Poems Speaking to One Another (Video)

Dear Friends,

In this talk, I tell stories about Miaozong, the amazing twelfth-century Zen teacher who was the first officially recognized female Zen “master.” She was fierce, direct, and playful; more than a match for the Zen men she encountered.

Miaozong wrote a book of poems responding to Zen koans (teaching stories), and then, five hundred years later, two other women — close friends and Zen teachers themselves — added to Miaozong’s collection with their own poems. Together these poetic commentaries form a unique collection which has been translated as Zen Echoes.

Whether or not you are familiar with Zen koans, I think you will enjoy these stories and poems of remarkable women. They invite us to join their exchange with our own poems.

— Sal (aka Gessho)

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Video: Poems Speaking to One Another

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Podcast

As an alternative, you can listen to the podcast version of this talk here.

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Transcript: Poems Speaking to One Another

I’m going to talk today about Zen poetry and the twelfth-century female Zen teacher, Miaozong.

As some of you may know, I’m co-leading this year’s Path class. The zendo has a tradition of these study classes that meet monthly, either over a season or the whole year, to intimately investigate some aspect of our teaching literature. There has been a Path of the Bodhisattva, Path of the Koan, Path of the Ox-herder (for the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures).

This year, Fusho Hoshi and I are teaching the Path of Expression. Its focus is on our immediate expression. In the spring, over four sessions, I’ve been leading Zen Poetry, and in the fall Fusho will be leading the Art of Flower Arranging for the home and the altar, influenced by her studies in Ikebana. I’m really looking forward to that.

We’re doing Zen Poetry now, and because there are four sessions it seemed to naturally fall into the movement of Zen from place to place and time to time. So we began in India with some poems by the direct followers of Shakyamuni Buddha, both men and women. We have their poetry collections which are quite amazing to have. Even though this is before Zen, right away we see people are expressing their understanding of the Dharma in the form of poems, and this continues right up, very literally, to the present.

Before this moment I’d always had Zen poems on my shelf, and I loved them way before I was a Zen practitioner, but I had never fully delved into the great richness of it until I was preparing for this class. I was left with a sense of the vastness of the literature, and also its importance to Zen. It’s not some kind of secondary thing, or ornament, or extra. Actually it’s very fundamental.

You’ll notice, if you come to these dharma talks, that speakers frequently include poems in their talks. Roshi Enkyo, for instance, always ends her talks with a four-line gatha (verse) that acts as a kind of punctuation for the talk, pointing out some particular aspect of what she’s been talking about.

You’ll see poems everywhere in the Zen literature. One place that you see them is in the koan collections. If you’ve ever done formal koan study, or gone to a Path of the Koan class, or if you’ve just been curious about them and you’ve picked up a volume of koans to investigate, you’ll know they are short teaching stories. They usually have some paragraphs of commentary or explanation, but they also include poems. All the koan collections that we work with include poems as a central part of explicating, or understanding, or pointing to what’s possible in the koan.

In our class we’ve been working with a particular collection called Zen Echoes, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

If you were at the recent Shuso Hossen ceremony for Jyakuen, or if you’ve ever been to a Shuso Hossen, one of the things that happens is that the Shuso gives a talk on a particular koan. Jyakuen’s was a koan called “Master Ma is Unwell.”

This is how it goes: Master Ma was unwell — and we think he was just a few days from dying — and the head monk approached him and said, “How is your venerable health these days?” Master Ma answered “Sunface Buddha, Moonface Buddha.”

In the tradition, a Sunface Buddha lives for 1800 years, and a Moonface Buddha only lives for a day. That was his whole answer.

As part of the ceremony, the Shuso walks very slowly over here to where Roshi was sitting, and during that time the Benji, the person who’s going to be the next Shuso, sings the verse of the koan:

[Singing]

Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha—stars fall, thunder rolls, 
The mirror faces forms without subjectivity; 
The pearl in a bowl rolls of itself. 
Don’t you see, before the hammer, gold refined a hundred times; 
Under the scissors, silk from one loom.

That is one of my very favorite moments in all of our ceremonies. You can just feel the whole room filled with the feeling of the poem, even if you don’t fully know what it’s referring to. Personally, I’m increasingly influenced by that sense of singing as part of the poems and part of the koans.

So in our Path class it was the second session, and we were in China, working with the book, Zen Echoes, and talking about poems for koans.

What is remarkable about this book — it’s a collection of koans that are familiar koans, perfectly famous, well-known koans — is that the Zen teacher Miaozong, who lived in the twelfth century, who was know as “the first officially recognized female Zen master,” wrote poems for forty-three koans. Though most of her writings were lost, those poems survived. Then five hundred years later, in the seventeenth century, two dharma friends, Baochi, and Zukui, decided — maybe, in a way, as a kind of Zen game — to add their own poems to the collection. So this book (Zen Echoes) is a translation by the scholar Beata Grant of this full collection. So you get the koans, and then you get Miaozong’s poem, and then Baochi and Zukui’s poems. So

It’s really a remarkable document that you have. One of the few real records of women in the tradition. I’d love to talk to you about all three of them, but the one I’m going to give you a bit more about today is Miazong, because there are some amazing stories about her. The stories I want to share come from another very wonderful collection, called The Hidden Lamp, which is a contemporary collection of koans and teaching stories about women in the Zen tradition. Each story is accompanied by a couple of pages of commentary by a contemporary Zen teacher. Enkyo Roshi and Joshin Roshi are both in the book.

The Hidden Lamp includes two stories about Miaozong which I’m going to share with you. Miaozong was born into a wealthy family. We know, for instance that her grandfather was a literati scholar-official who was an inventor, a poet, and a polymath. We can conjecture that she was well-educated in the Chinese literary tradition. Basically, at that time, to be literate in China also meant to be taught to compose poetry. To have any kind of government role, you had to take what was basically a very complex civil service examination, and part of that examination was the requirement that you spontaneously compose some poems, and they were judged — you could get a better or worse job depending on how your poems were.

So we know she was educated in writing poems. She married, and then some time after her marriage she became interested in Zen and began to visit various Zen teachers. There are stories about some of her encounters. One of these is with Jianyang Yuan, and this is presented in The Hidden Lamp as “Miaozong’s disappointment.”

Master Jianyan Yuan said,

“As a well-brought up lady from a wealthy family, how can you be prepared for the business of a ‘great hero’?”

In the Chinese, that has a definitely masculine inflection, so I think we can read that as “how can you be prepared for the business of being a male great hero.

Miaozong replied, “Does the Buddhadharma distinguish between male and female forms?” Yuan questioned her further. He said, “What is the Buddha? This mind is the Buddha. What about you?” Miaozong replied, “I’ve heard of you for a long time. I’m disappointed to find that you still say that kind of thing.”

So, she was fierce. There’s another story about her that I think was even better. This was about her time as Dahui’s student. Eventually she found Dahui as her heart teacher and became one of two of his female successors. He was unusual at that time in really taking in his female students, and he often held her up as an example to his other female students, to encourage them to follow the way of Chan fiercely.

So there’s this story. This is called, I think, “Miaozong’s Dharma Interview.”

Before Miaozong became a nun, she used to visit Master Dahui Zonggao’s monastery to study with him, and he gave her a room in the abbot’s quarters. The senior monk, Wanan, did not approve. Dahui said to him, “Although she’s a woman, she has outstanding merits.” Wanan still disapproved, so Dahui urged him to have an interview with Miaozong.

Wanan reluctantly agreed, and requested an interview. Miaozong said, “Do you want a Dharma interview or a worldly interview?” “A Dharma interview,” replied Wanan.

Miaozong said, “Then send your attendants away.” She went into the room first and after a few moments she called, “Please come in.” When Wanan entered he saw Miaozong lying naked on her back on the bed. He pointed at her genitals, saying, “What is this place?”

Miaozong replied, “All the buddhas of the three worlds, the six patriarchs, and all great monks everywhere come out of this place.” Wanan said, “And may I enter?” Miaozong replied, “Horses may cross; asses may not.” Wanan was unable to reply. Miaozong declared: “I have met you, Senior Monk. The interview is over. “ She turned her back to him. Wanan left, ashamed. Later Dahui said to him, “That old dragon has some wisdom, doesn’t she?”

So I think this can give you a little bit of the flavor of what it was like to be a woman in a largely male Chan world, but also the flavor of her fierceness, her playfulness, her directness, and her understanding of Chan; all of it is right there in those stories.

One of the great things about Zen Echoes is that it offers not only Miaozong’s understanding of these koans, it offers you three different understandings. It’s a reminder that there is not a single response to a koan; it’s a constellation that arises between you and the koan and your circumstances, and it comes alive in your own life. It came alive in one way for Miaozong, in one way for Baochi, and in one way for Zukui.

Baochi and Zukui, in their time, were also very well respected. They became good friends and they both became abbesses. Their writings were collected and preserved, and can be found (though I think you need to be able to read Classical Chinese). They were less famous than Miaozong, but also important.

I wanted to read just three poems, their poems for one particular koan. I was struck in their responses to this koan that they had very different understandings of it. For me, it’s helpful to feel that your own understanding of a koan has to come from your own life.

The koan is “Nanquan Kills the Cat.” It’s one of the most famous koans, about the great Chan teacher Nanquan:

At Nanquan’s monastery the east and west halls were fighting over a cat. Nanquan picked it up and said to the assembly, “Say the word and you can save the cat. If you do not say the word, then I will slice it in two.” The assembly had no reply, and Nanquan then sliced the cat in two. Zhaozhou returned from outside the temple and Nanquan told him what he said. Zhaozhou then took off his grass sandals, placed them on his head, and went out. Nanquan said, “If you had been here just now, you would have been able to save the cat.”

Part of what is so difficult about this koan, now and I think really through out the history of working with these koans, is the violence that it suggests. We have a precept against killing, we have a precept of not harming — how could he have really killed the cat? We don’t want the cat to die. That’s part of its power, and that’s part of what’s confusing about working with it.

So here’s what Miaozong said:

Nanquan brandished his sword and sliced the cat in two; 
Giving and taking life is something only masters understand. 
The authority seems on this morning to be in his hands; 
Watch carefully for when the order is to be carried out. 

Five hundred years later, Baochi offers her poem:

Zhaozhou was secretly pleased to have claimed the advantage; 
He was sure Nanquan had missed out on the first challenge. 
But although he escaped with the straw sandals on his head, 
Nanquan understood that there had never been a live cat! 

And then Zukui offers two poems:

How frightful were the talons and teeth of the wild cat; 
Lifting it up, Nanquan clear-mindedly put it in the ditch. 
If he’d been able to get the monks of both halls to speak, 
Would Nanquan have still brought down his sword or not? 

She also says:

Below the sharp sword, both were good at turning the body; 
There is nobody walking under the moon along the old road. 
That which was blocked has been transmitted and flourishes; 
At the golden gates, the secret armies halt by imperial decree! 

One of the things we did in the class was that everybody tried to compose their own poem for a koan.

And I encourage everybody who is listening to try this out in your koan practice. Not to take the poem super-seriously — it’s not meant to be crafted as the best poem that ever existed or the best poem that you’ve written — but if you take the time as you work the koan and sit with it, to write, just for yourself, a short poem,  it’s a record of that moment of encounter, that day that you’re with that koan. Maybe you’ll come back to that koan the next day, or the next month, or even a few years later. If you have a chance, and write another poem, you can see what’s happened between you and that koan over time.

I’ve been doing a little bit of this myself. So I’ll end with my very momentary and very temporary poem for this koan, “Nanquan Kills the Cat.”

[Singing]

I hold up my own life. Tell me should I cut or not?
Is it good, or is it bad? Am I living am I dead?
You ask me what it is, I say look!
I lift the cup of water to my mouth ,
And drink it down. We cannot be parted.

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More Information

Zen Echoes is available from Wisdom Publications.

The Hidden Lamp is also available from Wisdom Publications.

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I’d love to hear from you!

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If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also enjoy my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara