A Little Meditation on an Encounter Between a Zen Master and a Western Student

 

Student: Who am I? I am bones, skin, and blood.

Where do I go from there? Perhaps to this:

to become one with eating. … But to be honest,

I have no burning desire for kenshō—

for seeing (見) "nature" or "essence."

I get easily tired — the Way is terribly long.

—Roshi Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen

 

Whence do the roots of false views come?

Those that gnaw and feed

on what always knows within?

 

Oh, what is one's own

when one dies,

and what is the truth?

 

Is it like a body one thinks one controls,

one's exclusive claim,

a property with sequestered access?

 

Why, can't you hear how the gods laugh

just now?

 

Just think how much emptiness

one has to stir, build, inflate

to keep the truth away, at bay,

 

to let what is false and wrong stay,

be one's familiar company

whether in life or death.

How on a Monday Morning I Visited Soul through Her Eastern Door

 

Sometimes, or rather more often 

than day admits, 

what we opine, pine, think— 

and what the universe means— 

 

is foam: ephemeral, 

gliding to be rolled 

in spurted rains of mist 

to colossal waves. 

 

So being but a spark, 

a tiny drop, we fathom 

what moves us 

from above, from below, 

 

at times glancing at stars 

we try to map, to plot 

those distant constant lights 

on the face of what we see. 

 

Many strive to rip, to rend 

the common space, its lasting sense; 

some rush to mend the tear, 

repair streaming strings of ancient awe. 

 

Thus we play what we learned, 

practice what we learned to love, 

to hear, to see 

amid ceaseless swirls. 

 

The Chinese 看 (kān) suggests— 

to see and to visit 

may be of the same kith, 

the same ken. 

 

For seeing truly someone, 

or what truly is, 

must be counted 

divine boon, gift: 

 

an intermittent, fragile bridge 

between each passing path 

and life's never-ending resonance. 

 

Sometimes someone we meet
becomes such an opening— 

坎 (kǎn), 

a sill, a door, a window, a lost home. 

 

And even if one is but a drop, 

in that drop, deeper in, 

a staying print: 

刊 (kān), 

 

the ocean, the universe 

you are called to read, 

a font of sacred bliss, of awe, 

ever to be guarded, cared for: 

 

看 (kān), 

and, in this regard, 

even to endure: 

堪 (kān), 

 

transcending 

one's own fleeting drop.

Millennium Meeting beyond Time (Songs before the Gaze) by Vladimir Suchan

 

How Something So Thin and Small Can Catch Something So Large, She Looked at Me as if in Wonder

 

A line on which letters

flow and curl

to catch your breath and eye,

the delicacy of an arachnoid leg,

its sole, ankle, calf, and thigh,

to pin and plot and map

 

with the finest of the rifts

which pull and tie

as if it too sought to compete

with Pallas’ subtile weaving art—

sub tela—written finely—

under a cobweb’s geometric loom

 

for text was once a woven thing,

logos or speech by tekne

was to whirl and twine

rays by rays arrayed

and catch the lightest beat,

heart’s finely strumming pulse.