Two Poems by Chang Jian

A Buddhist Retreat Behind Broken Mountain Temple

Clear, quiet dawn enters the old temple.
Early sun brightens the forest heights.
Crooked path comes to a secluded space.
A monk's cottage deep in flowers and trees.
Light through the mountains plays over bird flight.
A deep pool mirrors both sky and heart.
Ten thousand sounds of nature are suffused
with the one tone of the temple bell.
     --my tr.

Alt:  Ten thousand sounds of nature are resolved
         in the one tone of the temple bell.


Ancient Spirit

Old men there on the River Han,
stiff corpses at the river's mouth,
their white hair wet with yellow mud.
Black ravens come for what remains.
Their cunning we may now forget.
Their selves--or souls--have come to what?
Wind blows, the fishing line snaps,
darting fish are hard to catch.
Islands are bright with white water.
Reeds crowding onto the steep bank
retain a trace of the small boat
now tied at the long river's edge.
Towering pines, their dried-up branches
hold up ropey hanging vines.
Must we depend on things like this?
Living and dead--can they know each other?
Survey the world today and see
everywhere all are like you.
A general dies in a great siege.
The Han soldiers still press forward,
a hundred horses on one bit,
ten thousand wheels on one axle.
Are you mainly name or mainly flesh?
Gentlemen, think well on this.
     --my tr.

Alt:  hold up raggedy green ropes.

Catching scent, then name, then sight
of the musty boxwood hedge.

LE TON BEAU DE MAROT

Another of my nearly always failed attempts to recommend this book.http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248193.Le_Ton_Beau_De_Marot

MY STUFF

Clearing out the clutter
so I can get to
what is no longer there.

"...in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,
and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life."

     --Marie Howe

WHAT'S YOUR ASKESIS?

A question for all: Of the many and disparate claims to ultimate truth, what is the liklihood that the one to which you adhere is THE one? A term sometimes applied to the ritualized life of orthodox Jews is "Innerweltliche Askesis" or "worldly asceticism." If we borrow this notion and regard our various religions and philosophies as different disciplines we impose on ourselves, they need not be so mutually antagonistic--like the Franciscans haven't blown up any Dominican monasteries lately. I read the Dalai Lama's talk on happiness a few years ago and he said that he didn't particularly recommend that people take up Buddhism and abandon a religion they already have. This makes no sense in our usual view of religion. But it makes good sense from the "different disciplines" point of view. This may be wrong. There may be an ultimate truth and THE ultimate truth may be YOUR ultimate truth. But there is a way of being in the world that makes it easier to live together.