Peach Blossom Spring

Another memo from the Pure Land, beginning with some poetic lines......

 

He was sure of his way there

        could never go wrong

 

How should he know that peaks and valleys 

          can so soon change?

 

When the time came he simply remembered

          having gone deep into the hills

 

But how many green streams 

            lead into cloud-high woods –

 

When spring comes, everywhere 

          there are peach blossom 

                 streams

No one can tell which may be

       the spring of paradise.

 

The above is part of a Chinese Tang Dynasty poem, in fact the ending. "Song of the Peach Tree Spring" by Wang Wei. The names of Tang poets appear to me as exotic, from another world, and yet not really so. A cow or a camel, an oak tree or a palm tree, grass or sand - each no more common-or-garden, or strange, than the other. The ordinary can dull the senses until we see with new eyes.

 

Seeing with new eyes - Vincent Van Gogh (self-portrait)

I mentioned Tang poetry on a Forum site and quoted a line or two. Back came a rejoiner that the words were the product of people "padded" against reality, living secluded lives, away in the mountains. Maybe so but more on that later. 

Here is another Tang poem:- 

 I asked the boy beneath the pines, 

He said the masters gone alone, 

Herb picking somewhere on the mount, 

Cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown.

The master - found?

Not being able to find the "master" is a recurring theme of all Chinese poetry. Maybe for the best, for when found they tend to morph into formulaes and doctrines, a path to be followed. They would perhaps bring us to a conclusion. Always better to remain lost just so long as we have some sort of trust in the ultimate ground of Reality - a trust that is more a letting go than a clinging to. As Shinran once said, "rooted in the Buddhaground of the Universal Vow".

 

Getting back to "padded" lives.................... I was reading a few mini-biographies of some of the Tang poets. Many lived at a time of great unheaval with warring tribes at each others throats. At one time the population was virtually halved due to warfare, famine and the like. Just how secluded the various poets were from all this is difficult to judge given the often sparse details known of their lives. Some seem to have been involved in "courtly" intrigues, with associates ending up on the chopping block. So, apparently not padded and rarely if ever secluded in some mountain hermitage looking down with disdain upon the goings on in "the world". The world was with them, part of them. Like all of us, they were the world.

 

What it can come down to is our judgement of any poem, of any work of art. It can be dismissed as something outside of us or we can become involved, as Jane Hirshfield says in her book "Ten Windows".............

  A work of art is not a piece of fruit lifted from a tree branch; it is a ripening collaboration of artist, receiver, and world. 

Time to go