INTERLUDE BOOKS 3 : PENGUIN POETS The Penguin Book ofZen Poetry Lucien Stryk's most recent of eight books of verse are Selected Poems (1976), The Duckpond (1978) and Zen Poems (1980). His Encounter with Zen: Writings on Poetry and Zen is forthcoming, as is a recording of Zen poems (original poems and translations) from Folkways Records. He has received awards for poetry, held a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a National Translation Center Grant, along with Takashi Ikemoto, to work on Zen poetry. He is editor of World of the Buddha and the anthologies Heartland: Poets of the Midwest (I and II), and translator, with Takashi Ikemoto, of, among other volumes, Afterimages: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi and Zen Poems of China and Japan The Crane's Bill. In 1978 The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry received the Islands and Continents Translation Award and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award. He has given poetry readings and lectured throughout the United States and England and held a Fulbright Lectureship in Iran and a Fulbright Travel/ Research grant and two visiting lectureships in Japan. He teaches Oriental literature and poetry at Northern Illinois University. Takashi Ikemoto, educated in English Literature at Kyushu Univer- sity, was Emeritus Professor of Yamaguchi University and taught English literature at Otemongakuin University in Ibaraki City. He was a Zen follower of long standing and co-translator into Japan- ese of a volume of Thomas Merton's essays on Zen and Enomiya- Lasalle's Zen: Weg iur Erleuchtung. His major concern was for many years the introduction of Zen literature to the West, and he collaborated with Lucien Stryk on a number of Zen works. Takashi Ikemoto died in March 1980. Edited and translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto with an Introduction by Lucien Stryk The Penguin Book ofZen Poetry Penguin Books Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Limited, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1977 First published in the United States of America by The Swallow Press, Inc., 1978 Published in Penguin Books 1981 Foreword and Introduction copyright © Lucien Stryk, 1977 A Note on the Translation copyright © Takashi Ikemoto, 1977 The poems in Part Two, 'Poems of the Japanese Zen Masters', are from Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews (published by Doubleday & Co., Inc.), translations copyright © Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, 1963, 1965 All remaining translations copyright © Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, 1977 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America by The Book Press, Brattleboro, Vermont Set in Monotype Fournier Designed by Gerald Cinamon Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser To the memory ofmy cousin Stephen Ullmcu - Lucien Stryk To the memory ofmy beloved brother Yukio - Takashi Ikemoto 1 List of Illustrations 8 Foreword 9 Introduction 1 A Note on the Translation 33 Acknowledgements 37 Part One CHINESE POEMS OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND DEATH 41 Part Two POEMS OF THE JAPANESE ZEN MASTERS 6] Part Three JAPANESE HAIKU 85 Part Four SHINKICHI TAKAHASHI, CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE MASTER 131 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece. Zosan: Eight Views at the Confluence of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers (detail). Muromachi period (1333- 1573). Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Page 44. Mu-ch'i: Kuan-yin (detail). Thirteenth century. Daitoku-ji. Page 52. Liang K'ai: Li Po (detail). Thirteenth century. Cultural Properties Protection Commission (Tokyo). Page 65. Sesshu: Ink-Splash Landscape (detail). Muromachi period. Tokyo National Museum. Page 73- Sesshu: Winter Landscape ' (detail). Muromachi period. Tokyo National Museum. Page 80. Kei Shoki: Daruma (detail). Muromachi period. Shinjuan. Page 90. Liang K'ai: The Sixth Patriarch Chopping Bamboo (detail). Thirteenth century. Tokyo National Museum. Page 97. Ryozen: White Heron (detail). Fourteenth century. Nagatake Asano Collection. Page io5. Josetsu: The Three Teachers (detail). Muromachi period. Ryosokuin. Page 109. Mokuan: Hotei (detail). Fourteenth century. Sumitomo Collection. Page 114. Mu-ch'i: Six Persimmons (detail). Thirteenth century. Daitoku-ji. Page 124. Motonobu: The Story of Hsiang-yen (detail). Muromachi period. Tokyo National Museum. Page 136. Shukd: Monkeys (detail). Muromachi period. Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Page 244. Niten: Crow on a Pine Branch (detail). Momoyama period (1 573-1614). Formerly Viscount Matsudaira Collection. FOREWORD The temple, reached by a narrow mountain path five miles from the bus stop, was in one of the most beautiful districts of Japan. Surrounded by blazing maples, it appeared to have been rooted there for centuries. To its right was a kiln with a batch of fresh-fired pots, to its left a large vegetable gar- den where a priest bent giving full attention to a radish patch. He greeted me warmly and at once asked me to stay the night. Talk would wait till evening, after his meeting with parishioners - farmers, woodsmen - to discuss a coming festival. Each, I noticed, brought an offering - fruit, eggs, chestnuts. That time I came with nothing. Twenty years later I brought a book of Zen poems, one of a number translated since that first inspiring meeting. Poetry had always been part of my life, and my interest in Zen poetry began as the result of that visit. Moved by a show of ceramics, calligraphy and haiku poems in Niigata, while teaching there, I asked a friend to take me to the artist. The evening of my visit I discovered that the priest's life was devoted equally to parish, ceramics and poetry. He spoke with love of haiku poets, Basho, Issa, and mentioned great Zen masters who excelled in poetry - Dogen, Bunan, Hakuin, names unfamiliar to me. I was intrigued when he compared their work to certain Western poets (he especially admired the passage from Whitman in the Introduction), and I resolved to learn some- thing ofZen poetry. He was wonderfully impressive then, and I found him even more so now, this priest-artist content with earth, pots and poems, seeking no praise of the world, his deepest care the people around him. I have owed him all 10 these years a debt of gratitude, both for my feelings about Zen and for the lesson that one should make the most of the earth under one's feet, whether Japan or midland America, which have stemmed in large measure from our meeting. My second lectureship in Japan, some years after, was in Yamaguchi, the 'Kyoto of the West'. There, at the Joei Temple, where the great painter Sesshu had served as priest in the fifteenth century, came another meeting which would leave its mark. Takashi Ikemoto, a colleague at the university, and I were interviewing the master of the temple for what later became our first volume of translation from Zen literature. I said things about the rock garden behind the temple, laid down by Sess.hu — surely one of the finest in Japan - which struck the master as shallow. He patiently explained that in order to grasp the meaning of so great a work of Zen, I would have to meditate, experience the gar- den with my being. I was intrigued and humbled: familiar, through translating the literature, with the ways of Zen masters, I accepted his reproval as challenge. Thus I began a sequence of poems on Sesshu's garden, a discovering of things which made possible not only a leap into a truer poetry of my own but also more effective rendering of Zen poems. Years and Zen books since, I still think of those encoun- ters as phases of rebirth. Now, after meetings with Zen masters, poets and artists, comes this volume, the poems translated in homage to those Zennists who insist that awakened life is not a birthright but something to be won through, along a way beyond t he self. My experiences, however ordinary and lacking drama they may be, I give here because they are the kind which have always been important to Zen - leading to awareness of possibilities for art and life which, as the poems reveal, are limitless. LUCIEN STRYK INTRODUCTION I The Golden Age of China, T'ang through Sung dynasties (ad 618-1279), began not long after the Western Roman Empire came to an end and lasted well beyond the First Crusade. One of the most cultivated eras in the history of man, its religious, philosophical and social ground had been prepared centuries before Christianity, and men per- fected their lives and arts certain that they gave meaning to something higher than themselves. To artists of the time, numerous and skilled, poetry and painting were Ways - two among many, to be sure, but glorious Ways - to realization of Truth, whose unfolding made possible not only fulfilled life but calm acceptance of its limitations. They saw in the world a process of becoming, yet each of its particulars, at any moment of existence, partook of the absolute. This meant that no distinction was drawn between the details of a landscape - cliffs, slopes, estuaries, water- falls - shaped by the artist's emotions. Foreground, back- ground, each was part of the process, in poetry as in paint- ing, the spirit discovering itself among the things of this world.