to their companions with melancholic cries. Wild geese wing their way south. A hundred cares lie in my brow. Ten thousand troubles rid my heart. I want to return, but I've lost the way back. Here it is, the end of another year. What am I to do? Rags and patches, patches and rags, rags and patches, that's my life. My food is whatever I beg by the roadside. My house is completely overrun with wild grass. In autumn, gazing at the moon, I recite poetry all night long. In spring, entranced by the blossoms, I wander off and forget to come home. I left the temple and this is how I've ended up, a broken down old mule. And finally, maybe one more. Ever since I quit the temple, my life has been completely carefree. My staff is always at my side. My robe is worn completely threadbare. At night, in my hut,

[16:30]

through the lonely window, I hear the falling rain. On spring days, when the flowers riot and bloom, I'm playing ball out on the street. If anyone asks what I'm doing, I say, the most useless man there ever was. Who was Ryoka? A real person. What do you mean? He seems real. Okay, he feels real. Anybody else? Romantic. Why? Because everything has this feeling. Colorful, lots of rich feeling to it. What else would mark it as romantic? Longing. A kind of melancholy, but that's hung over all of these poems to some extent, hasn't it? The sense of loneliness. Sometimes depressed.

[17:43]

He seems to have a great need to be exposed to raw experience. Need to live on the edge. Yeah, he needs to and he doesn't have much of a choice. Okay, now some of the biographical stuff about Ryoka is that he came from an upper middle class family. His father was a village elder and was very important kind of family connections. He had brothers and sisters at an early age, since he was supposed to inherit his father's role as a kind of mediator in the disputes. He lived, by the way, about the time of our revolution in the 18th century. Died in the 1890s, 1790s, I think. He went to a monastery at an early age and according to what we understand from the notes that he's left behind, that he studied for years at a very rigorous, which is very rigorous, even severely rigorous practice for a number of years.

[19:01]

And at some point, he had an awakening and went to his master and his master gave him the name of Ryokan, but he also called him Daigu, great fool. Now, he has become such a legend in his own country that we can't separate the legend part of him and what he might have really been like. But according to the legend, he left the monastery because he was dissatisfied after this particular point with what he saw as a kind of decadent or a kind of, yeah, kind of decadent settling into the religious establishment, not unlike Saigyo 500 years before. And he wandered about begging, making his life by begging, we think, right? That's how it sounds like, that he went about begging from door to door, making his livelihood that way and would go back to his little grass shack.

[20:04]

I'm not sure, is it Waikiki? No, that's the wrong century. To his little grass hut up in the mountains and live on the edge, kind of a hand-to-mouth existence. He was also called great fool because he loved to play with children for hours on end, hide-and-go-seek. There are many stories about him going to close his eyes or hide, not look as the children run in and hours later, six, seven hours later, he's still in the fields holding his hands over his eyes. So there's something in the myth of Ryokan about great naivete, it sounds like, the sense of not being very sophisticated. Yet, at the same time, his literary capacity, he wrote kanji, poems in Chinese, many of those poems were written in Chinese, he wrote many in Japanese. His calligraphy is today priceless as a collector's item. He was known even at his time as a great collector and a wonderful poet and people would try to get, stop him on the street, see if they could get him to write something and he would put them off.

[21:15]

Now if you read the letters that he wrote to people, which are by the way in this book, which by the way is also in the library, you will see that he sent home or sent to various people requests for numerous things such as sake, tobacco, he loved to smoke. So as for rice, as for materials with which to write his poems and so on, and lived very often in the shadow of a larger establishment. So although he sounds like a very romantic figure and so on, Ryokan, and he practiced very hard, what, what this, this archetype, this person that finds some resonance in me, a response in what, in our own hearts, because he is what? He's free. The thing you feel about Ryokan is I'm free of it, I'm free of the establishment, I'm free of following any particular way of being other than letting the winds of the moment blow me now this way and now that way.

[22:20]

Does that kind of, do you have ever read anything or felt something like that's how you would like to study? Read it. I wanted that life but didn't dare. So here I am instead, thinking maybe I'll get there. Is your life informed by Buddhist practice? Romantic, yes, because it's rustic. Romantic, yes, because it's kind of back to nature, it's kind of counter-establishment. It has a sense of the earthiness of things, the eternality of the myth of the earth and all of this. Back to nature, back to a simpler life form, and so forth. So I spent nine months in a hut that wasn't much bigger than his that you could barely stand up in. Had one sink in it and two tatami mats.

[23:32]

And every day I had to face myself about how real this idea was and how romantic it was in our heads because, as has been pointed out in more than one book, that when we take these Japanese and Chinese poets, we unconsciously as Westerners sift them through our own romantic ideas. That is the romance that comes down from someone like Rousseau, that which countered the age of enlightenment in the 18th century. We color it with our own ideas of being a dropout, of being footloose and fancy-free in a world of phenomena in which we can be great fools and have no more particular need to do anything but wander about. But what would happen to you if you did that in our time? If you got a staff in our time and acted like Ryokan did, you'd probably be given a handful of Prozac and sent to a homeless shelter and then analyzed maybe for a while to find out why you were so neurotic that you couldn't conform.

[24:44]

Which reminds me of a poem. I was just going to say, actually, they don't pay that much attention to homeless people. You would just be one of the homeless people. But if he was just one of the homeless people, he wouldn't be Ryokan. Why not? Even if he practiced in a monastery for 20 years. Well, that's one, but even if he practiced in a monastery for 20 years, why wouldn't you still have this particular mood, wandering in the fields and streams of America? Huh? You're not Japanese. You're not part of that context. There is a whole context in which this is possible to be this way. Now, read one of those Hanshan poems and you will hear exactly, it sounds like the same voice. And of course, he read Hanshan. That was one of his favorite poems, poets was Hanshan. He was carrying on this myth of the dropout, wanderer, holy man. But himself, his great contribution was that in his poetry as a Mahayana poet,

[25:57]

Ryokan managed to not take sides on being enlightened or being unenlightened, in being poor or being rich. In any of the dichotomies that are hidden within our language itself, Ryokan exposed those dichotomies in his life, in the way he lived. And manifested what, at least one argument is, a real exemplar of non-duality. Yesterday, did I tell you this poem? Yesterday they got basho. You know that one? This is if they lived today. Yesterday they got basho. They already, as you know, picked up Hanshan, Milarepa, and Lipo. And Latsu, that old coot, they sent to Napa long ago. You know what Napa is?

[26:57]

Right. The state mental hospital, or the county mental hospital. As for Bodhidharma, he got busted for illegal entry and is cooling his heels in El Paso. But yesterday, dammit, yesterday after all, they finally got poor old basho for writing a haiku on a restroom wall. Is that one of yours? That's one of mine. But what's interesting is that in some way, I had to take the feeling of how it would be today if you tried to be basho. Another time I put in my backpack basho's poetry, Hakuin's poetry, and I think Philip Whelan maybe, something like that,

[27:59]

and was walking up the mountain roads with my staff, quoting him and so on. Basho, or Hakuin, or Santoka, and so on, thinking of that kind of life. And along, suddenly coming over the hill was Kawasaki. And Yamaha. And I met Yamaha and Kawasaki on the road, and I'm quoting basho. And they're sitting on Yamaha. So you see, we brought these, what I'm trying to say is, if we update teachers, poets, to conform to our idea of who we think they were, not to mention in their own context who they thought they were in terms of the practice, then there is no difference between what we consider to be what they realized and what we realized. And if that is the case, that is not a Buddhist teaching of the pinnacle arising and the impermanence of all things, is it?

[29:03]

If we think that we can live the life of basho, just as basho thought that he could live the life of Hanshan, and we try to update the model of the teacher to conform or to fit our preconceptions of who we think that person's enlightenment is, then what we think that person experienced as enlightenment in our experience is no different. And if it is no different, it means it has, what, an entity, an integral self that has not changed according to context through time. This is not understanding what he was actually writing about, I think. It's merely mimicking. It's mimicking. It's being a little phony. So if we try to act like, even in our poetry in our day and age, we have to inculcate into our words, into our expressions those cultural signs and symbols and signals and so on,

[30:16]

that show us who we are linguistically as a culture, because culture is language. You see what I'm saying? So, here's what I want from you for next week. Try to write the following kind of poems. One, try to write a poem that's didactic. That is to say, it just has something to do with a lesson about how you understand the practice. I think I'll try to write one myself to see what I meant by that. Well, it was something like, All the Buddhas and ancestors are nothing else but the transmission of this face-to-face meeting at this moment.

[31:20]

Something like that. Whenever you're coming up with a sudden insight into what you're studying, that what the Buddhas and ancestors are about are not people living at some other time at some other place. They're the arising of your own mind at this moment in that kind of condition. Anything like that, that is revealed to you as you're doing your study, write it down. Make it like a didactic poem. What's the matter? You're frowning back there. Is that okay? Oh, fine. No, I thought maybe you were saying, no, no, no. By that I mean, it's not clear what I'm asking for. It's not clear. How about, birthless I am born, deathless I die.

[32:20]

Something like that. In which, possibly, if you can turn the two sides of the image back on itself. Another one I thought of was, this robe of liberation is also a straitjacket and a shroud. Turns around. Try to find an image that turns and shows both sides of the story. In as short a way as possible. You understand what I'm saying? And then as we build longer poems, as we go on through the weeks, we can use these particular conceits. I think the main thing I'm trying to get at here, for myself and for all of us, is that there's no way you can write an authentic poem with the same kind of feeling. Because we don't know what his feeling was, that Ryokan had. We don't know what Hanshan really felt. We're guessing and we're guessing it through the filter of our own interpretation.

[33:22]

As long as you're constantly doing that, we're always updating what that means. In other words, we're keeping that spirit alive. How that really applies to us, in our own way. How we really respond to being that particular kind of individual. Who goes his or her own way. This is a big thing in Zen. Is the tension, you see it here, is the tension between the collective, as the church and so on, and the individual within those forms. What is that tension? How do you manifest it? Where yourself as an autonomous feeling individual, expresses himself within the context of the greater whole that made you who you are. In this case, it would be the Soto Zen Buddhist Church. That gave him the form by which he could feel himself. You follow? This is contextual, looking at the context in which we... So find phrases that mean something to you.

[34:25]

They can even be slang phrases. And try to be as concrete with those phrases as possible. Is it personal? Yeah, it can be personal. Watch how you use the pronoun I. Because with this kind of language, Japanese and Chinese, you don't need pronouns as much as you do in English. But you can still... You can still... You can still give a presentation without actually putting the I in there. And you can even have feelings in your poetry that don't express who the I is, but is implied. Such as a phrase, alone with the wind and the cry of the hawk. You can say, well, I'd like to go out to nature to be in solitude. And that's very abstract. But if you say, alone with the wind and the cry of the hawk, you get all that feeling. You can feel the wind, you can hear the audio part of it,

[35:26]

and you can feel the spaciousness of it. You look for those kind of images that bring disparate sides of our experience together to form the emptiness, for example. Any questions? Shoot. That's right. When Ryokan writes, those who say I'm a poet don't understand me. What he's suggesting, at least to me,

[36:26]

is that, in fact, he said it outright. He said, there's three things I dislike. Poetry by poets, cooking by professional cooks, and calligraphy by professional calligraphers. But this is always taking a position that one has against some established position in the world. And I have a feeling that a lot of us come here out of a need to do that. To find ourselves over and against what any particular establishment, whether it's art, whether it's sciences, whether it particularly is religion, and so on. Out of that tension between who you should be as a practitioner within the form, mimicking the forms, imitating the forms that are passed down, and where you feel your own, where you feel this edge of yourself come in friction or in tension with those traditions.

[37:27]

That tension, if we keep that tension alive, if we can give expression to that tension, that's where poetry, that's where language begins to redefine the meanings inherent in the traditions that have come before. We find a new way to express something. But it is a new way. The way that we will express ourselves will not be the same way that Hakaway expressed himself, or Ryokan expressed himself in terms of our practice. These are only models. Okay. And then next week, I want to bring some up-to-date poems, as I said, that actually pick up issues, social issues. Buddhism as... Buddhism as kind of social activism. There's some of those poems by people like Gary Snyder. And where they seem to fit with this kind of tradition and where the points of departure are,

[38:29]

there's one he wrote that comes to mind right away, Smoky the Bear Sutra. Remember that? And our own Norman, and several other people. The book from which we will be looking at, and you can get it in the library, and you can get it in the bookstore, is called What Book? Have you seen that book? It's about poets from professionals and amateurs and people within children and so on, all writing about different aspects of Buddhist practice. And for the next two weeks, I want to do that, write and begin to write longer poems, maybe eight lines or so, maybe even ten lines of poetry that begin to, using these ideas of immediacy, one hit, maybe as a starting point, a didactic point. Notice how he'll use the didactic idea of impermanence and so on.

[39:31]

If you have good, you have bad, and so on. Then he'll suddenly switch, in about the third part of the poem, to the wisteria or some, what's called objective correlative, something that physically, some physical detail that recapitulates, that shows that idea in the phenomenon at large. So that you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it. That's important for us to do, to come alive with us. The reason we love him, even in translation, because he feels very human. We could almost, you know, step into his shoes, we feel. We feel. Okay. We've got a few minutes, so we're going to read some poems here tonight. Right? And I wanted to ask you, when it comes time to make up our little chat book, do you want your names on them or should they be anonymous? How many want anonymous? Anonymity.

[40:31]

How many want their names? Nothing wrong to have your name. Okay. Okay, so some people, I guess, I don't know exactly how we're going to do this. Do what? Yeah. Yeah. One of the things I said in the beginning, and this is very interesting, it's part of our practice, actually, is to begin to look how our egos begin to get involved. And this is a question about, you know, I think I'm pretty good. Do I want to come forward and show up? I don't think I'm very good at all. And, you know, begin to see this comparative mind come up as we express ourselves in language, which is a pretty good way

[41:33]

to express ourselves. The name of the game is what? Yeah. Who said that words aren't real? Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Baloney. You'll heal from sticks and stones, but names can wound you forever, right? So, always in Buddhist practice, there is right speech. How do we use language in a way that's tells the truth, is open? How do we use language? What is right speech as poets? Does Charles Bukowski write right speech? Does right speech only mean, you know, it has to be circumscribed by certain moral standards? What is right speech for a poet when it comes time? Yeah. It has to do with taking responsibility.

[42:35]

Taking responsibility? Good point. As long as you put your name on it, you're taking responsibility, right? Any other comments on this? We need a way to proceed because one of these days we're going to have to get to work on it. And I'm also thinking that we can't maybe print every poem. There's an awful lot of work to be done if we did it all, right? I don't know if we could do every one. But then how do we call through them? Should we just grab them out of the hat? I mean, what's fair? Are we going to edit them? See how this becomes? We have to put them all on the computer, right? It's going to take forever. We get busy men over there.

[43:37]

So I think we need to call through them some way. And I'm not quite sure how we're going to do that yet. Not to talk that over. All of us could. I don't know if we're going to put the names on it. That doesn't mean we need to put up with the years. Or just one night, write down a big poem. Mick offered to be the putter together of this. I'd be happy to designate him the editor as well. What if it was just one manuscript copy? One manuscript copy that he'd write?

[44:40]

Well, I see that the mechanics of this has yet to be worked out. Now, anybody who's inspired to actually take this very subject has something to write about. My poems are not poems. Whoever calls them poems don't understand me because I'm not about poetry, says Ryokan. What am I about? I'm about living my life freely and openly in which poetry is part of the expression of how I do that. But don't call me a poet first. On the other hand, I'm known for my poetry and always, always, always by that which is absent or by that which you can express as the opposite. It's giving you that which I say sparks your inspiration. That part of the establishment you have to realize without that, without having the very thing he wanted to drop out from, the very thing he dislikes, without that there's no Ryokan. So what is that thing

[45:43]

we push against, fight against, object against, write about? I'm not this, I'm not that. Trying to find the conflation in one line, in one poem. Our language itself is set up with dualities, isn't it? Our language is already set up with good and hierarchies, good, bad, male, female, black, white, so forth. And always the second of those pairs are unconsciously of lower status. And these are already implied in our language that we have hierarchical signs built into the way we express ourselves. By writing poems, since we don't, we don't have, you know, we don't have masculine and feminine forms particularly in our nouns, verbs and so on, as other languages might, they're more implied

[46:46]

than made explicit. So by taking on forms of poetry and writing about them, we begin to see what our attitudes are. Unconsciously they come forward. Give a name to the way you feel. Name it. And once you name it, you're taking the whole history of all the language and bringing it forward into your life and expressing it. We have to express ourselves some way in order for this tradition to keep being one way and understanding one way of being in the world. We're soon not going to have a practice or a practice place. Unless we are inspired to come here and practice and have been inspired by the past, by those figures of the past, want to discover something

[47:48]

that they had to say and then bring it forward into a new way, a new language, a new code. One way to be inspired in our practice is to come forward and articulate our point of view freshly, by taking these words and freshly expressing ourselves. And not just mimicking. After all, my mind is not Dogen Zenji's mind. If it's one mind understanding what they meant by one taste, what the context was, what do we mean by it then? What I'm saying is this is an exercise that we're constantly faced with. How to articulate and bring forth the teaching in the here and now as ourselves, not some dead thing. Sit like your hair is on fire even if you're too green to burn. Splitting freshly cut

[48:55]

too green to burn eucalyptus rounds, green juice spurts out. I heard a bird sing. The tall stately redwood trees blue-tagged for cutting too green to burn. Too green to burn. Try a didactic poem. Is this the poem? Too green to burn. Try a didactic poem. Turn 360 degrees and see what the mind picks up. Can this class help bring the immediate into focus? I swear I said those exact words

[50:01]

but it's not my writing. Somebody's listening. Too green to burn yet here I am. Please scatter my ashes over the sea. Now I understand without these white plum blossoms the world falls apart. A patch of sunlight moves slowly across the wall. The birds grow quiet. The cry of a hawk meets a sunbeam both pierce the heart mountains bristle brushed after the rain the moon takes one careful step spring breeze caress the grass passing wind always cracks me up a smiling face for lunch tofu for dinner a dewdrop in the sun every tooth a diamond a breeze caressing me at the reservoir the wind chases the waves rain hits the skylight trees alive in the breeze what a waste to be

[51:01]

turning pages. I'm on fire, he said. You're too green to burn, I said. Oh really, you ask? No, not really. So she sent to Goodwill again to report the same answer. Did I hear too green to burn in that? It's nice, but I didn't hear it. This is good, but I'm looking for too green to burn poems at the moment. Fresh mint

[52:09]

cool light streams wide of the fire too green to burn. Read it again, please. Fresh mint cool light streams wide of the fire too green to burn. What of the fire? Wide of the fire. Wide of the fire. Too green to burn eyes bright, heart warming this dove's gonna fly too green to burn fawning over nighttime newt I tried to stroke his back

[53:09]

instead I felt a puddle. You know, we slowly and clearly, sometimes it's hard. It would really help if you printed these poems so they were easy to read. Arrived at these gates 24 years ago too green to burn I am not yet ready to be head student but find I am ready for joy, for meeting, for knowing you. Ready or not, here I come. Here I am. Maybe one more here and then we'll go on. California March

[54:23]

all the sweet young monks too green to burn I am not yet ready to be head student Petals on the path February Monks in shorts too green to burn That's what I said about muffins. Oh, then we have too green to burn can I slow it down? Yes.

[55:23]

Do we have monks today? Incense before dawn Broken moon on rippling pond Moonlight on the path Read that last one once more. Incense before dawn Broken moon on rippling pond Moonlight on the path There's actually another one that looks similar. Moonlight on the path Carrying the kabakos Now the birds begin. Try to see also if you can write you don't have to do it for next week but before we're done to write a poem that has no adjectives or adverbs and even if possible

[56:26]

to quote or write no, I don't know if it would be possible no qualifiers in other words nothing to describe the action itself other than the verb the qualifier nothing to modify the person or the nominative the noun the thing in other words bringing two maybe two elements into the thing in action something abstract about your teaching and something concrete try that without adjectives without adverbs what this does is help us instead of trying to describe something find those very things and those very actions that suggest it yeah

[57:30]

yeah just as that you know you could say plum blossoms you know sprinkled on the muddy path right I'm not feeling very good myself or I'm feeling something about my own passing or something in which all things are impermanent plum blossoms on the something in which you find at the moment I can't come up I'm not very creative at the moment but something yeah rather than just have a totally didactic poem have a didactic poem and then find the correlative that expresses it without adjectives well I did I'm not very creative right now I'd have to sit down so that should be the didactic poem should have no adjectives

[58:30]

the what poem didactic well you can write a didactic but try to write also a poem I just said throw this in as an extra exercise trying to write without qualifying words like adjectives or adverbs it's like taking a paintbrush away from the paint exactly that's a good idea to do that with painters sometimes they have to use their hands their elbows their knees you have to come up with new ways to paint there's another quality in this kind of poetry that it's a quality of taking the stance of being humble

[59:33]

of writing yourself off in a sense like rags and patches patches and rags and then he calls himself this broken down old mule but there's there's a kind of praise in that there's a kind of exalting the self in some sense in presenting yourself in negative terms that doesn't go always over so well anymore in our poetry because if in those terms because it's become self-conscious becomes a way of setting yourself up for comparison as I'm just this old wreck rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and this is how I lead my life and he used it because he was actually apologetic that he could not help out with the family fortunes

[60:37]

for example that he let things go in the world at large and there's a certain amount of asking for forgiveness within the social conditions of his time I don't think people in the West feel that way particularly that we feel we have to apologize I don't think people in the West have much humility I think another thing about writing poetry like this is that it can be embarrassing the next day or even the next hour and why is that? It's because it's that at a certain moment that we express ourselves it seems real enough when we put it down but as causes and conditions in the next few minutes or days and so on change we look from a different perspective back there and we see well that's not really how I feel that's not exactly how I feel and if one were to ask

[61:38]

Ryokan if these poems were the way he felt he would probably have to answer like you know what's the Milosh the Polish poet today who says that poetry is he calls it a lie that tells the truth I think he quotes somebody else with that but no I think it's actually Picasso but maybe Picasso was quoting somebody but you know the thing about writing out and putting your name on it too is that here here is one flash of how you see me or how I see myself but this is the whole picture it's just this look in the mirror you know you stand in front of the mirror and you say

[62:39]

is that face and figure in the mirror really me and you get that one look and then if you want to start thinking about because next we're going to write a little longer more personal poems and we're going to write longer descriptions of yourself and your practice but putting the roots down into some graspable, understandable, seeable, feelable, smellable, tasteable objects in your life that we can all relate to rather than totally abstract I'm feeling very poetic today I'm feeling that I understand what Nargajuna meant by emptiness and so on, oh I don't understand I want to know what happened to you at this moment Any questions?

[63:46]

What line do you want us to be working with this week? Well, make the didactic poem and the one without adjectives and so on short, four lines but then start writing something maybe that has a little more narrative to it and begin to use longer lines longer sentences begin to bring other images together maybe we can begin to move into metaphor similes and the like Are you reading the poems that are on the bookshelf there? How many people have read any of those poems? There's a there's a whole list of books bunch of books up in the library on the shelf We don't have a tremendous amount Just didn't study but you're studying other things So is writing poetry a form of samadhi?

[64:49]

Yeah Zazen is a poem When you're sitting in Zazen maybe you should let the poetry sit for a little while if you can but sometimes by letting it go the best stuff comes up and then you're going to sit the whole hour thinking you've got to remember that line Let's see, what was that? There's someone who brings a notepad There is an edge where what is real at the moment for us is our practice He talks about just the flow of everyday events just as they are

[65:57]

There is that edge that we can give voice to And Yeah Yeah In fact there are no restrictions on what you want to write from now on just write it and bring it in but if it's too long it's just going to take us longer to reproduce it Anybody have a poem they want to anything else they want to recite? We've got to go in a minute or two I was wondering about like umbilical cord Umbilical cord Chord rising Anybody else? Dry leaf on gentle breeze

[66:57]

Great teacher writes a poem Once more Dry leaf on gentle breeze Great teacher writes a poem Okay Now try to do that same poem without the adjectives Try to find some way to express the same thing Dry breeze Okay Leaf on breeze Teacher writes poem Play with that Play with it That's what I mean Take these lines try a different move them around drop this part out suddenly something will come forward that you didn't know until you make yourself available to the process and in that act in that moment there's an authenticity that rings in the poet itself We're not trying I'm not trying to be a poet he's saying I'm not trying to we have to practice a lot

[68:04]

so it comes out spontaneously For every hundred poems you write you maybe get one that actually seems to get the nail on the head Well it's 20 of it's 20 of we have to be over there in what five minutes Anything anybody has to say about tonight? Yeah That's what we're here for I I long to burn my life out Every thought and every touch and every yearning fuel to the roaring flames but this feeling itself too green Now write three more almost exactly like that with the same idea see what you can do with it You know what I mean? Take that same idea that same impulse

[69:05]

and try it Try two or three ways now The title Waiting for the King Too green to burn they say I wait slowly drying gathering patience getting ready for that fire Okay Can I ask a question? Yes You say about trying to write a poem as opposed if there's trying to write a poem and there's the poem happening more spontaneously Personally I'm just I'm really into trying to write a poem because it's like part of turning the light around studying yourself and maybe I can maybe look at it like maybe I should look at that poem now but anyway I just feel like Well you have to try to write the poem

[70:06]

but by trying by continually doing it and so on by making yourself present to the process of writing the poem suddenly there will be the spontaneity within us like playing the piano and then at some moment when you're I think of it when I'm shaving the moments when I can't get to a pen or to a brush or something are the moments when these things suddenly occur to you you're walking down by the ocean you got the perfect idea perfect expression for that moment and it's gone and that's okay I don't have to carry a pen and a pencil or a camera so obviously you're going to lose it sometimes and that losing is also part of the process not being available to not having something around that you can capture it with

[71:07]

that kind of frustration I remember I used to always carry a pen and a pencil with me whenever I went because I wanted to jot down but when I carried the pen and pencil with me these spontaneous ideas did not arise as much and I'm going to be alert and catch it when it arises but the more I'm aware of that process the more those things will naturally arise why? because we've set up the context set up the idea in which that stuff can happen until we make the effort and set up a context for it nothing will arise am I right? or am I wrong? tell me you're right you're wrong do you follow what I'm saying? oh yeah when it was related because once I did that and actually I was pretty successful

[72:10]

I wasn't writing poetry but I was writing these little snapshots of things it was the first time I came here I drove from Minnesota and it was so wonderful and every now and then I had to stop the car and write and the next thing you know I quit because I was spending all my time grasping these images and it just like ruined things and I think about that it's like there's a reason I didn't bring my camera I think that sometimes about writing is that this grasping happens remember in the beginning we talked about the fact that we rely on words without relying on words and yet that very thing is relying on the words that was just expressed to us not rely on words so we do rely on words but the thing is there's a difference between relying on words and deciding that you're going to encapsulate your whole life into them what is that tension?

[73:11]

that's what I'm interested in what is that tension?

[73:25]

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