Hanshan is one of my favorite poets. Well, the poet or poets anthologized as Hanshan is a favorite of mine. Generally thought of as ninth century, the poems may come from the entire range of Tang China. According to legend he lived as a semi-hermit in a cave called Hanshan, Cold Cliff or Mountain, in the Tiantai mountains in modern Zheijian province. He is claimed by both Buddhists and Taoists. Although in the stories, it’s the monks of the Buddhist monastery that feed him.
The poems are a distillation of Chinese mystical wisdom.
But today as I get ready to go to church and preach I find myself particularly thinking of one poem in particular. (Here translated by Burton Watson)
Talking about food won’t make you full,
Babbling of clothes won’t keep out the cold.
A bowl of rice is what fills the belly;
It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm.
And yet, without stopping to consider this,
You complain that Buddha is hard to find.
Turn your mind within! There he is!
Why look for him abroad?
Words. My stock in trade.
There are days I most deeply feel the truth of the old saying that my occupation (both as Unitarian Universalist preacher and Zen meditation teacher) is selling water by the shore of a river.
On the other hand, someone needs to point the way.
Even if it is talking and talking about how important it is to stop and notice, to turn the glance inward and see for oneself…
At the same time I take some comfort in knowing that as I do this I see there is no place that is not Buddha, not even those words that spill from my mouth, drip down the front of my clothes and spread out on the floor, a great puddle, a sea…
The deal is
that life is the only teacher,
and life
is such a trickster.
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