Poetry Chaikhana Blog

An Exquisite Truth
by Hsu Yun

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
Is like asking to borrow string
when you’ve got a good strong rope.
Every Dharma is known in the heart.
After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

— from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger

/ Image by Alain Bonnardeaux /

I like what that opening statement says:

This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.

Whether we’re talking about inspired reformers or shining examples of enlightenment, our instinct is to elevate great souls as unique phenomena. We assume they are somehow other than us. But the liberating and challenging truth is that saints are the same as everyone else. The only difference, if we want to call it a difference, is that they don’t cloak their nature as most of us have learned to do. We all have that same steady glow within us. A saint is simply someone who doesn’t damp it down.

Understood this way, the spiritual journey is not one of crushing effort to acquire virtues, to build wisdom, and to learn love. We already have all of that in abundance. The only work necessary is to let go of the assumptions that keep our true nature hidden.

Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

I think these are the lines I respond to most. I don’t know about you, but I spent so much of my life as a teenager and young adult feeling disappointed with where I found myself in the world. I wanted something profound, adventurous, bursting with meaning. Instead, I had a very ordinary lower middle-class American upbringing. I sabotaged my college education and decided to search for something deeper. Most of that search was a painful flailing about, but it did bring me adventures, both internal and external. I lived on Maui for several years. I lived high up in the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been homeless. I’ve had friends in wheelchairs, friends with wealth. I’ve known hippies and bikers and techies and farmers.

While all of that makes for good stories, that ache for something extraordinary just fell away the moment I first settled into a sense of spiritual opening. With that dawning of peace, I also found rest… and a profound sense of self-acceptance. It wasn’t that I had somehow changed into someone new and extraordinary. Instead, I felt profoundly myself for the first time, profoundly my ordinary self. And I can’t describe how blissful that recognition of ordinariness is. I no longer felt the constant need to struggle after the extraordinary; the simple and the plain stood revealed as a stunning work of art filling every day.

These lines by Hsu Yun about “fate’s illusions” remind me of how I spent the first three decades of my life struggling against my circumstances to find a fate with meaning, only to discover that the struggle was unnecessary. All I had to do was open my eyes. In every corner of the world, in every life, great and humble, the entire mystery of life and death can be found.

After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.

Recommended Books: Hsu Yun

The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology)	A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry	A Pictoral Biography of the Venerable Master Hsu Yun	Empty Cloud: The Autobiography of Chinese Zen Master, Hsu Yun

Hsu Yun China (1839 – 1959) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

Continue Reading »

Love everyone and everything
with the last ounce of your being.
Love all until you are shattered
by love
and only love remains.

A ghost in the mirror is the mind
by P’ang Yun (Layman P’ang)

English version by Ivan M. Granger

A ghost in the mirror is the mind:
Not there, yet not unreal.
When the mind is as it is,
      the world too simply is.
Grasping neither reality nor emptiness,
you are neither holy nor wise,
just an ordinary man done with his work.

/ Image by Peter Schulz /

When the mind is as it is,
      the world too simply is.

This is such a lovely statement that seems to feed so naturally into a serene state, but it is also saying something very powerful that overturns our common assumptions.

Most often we imagine that if our lives and society and the world as a whole would just settle down, then perhaps we could experience peace. And so we turn all of our efforts outward, trying to force a sense of peace in the world. That doesn’t usually work so well, does it?

It can get to the point that turning inward, prayer, meditation can feel like a betrayal, as if we are abandoning the outer world to chaos, while we selfishly seek a separate sense of peace.

But the strange truth is that we don’t create a peaceful environment and then experience peace. The reality is the reverse. We discover peace within, and only then can begin to build it outwardly. More surprising still is that we come to see that the “world” outside of ourselves as but a reflection of our own inner state. When we discover peace within, the world comes naturally to rest as well. Does that mean problems in the world disappear? No. But we recognize the peace that underlies even those problems, and we begin to see new ways to coax that peace to the surface. At peace, in peace, we invite peace.

Grasping neither reality nor emptiness,

just an ordinary man done with his work.

We no longer feel the need to do something to validate our existence; we undeniably are. No work remains to be done. One may still be active in the world, but there is no “work” behind it, simply the dance of stillness, presence, and flow. Observers may disagree, but you understand that all that seemed important about your identity has trickled away, and you have become unremarkable, purely as you are — an ordinary fellow, alive in this extraordinary world.

Recommended Books: P’ang Yun (Layman P’ang)

This Dance of Bliss: Ecstatic Poetry from Around the World	The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry	Haiku Enlightenment: New Expanded Edition	The Sayings of Layman P’ang: A Zen Classic

P’ang Yun (Layman P’ang) China (740? – 808) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

Continue Reading »

Be unsatisfied
with secondhand ideas about God.

To the utterly at-one with Siva
by Devara Dasimayya

English version by A. K. Ramanujan

To the utterly at-one with Siva
there’s no dawn,
no new moon,
no noonday,
nor equinoxes,
nor sunsets,
nor full moons;

O Ramanatha.

— from Speaking of Siva, by A K Ramanujan

/ Image by whologwhy /

To the utterly at-one with Siva…

That line stops me in my tracks each time I read it. Do you have the same reaction?

there’s no dawn,
no new moon,
no noonday…

Time and the phenomenal experiences that move through time are seen as glimmerings on the surface of the immense, still sea of the Eternal. Days and seasons, action and reaction exist only for the unsettled ego-self. For the true Self, which is “utterly at-one with Siva,” there is only Siva, there is only the Eternal. Dawn and sunset, new moon and full moon, time and motion, all of these are simply Siva’s ornaments fluctuating in timelessness.

This is another way of saying there is no separation in Reality. The new moon pours into the full moon, the glow of dawn naturally builds to noon’s blaze and fills the sunset with its sleepy glory. They are not separate objects or events, but a single continuity witnessed from different perspectives. They are one. They are shifting glimmerings upon the surface of the Eternal.

Truly realizing this, we recognize that wherever we are is the holiest place in the universe: right here, right now. There is no fundamental difference or distance between the ground under our feet and the most sacred pilgrimage spot. They are the same, part of the same continuity of existence. Your “front yard / is the true Benares.”

===

Ask yourself:
Are you one who seeks
or one who finds?

A few days ago I pulled a copy of my book Gathering Silence from the bookshelf and I have begun reading it again.

Regardless of belief,
everyone is agnostic
until gnosis.

Maybe saying I have been reading it is not the right description, since it isn’t a book meant to be read page after page front to back. Rather, I have been finding quiet moments to open to a random page and then reading the sayings that come up.

Love and compassion are effortless.
The soul is exhausted by its effort
to stop the natural outpouring
of the living heart.

While The Longing in Between, with it’s collection of poems and commentaries and personal stories, has always been my best selling book, Gathering Silence, with its short poetic statements and lovely collages by Rashani Réa, is among the more overlooked of my publications. Yet, for me, this is one of my strongest works. It sings to me somehow.

Enough deals and half-measures!
Hand everything over
to that divine ember
burning in your chest!

Each time I leaf through its pages, I have the strange experience of not always recognizing the author.

How can you settle into yourself
without
self-acceptance?

I regularly find myself thrown into deep contemplation by the words I find within its pages and wonder who wrote them.

What the heart recognizes
as liberation,
the ego sees
as theft.

I like to think Gathering Silence finds its audience in its own time.

We don’t take the final step.
It takes us.

Have a beautiful day!

Recommended Books: Devara Dasimayya

Speaking of Siva

Continue Reading »

Don’t try to control life.
Witness it.