Poems from a thousand years of the Zen tradition

·期刊原文

Getting past words: Poems from a thousand years of the Zen tradition

by J. P. Seaton

Literary Review

Vol. 41 No. 4 Summer98 Pp.498-499

Copyright by Literary Review

ONE OF THE THINGS that set Zen Buddhism (called Ch'an in China, where it
originated) apart from the many other forms of Buddhist religious and
spiritual practice was its conscious appeal to lay practitioners. Strongly
influenced by the writings of the Taoist sages Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, Zen
monks pointed a Way to enlightenment in the world, in a lively and often
humorous poetry that easily finds a place in the classic Chinese poetic
tradition. A philosophy that shows a profound distrust of words, Taoism
does quite specifically trust poetry to get beyond them. Zen poets, both
monks and laymen, beginning in earnest in the Tang Dynasty (618-907),
created a poetry that both borrows from and reconstitutes the lay
tradition. In poems that are bright, simple, direct, and usually devoid of
abstract words and overtly religious language, these poets appear to put
William Carlos Williams's dictum to the test, expressing ideas perhaps only
as things can. Most often centering themselves in the beauties of the
phenomenal world, they take advantage of the uniquely visual aspects of the
Chinese written language in an attempt to share the perception of
enlightenment, rather than to describe or analyze it. It is Zen's way to
teach by direct pointing, only.

Each of the seven poets included in the present selection lived, at one
point or another, the life of a monk. Yet, though they may have temple
grounds in the near view, or temple bells sounding, tantalizingly lost in
the background's mists, these poems are not about "Buddhism,' or the lives
of cloistered monks. Zen is, above all, humanist, and these poets are
certainly human. Two of the six, Chia Tao (779-849), perhaps the most
famous poet of the group, and the pseudonymous Shih Shu (c. 1703), actually
served, as laymen, in the imperial governments of their times. The others
were all prominent in monastic life and actively involved in social,
intellectual, and aesthetic intercourse with lay poets of their
generations. Lively, active people, deeply engaged in the real life of
their times, they provide us, across the chasm of decades or of centuries,
insight into) the live, s of human beings of good will-poets who loved life
in all its simple complexity. Before they studied Zen, the mountain was the
mountain and the river was the river. While they studied Zen, they tell us
elsewhere, the mountain was no longer the mountain, and the river was no
longer the river. Here, after their study, even we, twentieth century women
and men, can clearly see real mountains and rivers, with real rocks and
real trees, real sun setting, and phenomenal leaves bursting into spring or
falling into autumn. Enlightened men of Zen, and fine poets, these are,
all. It is a tradition that is increasingly, and deservedly; finding
practitioners among modern poets writing in many different languages. Love
of life and clarity of language are the messages beyond doctrine and dogma
that these poets send us.

The oldest of the poets included here, Chia Tao, was born in 779 toward the
end of the Golden Age of Chinese poetry, in the midst of the Tang Dynasty,
just fifteen years after the death of the great Li Po. The most recent of
these, Ching An, died in 1912, surviving the Ch'ing, China's last imperial
dynasty, by a single year.

Chia Tao (779-843) was first a Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist monk and then, in
midlife, a secular poet who wrote with a mysterious lyric beauty of the
religious and reclusive life he had formally left. Ch'i-chi (861-940) was
one among the significant flowering of Zen poets that occurred in the
turmoil of the late Tang Dynasty. His intentionally bland and rather
low-key style was modeled on that of Chia Tao. Pao Hsien and Chih Yuan (fl.
Late 10th century.) were two of the famous Nine Monks of the Northern Sung.

Han-Shan Te-ch'ing (late 17th to early 18th century) was probably the
leading cleric, religious philosopher, and Zen poet of his time. Political
involvements forced him to spend time in prison and exile. Shih Shu (c.
1703) is the pen name of a retired official and Ch'an devotee. The only
surviving poems of this poet under this name are a set of "harmony poems"
to the works of Han Shan and Shih Te. All these poems use exactly the same
written characters at the rhyme points as the poems that are their models.
Ching An (1851-1912), as a powerful abbot, was a significant player in the
political world in the final years of the Ch'ing Dynasty and the first
years of the Republic (1911). He was also clearly one of the great poets of
the Zen tradition; only perhaps, not the last.

NOTE: The poems in this section will appear in the forthcoming book, The
Clouds Must Know Me by Now (Wisdom Publications), in the fall.