My mind roams by day;
I cannot sleep at night.
Daily affairs have no end;
Fatigue is my only friend.
~Tsangyang Gyatso (The Sixth Dalai Lama)
*untitled poem translated by G.W. Houston in Wings of The White Crane:
Poems of Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho (1683-1706). Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1967.
The mountains remain the same,
As do the trees and streams…
All that has changed
Is my heart.
~ Bennen
And I say to mankind,
Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious
about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am
at peace about
God and about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet
understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more
wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the
twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in
my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and
every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that
wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
A bamboo dipper
resting on two red branches
bound by fraying twine.
A dark elephant
living in a dark forest
came to sip from a pond
as the Buddha watched
A dark elephant
from a dark forest
has come to the pond
and sipped
the trembling vision
of the Moon.
A dark deer
from a dark forest
also came to sip from the pond.
The deer has also sipped
the vision of the moon.
The Buddha leaned over
and scooped up the moon in his palm.
I too will sip
if it will illuminate my heart
just a little.
More than two thousand years
after the Buddha’s death
His remains have been divided endlessly
only imaginary numbers can count
the tiles atop the reliquary pagodas
that stretch into the sky
three stories, five stories, seven stories…
As a person of brightness
living now in a town of light,
to which pond will you go
to sip when overcome by night?
When you scoop up the water
what vision of the moon
will you find in your palm?
I too will sip
if it will shade my heart
just a little.
~ Tada Chimako
(Source)
Oroka 愚か 