2nd Cycle of Dongshan’s Poems, Verse 5: Awakening within Awakening

Trying to explain you regretfully grow horns on your head—
Be wary of the desire to search for the Buddha.
In this time of vast emptiness, there is no one who can know,
so head south search of the many sages?

—Dongshan’s second set of Five Ranks, fifth verse.
 
This beautiful poem is the last in the second set of Dongshan’s Five Ranks, a series of verses that we encounter in the final stage of our PZI koan curriculum. 

The poem asks us to not search outside this intimate, luminous self. This self, writes Dongshan, is without blame.
 
Relying on explanations just grows a couple troublesome horns on our head. Yet our devil desire keeps telling us to search for enlightenment. Of course we want it. We badly want to fix our apparently disjointed lives, our disjointed world.

But awakening is not an idea of perfect life. Dongshan writes that it is empty of tags, and because of that, we have freedom to see grace in whatever arrives: the darkness of failure, loss, and sickness; the light of joy, love, and warmth. How inconceivable, how unthinkable. 

In last line, we are told there is no need to seek wisdom in the South, where the many sages live. After all, there is “no one who can know.”   

In koan work we sometimes say, “show rather than tell.” This means that in visiting a koan we accept its singular invitation to join it in the work and play of our everyday lives. It is an invitation to remain open.
 
Robert Hass, who is joining us in our Pacific Zen Luminaries Series on August 12th, in one of his early and best known poems, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” offers a master class on how to show rather than tell. The world of ideas keeps us at arm’s length from experience—notions of a woodpecker’s undivided light, or that the word blackberry itself somehow falls short.
 
By honoring human tenderness and feeling, Hass swings open for us a gate through which we may directly appreciate our lives. Notions like justice, pine, and hair dissolve away. And then we are left with memories of a lover’s small shoulders, the way she broke apart a loaf of bread, and her dreams. In these moments of numinous body, we are left with the sweet rhythm of blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
 
Meditation at Lagunitas
 
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. 

Art: Mayumi Oda, “Peach Boy.” See the work of the original Goddess here www.mayumioda.net.