I Open The Window

The post I Open The Window appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Zen practitioner for nearly fifty years and one of America’s most celebrated poets, Jane Hirshfield has long been fascinated by the power of unanswered questions. When she first arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center as a student, she was instructed that it was a good idea to always practice with a question. She’s been asking questions ever since.

Both in her Zen practice and in her poetry, she is guided by questions that resist easy answers, allowing herself to be transformed through the process of asking. “There’s always the intention of questioning,” she told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen. “You say to each moment, ‘Who are you?’ You say to yourself, ‘Who am I?’ You say to each other person that you meet, ‘Are you a buddha? What is your teaching?’”

In her new book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, she takes up the question, “How can I be of service?,” inviting readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing. Shaheen sat down with Hirshfield on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks to discuss the questions she’s been asking lately, the role of poetry in the face of injustice, and the liberating power of being no one and nothing. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, along with two poems from her book, and then listen to the full episode.

What are some of the questions you’ve been asking lately? Questioning has always been important to me, and as a practice issue, that goes back to my very first week of Zen practice when I was a guest student at Tassajara. Soto Zen is not Rinzai Zen. One doesn’t work with koans as the main focus of meditation. Stories are told and thought about, but it’s not the central practice. Nonetheless, the teacher suggested that it’s a good idea for you to always have a question in your practice.

Over the years, that central practice question has evolved. For a very long time, it was a question that I actually ended up writing about in a special section for Tricycle, which was “What is the emotional life of a Buddha?” I looked at that question for many years until I felt that I had saturated myself in it and come up with my own answer. And then I had to find a new question. The new question of the last quite a few years is one that I think is widely shared, which is “How can I be of service?” How can I serve? How can I help? What can I do? How can I add my one molecule to the tiller of change?

You write that from your earliest work, you have investigated justice. So how do you understand justice? And how do you view the role of the poet in the face of what you call failures of justice and compassion? Poetry can be used in many ways for many purposes. I don’t want to pretend that it is an act that always includes interconnection and empathy and all of the values that those on the path of practice are trying to raise in one another and in ourselves. There are war poems. There are angry poems. There are silly poems, which might be more neutral. But for me, when I look at how poems work in our lives, I see that in their very fabric, there is empathy and interconnection. The very act of entering another person’s language and hearing it inside yourself as if it were your own is an act of permeability and a recalibrating sense that we are not separate from one another.

If you read a line about a mountain, you cannot understand the mountain without becoming it for an instant within yourself or becoming the creature walking on the mountain and feeling that steepness in your legs and seeing the sharpness or smoothness of the surfaces and seeing the many beings who are inhabiting the mountain with you. To actually participate in any work of art is to lower the barricades between yourself and other beings. And so poetry, by its own fabric of what it is and how it works, is already an act that moves the psyche toward the values of practice, the hopes of practice, the vows of practice.

For me, every poem I write is an act of trying to discover a larger and changed and new way of seeing in the face of the evidence and experience of existence. Many poems are written when I feel inadequate—they’re written out of grief and the sense of my own impotence before the disaster that we are all witnessing. The question is, “What can I do?”

Because I am a poet, I can do a few things. My daily practice for many years was to take some political action every single day having nothing to do with being a poet: donations, sending letters, sending postcards. But then sometimes I get to do something as myself, not just as one more set of hands pitching in. And when I’m doing it as myself, this is what I am: I’m a poet. I’m not a union organizer. I’m not a giver of speeches or recorder of TikToks. And so what I can do is write a poem and make that poem available and say that poem when the opportunity arises and hope that because the poem changed me first, it might help change someone else once it’s been written.

I write poems to change myself. I write them to see more clearly, largely, compassionately, less from the small self and more from the large self. And so those changes are in the poem because they are why it became a poem in the first place, and perhaps someone else reading the poem will go through the same experience and move, for instance, from anger or incomprehension to compassion.

Some of your poems read like imagined rituals or liturgies, like “Spell to Be Said Before Sleep” or “Invocation.” How do you think about poetry in relation to ritual and prayer, and are there any Zen rituals that inspire your writing? A poem is very much akin to a ritual for a rite of passage. I’ve been interested in rites of passage ever since I took an anthropology course in high school and read The Ritual Process [by Victor Turner]. That was kind of a life-changing book for me, not least because it talks about how in any rite of passage, there is a moment when a person is no longer the old self and not yet the new self. They are in a state of threshold and liminality. That idea has informed my life ever since.

The strongest experience of this particular kind of liminality I have known in my own life was a Buddhist rite of passage. When you go to Tassajara to stay there as a practicing student, you do five days of what is called tangaryo. Tangaryo is a ritualized reenactment of the earlier practice where a monk would arrive at the monastery gate and simply sit outside until taken in. There is no form. When you are in the zendo sitting your five days of tangaryo, the only requirement is that you not leave. You stay on your zafu. There’s no kinhin, or walking meditation. There’s nothing but you sitting there, and you are so no one that the year that I was there, they continued to do construction projects in the zendo while we were sitting there.

You just didn’t count. You were no one and nothing. And it was physically almost unbearable because I don’t have a body that was meant to sit with its legs crossed. In all my years in the monastery, I don’t think I sat more than three periods of zazen when I wasn’t in pain. But I adored the experience of being no one. This is a paradoxical thing to say, but it felt such a deeply human thing to not be Jane—to just be this ignored intention, the intention to manage to stay to practice. That was informing and life-changing.

“I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being is to have my first impulse be not to assert something but to ask something.”

From the ritual of tangaryo, I learned that no matter how hard the pain is, you can survive it. In any period of zazen, part of what is being learned is that whatever your experience is, you can simply stay with it. You need not run away. You need not be frightened. You need not reject it. Your only job is to stay on the meditation cushion and be with it and notice that eventually, something will change because something always changes. I think that was a very good instruction to me for practice and for what it is that I am interested in as a poet, which is to not turn away from anything.

There is a famous sentence from the Roman poet Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I think sitting on the zafu and seeing who visits in all of those hours and weeks and months and years is identical to the practice of writing poetry: you see what arises, and you notice if there’s anything you might want to do to help what arises unfold into something larger and deeper.

And so there’s always the intention of questioning. You say to each moment, “Who are you?” You say to yourself, “Who am I?” You say to each other person that you meet, “Are you a buddha? What is your teaching?” I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being is to have my first impulse be not to assert something but to ask something.

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.

⧫

Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, 
fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. 

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. 

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question. 

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised. 

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something. 

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, 
bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— 

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet       didn’t it give you the asking 

Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting

Each morning
waking
amidst the not-ever-before,
dressing inside the not-ever-again. 

Under sunlight or cloud,
brushing the hair. 

Not yet arrived
at the end-crimped finish,
drinking coffee
and buttering toast. 

Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,
I go out,
I count myself part, 

carrying only
a weightless shadow,
whose each corner joins and departs
from the shadows of others. 

Mortal, alive among others
equally fragile. 

And with luck—
for days even, sometimes—
this luxury, this extra gift: 

able to even forget it.

From The Asking: New and Selected Poems by Jane Hirshfield (Penguin Random House 2023)

The post Abiding in the Asking appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Jane Hirshfield, among America’s most celebrated and decorated poets and a longtime Zen student and Tricycle contributing editor, welcomes her tenth book of poetry this fall. The Asking: New and Selected Poems invites us to zoom out, to take a second look, and to explore expansiveness, pushing back against our culture that is often preoccupied with telling.

She recently spoke with us about the book, which is available from Knopf on September 12, 2023.

Your new poems in The Asking share sentiments of not-knowing, renewal, and awe of the natural world. Can you speak about what inspired the collection? These past years have brought us all a set of increasing, quickening crises, each requiring response. Failures of our sense of shared fate, of a basic social compact of mutual well-being. Failures of justice and of compassion, of care for the animals, insects, microbes, plants with whom we share this planet. COVID-19’s unspeakably politicized unfolding. I’ve had also some personal invitations to major transition. I write to meet what comes—to stay upright, to speak into shock and grief. Yet somehow, the beauty of the fragile world also steepens, grows brighter. The new poems hold, too, my gratitude for being alive for this open eye-blink of a lifetime.

What have you been asking lately?  “How now go on?” is a question more and more in awareness. It has several faces. One is, “How can I keep opening my eyes to each morning’s fresh news?” One is, “What can I do to be helpful in turning the world’s tiller in a different direction?” One is, “How to counter despair and my simple, profound disappointment in the course of our culture over my lifetime?” How to answer despair is a question I see being asked by many—the young; my own generation also. We came of age into the first Earth Day. I thought we’d respond to that moment’s shifted knowledge in ways united and urgent. The fracturing of trust and increase of malice that came instead continually stun me. What happened? Why?

Despair is a useful emotion, but only if we feel that it must be answered. Its antidote is, I hope, reflected in the new poems in two ways—one, the felt imperative to recognize the beauty still all around us. The other, taking some action. So long as you preserve possibility and agency, hope exists. Even to bring a few words together in a new way is an action, one always available. You can create a widened world, offer it forward. Despair freezes in place. Questions, hypotheses, imaginings, thaw.

Questions have for me felt always central to practice. Zen is continual asking, not a set of answers. With each breath, “What is this?” I arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1974, in summer, in a red Dodge van with tie-dyed curtains. One of the first teachings I heard was the suggestion that we find some question to practice with. Soto Zen doesn’t engage the formal curriculum of koans; we were encouraged to find our own questions.

For a long time, mine was “What is the emotional life of a Buddha?” But these days, most often, it is the simple: “How go on?” How stay undefended, unbarricaded, permeable, in the face of so much pain, loss, and delusion. Art’s work is to let us take everything in, however difficult. Also, to help us recognize the Buddhist parable of the mustard seed: whatever we experience is shared. Isolation, division, small self, compound suffering. The sense of shared fate loosens clench, loosens grip. A fist can only act on the world in a single way, by banging. An open hand can do infinite things. So perhaps another way to phrase my current question might be: “How can I open further into what is—and, once I have, what is given me then to do?” Writing poems is part of that, though I also take more concrete actions.

This collection contains both new poems and selections from past books. Can you talk about the criteria and process of including the previous works?  You write poems because you have no choice. You keep them, you publish them, because they might prove of use in the future. A “good” poem, for me, is a poem I may have need or desire to think of again. I tried to choose earlier poems that I felt—or had been told—serve most strongly. Ones that cast needed light.

One of the new poems, “Today, When I Could Do Nothing,” is a reflection on the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the collection includes a poem you wrote after 9/11. What is your process when writing about such massive events? Both poems arrived quickly into their respective moments. I need poems most—either my own or someone else’s—when the earth tilts in crisis. Poems re-knit the heart-mind’s fracture. These two speak to different kinds of distress. Terrorism and war—which I saw coming at once, and so wished any words could prevent—is a different order of crisis than a virus. But both were world-altering, and altered worlds need new words through which to walk into them. “Today, When I Could Do Nothing” was asked for by a newspaper hours after it was written. It went instantly viral, not least because it may have been the earliest such poem broadly published. But I didn’t write it for others; I wrote it to take in for myself the new state of being: the profoundly unnerving silence of that first day and what it meant.

What do you hope readers, writers, and the world might take away? How can we ask more?  This question holds beautifully its own answer. The shift from fixity, assertion, and shouting into a spirit of asking and dialogue is itself the key. Asking turns the heart-gate from closed to open. What a gift, a life’s bi-directional Q&A with the immeasurable What-Is. My advice to young writers is often: “Open the window a little wider than you feel comfortable.” My advice in practice is to ask each thing, event, person you meet, “What is your teaching?”

***

Today, When I Could Do Nothing

The post The Asking appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The work of Buddhist poet Jane Hirshfield, adored by readers worldwide, tackles some of the biggest questions we face as living beings. Addressing ecological, scientific, political, metaphysical, and artistic concerns, her poetry and essays move between scales vast and minuscule, balancing awe and mundanity, the out of the ordinary and the everyday. Her nine books of poetry include The Beauty; Given Sugar, Given Salt; and After. She’s also written two collections of essays: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

Her latest book of poetry, Ledger (Knopf, March 10, 2020), looks carefully at the environmental crisis, both mourning and praising “our cataloged vanishing unfinished heaven.” I read the book after visiting Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and spending hours in an exhibition called “Evolving Planet,” which tracks the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth and its life forms. This unfathomably long (“beyond measure,” in Hirshfield’s words) and unlikely chain of events—from the formation of the planet to the emergence of single-celled life, onwards to lichens and plants, sea creatures, and land-animals—that led to us today, at this particular moment, is astonishing to behold. And in many ways, Ledger excavates some of this inevitable yet surprising history.

I had the opportunity to speak with Hirshfield about her latest collection, and how she approaches life’s elusive questions on scales both grand and small.

***

Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to write this particular book? How did writing it differ from your experience with your previous collection, The Beauty (Knopf, 2015)? 

These have been sea-change years. Ledger’s opening poem, “Let Them Not Say,” was written in 2014 with the environmental crisis in mind. It was first published on January 17, 2017, the day of the presidential inauguration, to enormous response. Times had changed and broadened its meaning. The book’s final poems were written as the climate crisis, which I’ve written about for many years, became more fully visible. Social-justice themes also run throughout its pages. The bodhisattva vow has seeped into my pen’s ink. This isn’t particular to me. Most people I know feel this increase of urgency. The realities we see all around us require it. Even “sea-change” has taken on a new meaning.

During the years when I was writing Ledger, the crisis of the biosphere went from something imagined as future to something current, arrived. I waded in it for weeks, calf-deep, on the paths of a Florida Gulf Coast island, five feet above sea-level at its highest spine. The sheer and ground-slip of culture, the seeming failure of the social contract, shifted this book as well. Poems also emerged from the personal: one is about realizing how much I wanted to continue being surprised, another came from reading a library book thoroughly dog-eared by a prior patron, and some others came with a friend’s diagnosis and death from glioblastoma.

Species loss, environmental degradation, the disappearance of animals and atmospheres, aging, mortality—how does poetic practice affect your (and everyone’s) encounter with these forms of loss? What can a poem change?

For answerable questions, we have mathematics, science, engineering, all the immense machinery of care-taking that we humans have devised to keep ourselves fed, clothed, housed, cloaked in the folds of community and culture. Poetry—and spiritual teachings, philosophy, the other arts—are how we approach questions unanswerable in other ways.

I write to meet my life and the world’s lives fully, with my own eyes. The pupils widen further when they look for a new phrase, a new gesture. I need this impractical, unmeasurable, sometimes startling experience—need its capacity to make visible and audible the wholeness of heart that can be present even in fear, even in grief—to allow me to touch my life’s fabric. Poems also show us that we are not alone, not passive, not helpless, not without choice, whatever the circumstance. Even in the face of what seems unchangeable, by writing it down, we change it, and change ourselves. The literal meaning of the Greek poiesis is “making.” The writer R.P. Blackmur (1904–1965) said, “A good poem expands the available stock of reality.” It feels so to me. That breathing room and expansion let me go on.

Buddhist practice figures into this also. Can you speak to the role that Zen plays for you in excavating or facing these difficult things?

The practices of poetry, of Zen, and of daily life feel, for me, continuous. I bring to each the same hands, the same set of hopes and intentions: To know the world and not obstruct it. To sustain openness to what is. To bring forth in body, speech, and mind an original expression of the life and world and age I’ve been given to carry. To act with an awareness of interconnection. To lessen rather than add to suffering. To glimpse, a few times in my life, the full abundance of being and of beyond-being. To know existence directly, to live with these ears and eyes unconfined by the bell jar of narrow self. But also to treasure that small self, to care for it as we would care for any small, fragile being, any carpenter’s chisel, any washed bowl set carefully down.

The practice of zazen [meditation] awakens many things—among them, courage. Meditation trains courage, and it encourages. Zen’s formal practice has given me sustenance and tools—meditation, mindfulness, silence; certain stories and koans; the precepts and paramitas [perfections, or ideals]; the simple, helpful stubbornness of vow and intention. Also a basic stance of humility and non-grasping; keeping a don’t-know mind is one useful antidote to despair.

Has Buddhist practice sustained your response to these times of crisis in more concrete ways?

The night of the 2016 election, I asked myself what might be a right practice response to this unfathomable-to-me choice my fellow country-persons had made. The answer that came: “Do what you have been doing, only harder.” I’ve kept asking the question and thus far the answer has stayed the same. Part of that is continuing to honor interiority and non-doing, and to trust in the seemingly peripheral life of poem-writing as well as activism. Our culture values visible doing, but the heart also needs non-doing. Part of that is recognizing the perfection of things as they are, even now. Part is keeping the humility of a don’t-know mind. Part is bringing forward the values of kinship and shared fate, of compassion and interconnection. And part, too, has been a vow to take some daily action. 

Action is equally an antidote to despair, and beginning with the day of the 2017 inauguration, my practice has included taking action each day—large or small—without weighing its practical outcome. [Former Czech President] Vaclav Havel’s sentence stays close: “Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

The “ledger” of the book’s title comes up in several poems, most notably the title poem, but also in the poem “My Dignity,” and in the imagery of “My Debt.” Can you speak to this sense of accounting and accountability?

In the face of catastrophe, one of the first things you do is stop, look around, take stock, weigh the changed conditions in which you now must go forward. A sense of reckoning—emotional, conceptual, and ethical—runs through this book’s pages. We who live in a time of “alternative facts” and unfounded assertions can already see the harvest of reality-evasion. Thirst for the actual is one reason the language of science has become more present in my life and my poems. Science’s fidelity to clear observation feels needed.

Justice is equally a type of actuality-accounting, one I’ve pondered from many sides in my poems all my life. We notice justice’s failures much more than its presence. When present, justice is invisible, a right balance that needs no poems. I wrote “Justice Without Passion” in 1986, in response to Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, an early sign of much that has followed. Two of my poems from 2004, “To Judgment: An Assay” and “To Opinion: An Assay,” hold my discomfort with judging. Seng Ts’an [the third Zen patriarch] taught, “The Great Way is not difficult; only give up picking and choosing.” Yet keeping a practice-mind is not about being stupid, blind, unnuanced, unfeeling, or cruel. Discernment is needed.

The poems in Ledger reflect all these thoughts. Some—“Let Them Not Say” and “On the Fifth Day,” for example—have become anthems for activists. Others try simply to face and name things correctly, such as “Description” and “Ghazal for the End of Time.” Some hold the spirit of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, who hears beings’ cries and comes.

A sense of abundance is, I think, indispensable to equality and justice. A person afraid of hunger, cold, or powerlessness will behave badly, defensively. Recognizing the abundance of existence invites us to answer in ways equally generous. Traditional Zen imagery may sometimes seem chilled, but it also conveys a sense of limitless treasure: from a withered branch, the flowers of the apricot blossom. Sunyata [emptiness] is a flowering, not a barren. And the same flowering of non-attachment to self or outcome underlies justice.

Transience, doubt, failure, grief, even a sense of waiting: these words come to mind when I try to describe this collection. One poem is titled, and celebrates, “My Doubt;” another question is contentment. Yet there’s also a sense of mystery and un-knowing, of possibility (“What word, what act, / was it we thought did not matter?”). How does the book address these two poles and move between them? 

Your question beautifully captures the balancing act of my own psyche these past years. When I contemplate the future, it is hard to feel hopeful. But mystery and keeping a don’t-know mind remind me that I cannot know the future. The future will always surprise.

These many emotions are the music a life is conducted by and one way that we know the full dapple and opulence of existence. They are also the body and psyche’s weather, which comes and goes from sources too subtle to ever predict or understand completely. A world without weather would be narrow, boring, diminished. And so, in my poems, all the emotions, especially the difficult ones, are wanted, are welcomed. But when I found myself, these past years, leaning too hard toward darkness, I understood that such a view was incomplete. Despair does not help beings’ hearts or futures. And so, the last poem in the book, “My Debt,” was written with exactly this spirit of navigation. It attempts to correct something I came to realize was amiss late in writing the book: I had not praised enough, not thanked enough, the abundance of beings and beauties that are still here.

♦

Poems from Ledger by Jane Hirshfield © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Knopf (knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/knopf).

The post Approaching Life’s Unanswerable Questions appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

From Ledger: Poems by Jane Hirshfield © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Knopf (knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/knopf).

♦

Related: Basho as Teacher and Felt in Its Fullness

The post Advice to Myself appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Jane Hirshfield is a rare phenomenon: a world-class writer devoted to spiritual awakening, a person of letters as conversant in mindfulness practice as she is dedicated to finding le mot juste. For 25 years, Hirshfield has applied this unique, two-fisted brilliance to her many award-winning books—Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in poetry—and most recently to The Beauty, a collection of poems, and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Change the World. Beloved for her tenderhearted writing and fierce intelligence, Hirshfield is also an ordained practitioner of Soto Zen Buddhism and a teacher of writing and literature at educational institutions around the world. I spoke to her recently about Buddhist practice and the artist’s life and the balance she manages to strike between her twin passions.

—Mark Matousek 

“It is by suffering’s presence that we know there is something we need to address,” you write in Ten Windows. Can you say more about the relationship among suffering, creativity, and art? We make art, I believe, partly because our lives are ungraspable, uncarryable, impossible to navigate without it. Even our joys are vanishing things, subject to transience. How, then, could there be any beauty without some awareness of loss, of suffering? The surprising thing is that the opposite is also true, that suffering leads us to beauty the way thirst leads us to water.

In the midst of suffering, we almost have no choice. We have to feel and acknowledge it. It demands response. Art offers a way not only to face grief, face pain, but also to soften grief’s and pain’s faces, which turn back toward us, listening in turn, when we speak to them in the language of story and music and image.

Art isn’t a superficial addition to our lives; it’s as necessary as oxygen. Amid the cliffs and abysses every life brings, art allows us to find a way to agree to suffering, to include it and not be broken, to say yes to what actually is, and then to say something further, something that changes and opens the heart, the ears, the eyes, the mind.

There’s another thing we may try to do when we find ourselves in danger or pain: try to run, to hide. At any moment in a life, a person has this choice: presented with suffering, do we try to escape or to enter it further? Art’s gate is deciding to move toward entrance and not absence, and that choice has been a fundamental and shaping force in my life. We can’t sleepwalk through suffering: by its own definition, suffering is insufferable, unbearable, and so must be worked with. Since childhood, the way I’ve worked with it is by turning toward the gate of entrance: by writing poems.

That’s a good description of why we meditate as well. Art is one way a person can choose to enter, choose to fully know the range of human existence and experience. There are other ways. Zen meditation practice is one. Both are paths of awareness that allow us to move inside our own feelings, to recognize that the first gift of emotion is motion.

There’s a reason why the first noble truth of Buddhism is “Life is suffering” (or, perhaps more accurately, “Life is dissatisfaction”). If you didn’t feel any need for something to change, if there weren’t a sense of insufficiency, of something missing or some discomfort, why would you pay close attention at all? The longing to enter a more-opened being is no small part of what brought me to art-making, as well as to practicing Zen. Awareness, whether in practice or art, asks a question: “What is worth paying attention to right now?” That could be my personal life. It could also be some larger question, shared by all. The questions of political intransigence, partisanship, and violence; the questions of the unfolding environmental catastrophe we are living within are things that my poems turn toward, as much as any more individual sorrow or question. Awareness is always the starting place. Awareness shows us the questions, the problems we might be able to solve and the questions that can’t be answered at all, and awareness makes the hand-holds and toe-holds appear, as we traverse the cliff of our lives. It also makes the cliff appear, and the lives, and the hands.

You write that a work of art is a “ripening collaboration of artist, receiver, and world.” Can you elaborate on what you mean? We are permeable, vulnerable, and collaborative in everything we do. Art’s experience makes this especially visible. I don’t write a poem in order to record some realization that has dropped into my hand; I write to discover. For that discovery to happen, though, I need not only what’s already present inside my own life and memory and skin but also other things that are near, but outside and beyond me. I need, for instance, language itself. I need the world and its stories, images, musics, colors, fragrances. And if the poem is then going to speak to anyone beyond its author, it needs to find its way to a reader, who in turn brings his or her entire self and history into the words.

Art-making continually raises in me a sense of gratitude, because you realize how little of it is your own doing. Some part of a poem is what you bring to it, but much is what it brings to you. That process is what I mean by “ripening.” Think of how many things join in making a pear or apple—the tree, yes, but also the sun, rain, winter chill, the hours of darkness as much as the hours of light. And then, there is the reader. Poems live only inside a human life and a human response. The writer is the first reader, but after that, another person must bring his or her own breath, tongue, listening, memories, and hopes, or the poem is only dust, meaningless molecules of black ink on a white page. Most of the work of poems is done in the way we receive them. A work of art is always a conversation, not a monologue. A painting alone in a room needs no light.

My Skeleton

My skeleton,
who once ached
with your own growing larger

are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.

And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone’s arthritis,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis—
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.

What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?

You who held me all your life
in your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all.                   

 —Jane Hirshfield

Are you transformed in the writing of a poem? If it’s a good poem, yes. If I’m not in some way transformed, the poem is dead, inert—a word that means, quite literally, “not art.” In some ways, for me, the entrance into transformation comes first, before writing even starts. I know this isn’t always the case. Some poets, like Frank O’Hara, whose work I love dearly, speak in the guise of a person just walking along amid their day, having some thoughts and writing them down or saying them. And it might actually be so, for them. Allen Ginsberg claimed as one motto “First thought, best thought,” and O’Hara titled his second book Lunch Poems in part because he wrote the poems so quickly, often during his lunch breaks. For me, turning ordinary mind into poems is not so seamless. I need first to enter a different condition, one of concentration and vulnerability. I need to become permeable to thoughts and feelings and understanding I didn’t know were there, until their saying emerges, an image emerges, a question, a leap.

There’s a lot of science in your new book of poems.  We read about skeletons, arthritis, proteins, cells, bacteria, yeast, krill, and “delirium as delphinium.” And that’s just in the first five pages. I draw on many reservoirs as a poet, and always have. Science has increasingly been among them.  One of my earliest poems speaks of the strong forces and weak forces of physics.  Still, starting around the time the Human Genome Project became visible in the morning paper, I began to pay a more deliberate attention to science. Somehow, now, many of my closest friends are scientists—molecular biologists, geologists, ecologists, physicists, psychologists of early childhood and of olfaction. And in 2013 I was the artist in residence for a year with a neuroscience research department at The University of California, San Francisco, and organized an evening symposium on “Poetry and Science.”

It may be that whatever a poet pays close attention to will become a field rich with possible metaphor and image. That must be part of the reason science has stepped forward in my poems. But I think there is also something more. Science has become the central vocabulary and explanation system of our age. A writer is a chameleon, responding to the language of his or her time, and also a recalcitrance, resisting it. Purely material explanation is not enough for a human life. And so I, and other poets, turn science to the purposes of poems, which do understand the world in entirely different dimensions.

There’s also the way poetry is voracious, hungry for new descriptions, which will always carry both new and renewing forms of knowledge. The poem called “My Proteins” begins with the proteins of itch and ends with the protein in a cheese sandwich, but is equally about what’s now called the microbiome, whose study is clearly going to be a new phase of medicine, revolutionary in ways we can’t yet entirely grasp. This relatively new set of facts about our multiply shared bodies suddenly offered itself to me to probe a question I’ve looked at in other ways throughout my life: What is a self? Where does it begin and end?

All the “my” poems in this new book are in some way involved with that question. “I” am a very permeable construct, and to say “my” is an act of comic hubris. The question of what we mean by “I” has haunted my work for decades. “I” must surely mean “I,” yet it must just as surely also mean “we,” or the self becomes barrens-land, pillaged of meaning.

How does your spiritual practice affect your life as an artist and the making of art? They are the left foot and the right foot of my walking. Some desire for contemplative practice was already there, long before I entered formal Zen practice, and I’ve written poems from early childhood. The same impulse surely brought me to both—the hunger to know the world differently and to know my own life differently than I otherwise could. I was seven or eight years old when I started writing. The first book I chose for myself, at around the same age, was a collection of Japanese haiku. Japanese poetry and, later on, Chinese literature, were my introduction to Buddhism and to Zen. I didn’t come to Zen as so many in my generation did, by listening to Alan Watts on the radio; I didn’t know Alan Watts was on the radio. I came to it by reading Japanese poetry and Noh plays [traditional Japanese theater], which are filled with the worldview of Buddhism, sometimes named, sometimes not. 

In the practice of Soto Zen, shikantaza meditation (“just sitting”) is wordless. Poetry is its own form of meditation, done through words. Both can be felt as a kind of searchlight-consciousness. You stay rooted in one place, while listening and looking both inward and outward.

And both require a proportionate measure of concentration. Yes. More concentration than you thought you had to give. Both writing and any spiritual practice are technologies to exceed your own capacity for presence. Both are learned by entering them over and over, and both are without any arrivable-at destination. You don’t write a poem and say, “Good, I’ve done that now.” It’s more like breathing: you finish one poem and begin another. The same is true of meditation. One breath leads to another. Some breaths are transparent, some are filled with silent weeping. Some tremble on the cusp of disappearance, others become the sound of cars or birds. Closely attended, any moment is boundless and always changing. You emerge from these kinds of undoing awareness and you know it is not you yourself who are all-important. You know something of the notes of your own scale.

Good poems do that as well. They elude boundary and bring compassion. They make you, quite simply, both smarter and kinder than you would be without them. This doesn’t always happen, in poetry or in meditation—far from it. But once you’ve begun to see that it can, things change.

One last question. What do you hold most sacred in your life? That question is a little perplexing to answer for me, not least because, even though my 1994 anthology, presenting four thousand years of women’s spiritual poetry, is titled Women in Praise of the Sacred, I’m more than a little skeptical of that word. Etymologically, sacredness has to do with setting apart. But my own relationship to what the word sacred signals is the opposite of dividing things up into sacred and profane. It is the perception and recognition and inhabitance of the absolute, radiant sufficiency of anything. A pebble, a screwdriver, an odd little exchange with the person you buy your train ticket from—for me the most sacred thing is the most ordinary one, felt in its fullness. 

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A spacious range of awake understanding is embraced by the two quotes found above. Seng-ts’an’s words are unquestionably true: in any moment free of preference, sufferings vanish. His poem describes a mind supple, peaceful, undefined by opinion and concept, yet one that does not turn its back to the world. The phrase “Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha” holds the same perception: warm or cold, bright or dark, constant or changing, whatever is is the heart’s true home. Yet Issa’s haiku, written after the death of his five-year-old daughter, makes its own claim, equally true. Yes, it says, existence is transience—but to know transience fully is to grieve for what passes, if what passes is what we love. Desire is the wish for anything to be other than it is. Grief, then, or anger, the empty stomach’s appetite or way-seeking mind, the urge to write or paint-any of these, not just erotic longing or material greed, can be forms of desire. We who exist in human form exist also amid human feeling. Issa’s sorrow—his desire that his daughter might still live—is surely lit by a moon-faced Buddha.

It has always seemed to me that an essential distinction in meaning exists between the choice of “detachment” and “nonattachment” in translating the same Pali word, anupadana. Detachment implies the extinction of feeling. In non attachment the river-life of emotion continues, only our relationship to it alters. The response to the passions isn’t driven by the small self’s benefit, but turns instead toward all beings’ well-being. This distinction strips from practice the risk of nihilism. It also clarifies what at times seems to need remembering: the taste of awakening is not flavorless, the energies of practice are not apathy or depression.

The middle way means living in accord with things as they are, with ourselves as we are. Whether in the realm of eros, physical hunger, intellectual curiosity, or those difficult-to-classify longings that lead to works of art or a life of practice, desire faces us toward life, as inevitably as a green leaf faces its branch toward the sun. Desire lures us into our lives, threads us into the fabric of interconnection. By pleasure and by pleasure’s anticipation, evolution attaches us to the fragrant world.

So often thought of as an expression of ego, desire is also ego’s antithesis. Ego wants to control, to believe that it can control—yet desire demonstrates time after time that the small self is not in charge of our lives. The Japanese poet Masahide wrote: “Barn burned down. Now I can see the moon.” What is a barn-conflagrating spark, if not an ally of practice?

Erotic desire, then, can be simply another face of the many-faced Buddha. Whatever the symbolic meanings of the stone-held or painted Hindu and Tantric figures in full sexual embrace, to look at them is to breathe a little more quickly. Compassion, passion, and empathy share one root, in life as in language—each requires that we feel. For compassion to come into being, we need to enter fully into human life. This, then, is one meaning of the Bodhisattva Vow: to agree to remain subject to desire, in this world, while acting within the field of the paramitas (the virtues that one has to perfect in order to fully awaken). “This very body,” wrote Hakuin Zenji, “with all its passions, is the body of the Buddha.” A practice understanding that leads to fearless opening.

For a poet, the allegiance to fearless opening is the only practice possible. Basho wrote that the life of poetry means lighting a fire in summer, swallowing ice cubes in winter. And there is Ikkyu.

Born at dawn on January 1, 1394, the illegitimate son of an emperor, Ikkyu spent his life sometimes behind the gates of various temples in and near Kyoto, sometimes behind the doors of the local brothel. In his seventies, he brought his young lover, the blind singer Mori, into a formerly abandoned temple that soon became a gathering place for poets, painters, and other artists. Ikkyu abhorred official trappings of power, burning his transmission papers, but when his old training monastery, Daitoku-ji, was destroyed, he accepted the abbacy and, with the help of the wide circle of disciples and admirers gained from his years in the world, rebuilt it, even while continuing to live mostly in his mountain temple with Mori. Ikkyu’s allegiance—as can be seen in his poems—was never to outer appearances, always to himself as he was, to things as they are:

Who can measure a master’s means of teaching?
Explaining the path, arguing Zen, the tongues of men
grow long.
I have always disliked piety.
In the dark, my nostrils wrinkle: incense before the Buddha.

While alive, admit it: the passions never leave.
The fire of desire is the master of all that exists.
Spring comes each year.
New grasses answer the rising heat.

Just as they are,
white dewdrops fall
on scarlet maple leaves.
Look—red dew.

The mind-stream flows through its four rivers never the same.
Awakened Mind, Delusion—each entirely fills the
present and past.
Cold window, cold wind-blown snow. cold moon in the
earliest blossoms—
The drinker lifts his wine glass, the poet hums his poem.

Portraits by Rembrandt, Vermeer, El Greco, and Diane Arbus, village scenes by Breughel, share a particular quality: an alloy of detachment and empathy seems to suffuse their gaze. Desire is not overtly in their subjects, who tend to look back from the frame without any seeming longing for change, nor is desire apparent in the artists’ relationships to their subjects. Their works feel, but do not interfere with, the fates of those they hold. Yet artmaking is born, at least in part, in some kind of wish—for the ambering of experience against time’s dissolution, for the creation or expression of beauty, for the discoveries or display of talent or of emotional, intellectual, or spiritual understanding. Artmaking, adding something to things as they are, must be placed in the world of desire. Beneath the serene artistic surface is a rapacity: like the Greek god Hermes inventing the first musical instrument from the bones and intestines of a stolen cow, the artist is in some aspects a hunter and thief—to make art, you must want.

To make art, you must want. Yet the work of art completed counterbalances attachment.

Yet the work of art completed counterbalances attachment. It is done. The artist lets it drop and walks away, and the painting or photograph, the sculpture or poem with which the artist has been so fiercely engaged, lets her or him go. It is the same for the viewer, the listener—great art takes us utterly, changes us utterly, then restores us to the condition of fundamental realization: we are as we are, the world is as it is. An intimate thusness. In this way, any work of art is the Zen master’s ink-brushed circle—emptiness and form embrace, made visible in all of its beginningless and endless parts.

Must the experience of desire, of preference, even of the recognition of beauty, be identical to the experience of attachment?

A monk asks, “The great wind blows everywhere. Why, teacher, do you use your fan?” The master continues fanning.

That fanning is an answer that comes from the world as it is. It is also the monk’s question, going on in the world as it is.

♦

Ikkyu poems adapted from translations by Sonya Arntzen. 

Related: The Riddle of Desire: Introduction

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Don’t follow the old masters’ footsteps,
seek what they sought.

To learn about pine trees, go to the pine tree;
to learn of the bamboo, study bamboo.

Old pond
frog jumps in
the sound of water.

Whether in his poems or in his teachings about poetry, Basho sets forth his useful reminder with an incomparable and elegant simplicity: see for yourself, hear for yourself, enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing and all things will speak with and through you. One of Basho’s abundant gifts was the equality with which he met every form of existence: “Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men.” For Basho, the path is through: entering deeply into the cry of a duck or a hototogitsu, chewing dried salmon or eating lettuce with worn-down teeth, watching a nectar-drunk bee emerging from a peony, the poet—or any person—can awaken into the true nature of the self, the splash of this moment’s water. Between frog, pond, water-sound, poet: no separation.

For most of his life, Basho (1644-1694) supported himself by guiding other writers: compiling anthologies, commenting on his followers’ poems, receiving gifts of clothing and housing from those who admired and emulated his work. He took a kind of verse that had been close to a parlor game in its intentions and made of it a vehicle for understanding everyday life in a new way: bringing the surrounding commons, in which unnoticed life takes place, into interiority and depth. From the record we have of his teaching and approach to poetry, it is clear that he concerned himself, wanderer that he was in every sense, no less with the destination (a poem’s words, that is) than with the quality of the traveler’s attention: “Nothing is worthy of writing down unless it is seen with fresh eyes.” The process mattered. There are two ways poems happen, Basho counseled his students: some poems are made by technique, others arise as if of themselves, the poet virtually becoming the thing observed. We can see his opinion of the poem created solely by the writer’s will: “If we were to gain mastery over things, we would find that their lives would vanish without a trace.”

Yet even while foregoing any ambition of “mastery,” the path of poetry, like the path of Buddhist practice, is not without effort, requiring a concentration sufficiently deep to erase its own marks. A formal student of Zen who practiced at an Edo temple under the teacher Butcho, Basho learned the mind of meditative freshness equally from the study of earlier poets-the Chinese poets of the Tang Dynasty and especially the twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist priest Saigyo. “Saigyo in waka poems, Sogi in renga (linked verse), Sesshu’s paintings, Rikyu’s tea ceremony: all are moved by a single spirit,” one of Basho’s diaries begins, “The spirit of one who follows nature and its passing seasons.” From each of these expressions of the way, Basho learned the path of immersion and interconnection. Only when the space between poet and object has disappeared can the object be truly perceived, Basho taught his students, adding that for one who sees, there is nothing that does not become a flower, a moon. And so the writers of haiku could bring into the tradition of Japanese literary imagery a new possibility for the homely—a crow pecking up mud snails from between a rice paddy’s plants was Basho’s suggestion for haiku’s proper subject.

Waking mid-night—
the water jar cracks
in the freezing cold

The authority of Basho’s poetry is the authority of the world itself; yet the world of the poems is one that doesn’t exclude the human perception, feeling, and understanding through which they come into being. “Silence— / the cicada’s cry / falls into stone.” The poem describes what cannot be heard by following the hearable sound into its immoveable disappearance. In another version, the opening subject, “Silence,” is changed to “Loneliness.” Yet it would be a mistake to think one version more (or less) human-centered than the other. For Basho, as for Robinson Jeffers, human beings are not the center, bur coexistent with the rest of being.

It occurs to me that Basho’s description of the way of poetry can be thought of as offering a mirror-path to Dogen’s famous teaching that “to study the way is to study the self; to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to awaken into the ten thousand things.” The haiku poet studies the ten thousand things one by one, going deeply into each in its particular, fleeting expression at the moment of the poem’s composition. In doing so, the poet forgets the self and enters, for that moment, a practice indistinguishable from Shakyamuni’s when, after long sitting under the Bo tree, he saw the morning star and touched the earth, saying as he did, “With this star all things and I awaken.” After, there is nothing to cling to: daylight comes, the Buddha stands up. And the haiku writer? “The poem,” Basho suggested, “only exists while it’s on the writing desk.” By the time the ink has dried, “it should be recognized as a mere scrap of paper.”

Autumn deepening
my neighbor
what does he do?

At the fishmongers
a salt-cured bream
with frozen-looking lips.

This inn
where prostitutes sleep too—
bush dover and the moon.

What poetry teaches—all poetry, not only those poems that come from Buddhist traditions—is the interconnection and inseparability of being. Intimacy and connection-made-by-words are poetry’s skeletal structure, its lungs, muscle, and nerves. Basho’s poems show this intimate perception of co-arising with a few deft strokes—there is no time in a haiku to spell out the nature of relationship, yet always relationship is present. On his deathbed, the poet wonders about his neighbor with still-living sympathy; in a fish store, he perceives the fish’s body as keenly and sensually as if it were his own—first the salt cures the reader’s lips, then the cold. In a life, as in an inn, one core sides equally with every kind of person. Whether perceived with good-natured humor or a heart almost worn out past sorrow, “not one, not two” is the core flavor of Basho’s haiku, the dynamic of its insight and its transmission. In one teaching dialogue, Basho instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or objective?” his student asked; the teacher clarified, simply, “No.”

Poetry: in summer, a fireplace; in winter, a fan.

Eat vegetable soup, not duck stew.

Plainness and oddity, Basho counseled, are the bones of haiku. The poet seeks our not the exotic for its own sake, but the ordinary for its surprising revelations. Consider the first of these statements: A fan, a fireplace, are common things, yet in poetry they are called on not to temper the discomfort of daily living, but to intensify it. When you are hot, be hot. Poetry is not, for Basho, a path of amusement or consolation, but the cultivation of a ceaselessly “windswept spirit.”As for the way of poetry, it was never a “career” for Basho. When he returned to the capital after a long absence and found his former students had created a thriving literary scene, he turned away in disgust. Near the end of his life, he locked his gate for a month, the only way to find freedom from his admirers, whose visits eroded the very thing in him they sought.

“The invincible power of poetry has reduced me to the condition of a tattered beggar,” Basho wrote. A man of fragile health, prone to depression, Basho meant this statement literally. One haiku expresses gratitude for the gift of a pair of new straw sandals, with straps the color of blue iris, as he sets forth once more on a journey, and he noted that he was quite safe from robbers, as he carried with him nothing of value to anyone. Yet the statement speaks to his life also at another level: how the poet’s existence is a necessary opening to dependence, as Nell as to interdependence. “A disciple of the Buddha does not take what is not given,” says one of the ten prohibitory precepts. Basho’s haiku are the record of what the world placed in the open begging bowl of his perceptions. Had the poet’s mind been filled with an idea of self, an idea of world, there would have been no room for what he saw to find new life in his words.

As for Basho’s official status in the world, in his Diary of a Weather-Beaten Skeleton he wrote this account: “I may look like a priest, but I am a layman; although I am a layman, my head is shaved.” He valued the fruitless plantain tree planted outside his dwelling for the very uselessness of its wood and wind-torn, ragged leaves—as poetry, too, is useless, if what you are looking for in this life is simple shelter.

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At Tassajara, the Soto Zen monastery inland from Big Sur, where I lived for three years in the mid-seventies, a stone Buddha of great beauty and concentration sits on an altar. From his lotus throne he radiates both serenity and acceptance, the traditional half-smile on his face greeting whatever is brought into the room. In many ways, I found such a reminder of one’s own Buddha-nature quite helpful. Without such equanimity, how could one sit without moving amid the many hours of thoughts, feelings, memories, physical pain, or even the joys, that are an inevitable part of Zen practice? Without such equanimity, how could one learn that it is possible to feel strongly without necessarily acting upon those feelings, without reifying or identifying with them, fearing or desiring them?

And yet, the experiences of my heart and mind continually failed to live up to this serene and imperturbable image. Some part of me believed that to experience the full range of emotions was a mark of ignorance and unripeness, and yet at some point I realized that a practice that required turning away from parts of my experience also didn’t seem right. The Japanese Zen master and poet Ikkyu once described literature as a path of intimacy with demons—this, I realized, was closer. To be intimate with demons, to hold passion and feeling as fully a part of the field of Buddha’s robe, might be a path of inclusion, not exclusion, and one that began from the moment by moment experience of my own life rather than some outer conception or goal.

I don’t mean to imply that the particular teaching tradition in which I have studied caused my dilemma, and yet the issue was there. Where did the idea of exclusion come from? Some Buddhist teachings I encountered as a beginning student spoke of all thoughts and emotions as manifestations of illusion; others proposed the attitude “Offer your emotion a cup of tea, but you don’t have to ask it to stay”; others suggested that thought-formations and sensory feelings be allowed to come and go as freely as the reflections of clouds in a lake; and still others used a language of self-control and will, and “uprooting” and “burning away” the impurities of anger, pride, sensuality. None of this was particularly well sorted through in my mind, and the result was a number of clashing, coexistent prescriptions for dealing with emotions. Also, within a mostly unarticulated community agreement, certain kinds of emotional behavior were valued as signs of mature practice, others regarded as lapses—X’s temper versus Y’s evenness, A’s emotionality versus B’s solidity.

Stories and poems on the subject from various Buddhist traditions point in every direction. An interesting one is the Chinese Zen tale of an old woman who has supported a monk for twenty years. One day, she sends a beautiful young girl to deliver his meal in her place—in some versions, her daughter. She instructs the girl to embrace the monk and see his response. He stands stock still, and when asked afterward what it was like, replies, “Like a withering tree on a rock in winter, utterly without warmth.” Furious, the woman throws him out and burns down his hut, exclaiming, “How could I have wasted all these years on such a fraud!”

Paul Reps, in his book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones frames this story as a failure of compassion, a lack of loving-kindness on the part of the monk toward the girl. Suzuki Roshi, the Soto Zen priest who founded Tassajara, mused in a lecture he gave in Reed College in 1971, “Maybe a true Zen master should not be like a wall or a tree or a stone; maybe he should be human even though he practices zazen.” He then went on to add the opinion of the great thirteenth-century Japanese teacher Dogen, that all three showed good, steadfast practice: “The monk was great, the daughter was great, and the old lady was also great, they were all great teachers.” While I have no example of a tantric teacher’s response, it seems to me one might say that the point of awakening is not the utter cessation of desire that the monk seems to show (or for that matter of anger, fear, or any other emotion), but that in awakened consciousness such arising energies are seen as transient and without self, but not without power or usefulness.

There are also more Western ways of looking at this story. One might be through the psychological theory of the shadow, which says that if we cut ourselves off from our feelings through suppression, negation, or willed dissociation, they will come back to haunt us in increasingly destructive ways. The monk’s words ring over-insistent, and we have seen enough recent examples of sexuality seemingly run amok in spiritual leaders both Eastern and Judeo-Christian to be aware of the dangers of a simplistic denial. If we attempt to exclude the emotions from spiritual practice, this reading says, they will reappear in a form demanding that we face them: we will be thrown out of the hut.

Another Western perspective is to look at the gender roles. The male is shown denying desire and the body, the old woman insisting on their inclusion—significantly, not in or for herself, but simply as a test of valid practice. Her reponse to his failure is no dried-out statement of practice philosophy but an immediate, vivid, and full-bodied application of the bodhisattva Manjusri’s sword of compassion. In this reading, the story can be seen as a call to include all sides of our life in Buddhist experience.

In Zen, there is no emotional life outside of the one that exists this moment. The question becomes not “What is the emotional life of a Buddha?” but “What is my own emotional life in its true nature?” In the moment of experiencing emptiness, what is my emotional life? What is it in the moment of experiencing loss? Is the spaciousness of the awakened heart/mind a state of detachment or a state of non-attachment? Between those two words and conceptions lie worlds of difference. One, detachment, says that the passions and emotions will either be cut off, or, in a slightly different description, will fall away of their own accord with increasing ripeness of practice. The other, non-attachment, says that so long as we dwell in this human realm, we will continue to feel anger, grief, joy, sensuality, passion, but that when these emotions exist free of a limited idea of self, we will neither suffer nor cause suffering in fueling them.

While it is not so simple a model to ponder as the unchanging figure on the altar, I have come to imagine a buddha who feels the full range of emotions, yet feels them in a way not in the service of the self but in the service of everything. Perhaps such a buddha encounters each thing that arises including limitless suffering, including the end of limitless suffering—as simply what is: not standing back from this moment’s particular nature, but entering it more and more deeply, with awareness and compassionate intention. Compassion means to “feel with,” after all; the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara is the one who hears the cries of the world and comes. If one looks only with the eyes of the Absolute, there is nothing and no one to be saved, nothing in which to take refuge, no eyes, no ears, no tongue, no body, no mind, no heart. But if one speaks from the point of view where anything—the idea of compassion, the idea of the Buddha—is given entrance, all of it comes flooding in.

The experience of the practice itself teaches us that any conception or ideal of awakened being can only be a hindrance—neither practice nor awakening is about our ideas or images. And yet, however limited the finger-pointing at the moon, still we point, we turn to one another for direction. So I have come to think that if the bodhisattva’s task is to continue to practice until every pebble, every blade of grass, awakens, surely the passions, difficult or blissful, can also be included in that vow. And if awakening is also already present, inescapably and everywhere present from the beginning, how can the emotions not be part of that singing life of grasses and fish and oil tankers and subways and cats in heat who wake us, furious and smiling, in the middle of the brief summer night?

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