by Sarah Messer
Gui Shan, meaning “Gui Mountain,” is the name of a place and also the name of the monk presiding there, “Guishan.” One day he gathered his disciples, saying:
This old monk—a hundred years from now I’ll go down the mountain to a patron’s house and become a water-buffalo. On my left flank will be a line of five words, “I, a Gui Shan monk.” At just this moment, calling it a Gui Shan monk is the same as calling it a water-buffalo.
That water-buffalo is always plowing, being eaten and used up in the Three Family Village, a place so destitute that even Zen masters make fun of it. Guishan took the bodhisattva vow to return again and again to live in this realm of suffering.
The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment points to the perfect realization of every being. One class of its bodhisattvas is called “aware with their whole bodies,” another “calm with their whole bodies.”
poem #508
A Painting
Has Guishan really come back? Here’s a buffalo,
Wearing horns, fur and a monk’s head.
It’s so sweet: different species, calm in one whole body.
Inside the Three Family Village is also fūryū.
An ancient tale:
Once there was a two-headed bird named Joint Fate who lived on Snow Mountain in the Himalayas. One head was tranquil and ate well, while the other was agitated and ate poorly. “Why does the other head always get good food, and I none?” the agitated head said, eating poisonous weeds.
Sometimes, when the bird flew off looking for food, it would forget its way back to the nest.
Both heads died at the same time.
Li Bo wrote a poem of desolation on the western frontier, “Moon cold, river clear, the night is sinking, sinking.”
poem #304
On a Cold Night, Sorrow for the Bird of Snow Mountain
Morning comes: kōan. Evening comes: repeating again and again.
Seeking food, always forgetting its nest—past karma’s deep.
Day and night, everyone is the bird of Snow Mountain.
Suffering in the lowest hell, the moon is sinking, sinking.
Yang Guifei, glorious consort to the Tang Emperor. Delighting in their love-play, the Emperor left state affairs to her cousin, who corrupted government to enrich the Yang clan estates. Common people, soldiers and officials suffered from these entanglements. Their resentment led to rebellion, and that rebellion split the realm. Eight years later, half of China’s population was lost to warfare and starvation. The poet Du Fu, “the loyal subject,” his own son dying of malnutrition a thousand miles away, asked what might be the suffering of ordinary people if he, an official, knows such distress? In accord with imperial protocol, his poetry of remonstrance was addressed to the steps below the throne, rather than to the Emperor himself. Nonetheless it was always ignored.
Hino Tomiko, wife of the Ashikaga Shōgun, was determined to put her son in that seat ahead of anyone. Her feckless husband became the plaything of her clan, and as with Yang Guifei, her machinations divided the nation into two factions. Then ten years of the Ōnin War, blockades of rice shipments to the capital, the destruction of Daitoku-ji and all northern Kyōtō. Devastation throughout the nation of Fusang.
A Chinese master said, “The ongoing suffering of karma is always born from wealth and treasure.”
poem #309
Respectfully Offered to the Steps Below the Son of Heaven
Wealth, treasure, rice and money create enemies of the court.
Fūryū lovers, don’t think of each other!
Safety and danger are both bitter here in the nation of Fusang.
This loyal subject stands at the side with his heart of tangled threads.
III.
Hunger
on the day of Double Nine
The following series of nine poems was written on the night of the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, 1447. For centuries Chinese and Japanese literati had taken the day of Double Nine to climb the hills outside of town, enjoy a picnic, and drink rice wine steeped in chrysanthemum blossoms. Instead, Ikkyū initiated a fast. For a hundred years his Daitoku-ji monstery had preserved the right to appoint their abbot exclusively from among the temple’s monks. That autumn political authorities had placed an outsider over them. In response, a monk committed suicide—an extremely unusual form of protest. Abruptly, Ikkyū left Kyōtō for a small house he owned in the mountains thirty miles south.
The Chronology of the Monk Ikkyū of the Eastern Sea states:
Many incidents at Daitoku-ji, the Dragon Mountain—a number of monks were arrested and jailed. The whole temple was distressed. Autumn, the ninth month. Ikkyū was extremely heart-sick. Secretly, he entered the Yuzuriha Mountains, where he was going to starve himself to death.
The matter reached the Emperor’s ears, so he sent down an imperial order saying, “If you are determined to carry out this plan, you will destroy both the Buddha’s law of dharma and the royal law. How could you abandon us? How could you forget the nation?”
Ikkyū replied to the order, saying, “This poor man of dao is also a subject of Your Realm. How could he dare evade Your Command?”
Ikkyū’s introduction to the poem cycle
In the fall of 1447, a monk at Daitoku-ji monastery killed himself for no good reason. In response, some gossiping monks made slanderous reports to the officials. Due to this misfortune, five or seven monks were imprisoned, bringing great chaos to our temple.
At that time, people spread many rumors. When I heard them, I immediately disappeared into the mountains. Maybe because I just couldn’t bear it. A disciple from the capital chanced by and told me all the details. Hearing them, I was even more overcome with mourning and so wrote poetry to speak what was in my heart. Because it happened to be Double Yang, the ninth day of the ninth month, I wrote these nine pieces.
1.
Disasters at Daitoku-ji, the Dragon Treasure temple. Two thousand years earlier Zhuangzi used to say:
If it’s an “is,” then there will be an “isn’t.”
If it’s an “isn’t,” then there will be an “is.”
“Other” has its own “is/isn’t,” and “it” has its own “is/isn’t.”
So are there really an other and an it?
So are there really no other and no it?
Thus the sage does not go by this way.
But still, disasters at Daitoku-ji. The temple founder, Daitō, tells this story:
At the end of the summer training session, Cuiyan addressed the assembly. “All summer I’ve been talking for your benefit, brothers. Look, are Cuiyan’s eyebrows still there?”
When a great criminal is about to enter hell, his eyebrows fall out. Cuiyan’s offense: too much talking.
Zen students are all thieves, goes an old saying. So Master Baofu comments on Cuiyan’s crime:
You empty the thief’s mind!
A later teacher adds:
Then the thief can recognize his thievery.
Yunmen ended the whole conversation, by just shouting
KAN!
“Kan,” meaning the barrier, the gateless gate, the thought-stopper. Daitō said it even stops Baofu’s thief when he’s trying to escape.
poem #100
Earth is old, heaven a desolate wild, autumn at the Dragon Treasure.
Night comes, wind and rain. Evil is a tough harvest.
If you talk “is/isn’t” to other people,
You’ll get paid back with Yunmen’s “KAN!”
2.
Samsara, “the suffering that comes of grasping,” like fine red dust sifting into the eye—always abandon it. The fame of this one monk “Ikkyū”—always abandon it.
Daitō’s successor, Ryōzen—his name means the Vulture Peak Mountain where Buddha taught two thousand years ago. The joyful beauty of Ryōzen’s pure practice, strict monastic disciplines, always abandoning samsara.
But Ikkyū vowed never to abandon anyone lost in samsara. Never to hide in the mountains, never
to discard the weapon of his fame.
Mara, king of all demons, waits for us on both sides of the road.
poem #101
I’m ashamed that my reputation has not yet disappeared
After all this dusty work practicing Zen and studying dao.
Ryōzen’s true dharma has been swept from the earth, extinguished.
A moment of inattention and the demon king is a hundred feet tall.
3.
The lineage of Ryōzen traces back through Daitō to Daitō’s teacher’s teacher, old Xutang. The bane of fraudulent monks, Xutang was slandered, one month jailed. In the collusion of officials, only an imperial reprieve got him out.
The ninth day of the ninth month is called Double Yang, when chrysanthemums reach their fullest bloom. That flower is also the family crest of the Japanese imperial house.
poem #102
Old Xutang was imprisoned for one month,
And now Ikkyū’s heart-broken body meets with misfortune.
Bitterness and pleasure, warm and cold, each season.
One cluster of yellow chrysanthemums, knowing Double Yang.
4.
The world arises only from the purity of Buddha-mind—that wisdom and compassion is the root of everything. How then is this world filled with warfare? How has it become the screeching abode of the dead, a stinking corpse land, what the Chinese call the Yellow Springs? Only through unknowing, the preference for “is” or “isn’t.”
Lineage fathers, Ryōzen and before him Daitō and before him Xutang, these great warriors charged into the heart of war. “They mounted an iron horse and entered the citadel,” says an old text, “those lineage founders who have passed through war, those generals operating outside the safe fortress.”
A Zen teacher asked himself, “What is the correct time to wear a sword between your eyebrows?” And he answered himself, “When libation blood pours through the heavens of this world.” After warfare, the Chinese make a purification offering to the spirits by pouring wine onto the ground.
poem #103
Purity, at its root, manifests the great one-thousand worlds.
Today’s manifest world, the Yellow Springs.
Passing through war, the loyal red heart of the lineage founders appears everywhere.
When blood is poured through heaven, hang a sword between your eyebrows.
5.
In India it’s said that once every hundred years, a bird flies over Mt. Meru, brushing the tallest peak with its wing. Each time, a bit of dust knocked off into the void. The time it takes the bird, and the bird’s descendants, and theirs and theirs, to wear the mountain down is called a kalpa.
In the countryside, peasants carry manure in buckets slung from poles across their shoulders, fertilizer for the fields.
And Zhuangzi’s “isn’t” and “is.” One night he dreamed he was a butterfly. Flitter flutter, he was a butterfly—he didn’t know that he was Zhuang at all. Suddenly he woke up, Zhuang! He didn’t know if he were Zhuang dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuang. This is called the transformation of things.
poem #104
True transmission side-steps delusive combat.
Vast kalpas of unenlightenment are made of the feelings “self” and “other.”
Carrying self and other makes the balance pole heavy.
When emptiness looks at a butterfly, the whole body becomes light.
6.
The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were drunk poets, music makers, and government officials who never compromised their decency. Xi Kang, master of the zither, would gather the other six at his home in Shanyang. Later he was executed for his integrity. When his heart-mate Xiang Xiu learned of this, he smashed his own zither.
Later, passing by Shanyang, Xiu heard a countryman play the flute—the tone of that singular place. But by then his friend was dead, and only sound remained.
poem #105
Antiquity’s lustrous dao is bright these days–
People discussing the fame of Linji’s true transmission.
Before my house, behind my house, everywhere the song of woodcutters.
I recall that ancient sound of the Shanyang flute.
7.
Zen Master Deshan jumped off the dais, grabbed his student, and beat him with a stick. Linji shouted and shouted in the monastery. Or stayed on his dais, not yelling, lecturing on the three essences and the three mysteries.
The King of Han, future founding Emperor of the Han dynasty, once found his army surrounded by enemy troops. Advisors urged him to forge the seals of other kings, fabricate a letter of support from them, and through this ruse escape. No, counseled another, through something very small, the seals, you will lose everything. So the Han king broke the seals, cracking them on the floor before him.
Old Xutang told this story afterwards. “Casting the Seal,” his poem about meditation practice, and “Breaking the Seal,” his poem of liberation, with the line “sleeping on a stone bed in the wilds.” And inka, the “seal of enlightenment,” that was given to Ikkyū on realization—he threw it off, and it was burned.
A commentator concludes: “Just practice meditation for another thirty years.”
poem #106
Stick and shout, the Zen of Deshan and Linji,
Debating the three essences and the three mysteries.
The Han King cast seals, then broke them.
Practice recklessly for another thirty years.
8.
Beyond reck and reckless: crazy cloud Ikkyū. Beyond is and isn’t: Ikkyū’s meditation of deep samadhi that never strays into the useless talk-dharma of fraudulent monks.
In Daitō’s “Farewell Instructions” just before he died, he told his monks that though they may come to preside over golden temples with a thousand thousand students, if they lose the mystery-dao, then all dharma dies. “But,” he said, “if a man stays living in the wild, passing his days in a reed hut, boiling wild vegetable roots in a broken-legged cook-pot, simply doing his meditation practice, then he and this old monk Daitō see each other every day, and he is the one who returns the kindness of my teaching.”
poem #107
This generation of long-practiced monks
Claims word-samadhi as their ability.
I have no ability, I have only flavor, a crazy-cloud house.
In the broken-legged cook-pot, one pint of rice.
9.
From his small mountain dwelling, the Tang poet Chu Sizong wrote:
Downwind pine and cedar, the reckless mountains are green.
Incense burning on a round table across from the stone screen.
Empty, I recall how after last year’s spring rain,
Swallow droppings from time to time would stain The Canon of Supreme Mystery.
Huangbo, famous for his stick, teacher of Linji, contemporary of the poet Chu Sizong, once addressed the assembly:
All you guys, all you drink is dregs. If you go on like this, wherever will today be?
And someone adds his comment:
What are you using today for? Don’t worry if you stir the multitude and alarm the crowd!
Linji used to say:
Sometimes I take away the person but not the environment.
Sometimes I take away the environment but not the person.
Sometimes I take away both the person and the environment.
Sometimes I take away neither the person nor the environment.
And those who followed him turned these sharp teaching tricks into four formal propositions, each standing for a higher stage of realization.
poem #108
Downwind, pine and cedar recklessly enter the clouds.
Everywhere stir the multitude and alarm the crowd.
I can’t do the tricks of “person” and “environment.”
One cup of murky dregs gets me drunk drunk.
IV.
Mori
whose name means “Forest”
&
nbsp; Once a mountain spirit traveled to the southern rice terraces, answering the call of the King of Chu. There he dreamed her in the damp air, a shaman calling his spirit-lover from Shaman Mountain. She said, “I am just a guest here. I am the southern slope of the mountain. I brought you a pillow and mat.” For one night they lay together as lovers. She never returned.
Her yin is a darkness: a reverie, the moon, companion to yang, which is the sun, his brightness. Her perfume: narcissus, called “the flower of nymphs.” The poet Huang Tingjian wrote:
Rising in the waves, the nymph wears dusty stockings.
Atop the water, abundant, she follows the footsteps of the tiny moon.
poem #535
A Beauty’s Dark Yin Has the Scent of Narcissus
Behold the terraces of Chu and now climb them.
Half a night, sad colors of dream face on the jade bed.