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Introduction
Page One ... Page Two ...
Page Three ... Without Commentary ... Cleary Translation ... Shinjin-No-Mei D.T.Suzuki
A translation known as Faith Mind by Clark is a W.I.P.
as is the original Chinese
- HsinHsinMing
- HsinHsinMing
- (with commentary)
- THERE IS NOTHING DIFFICULT ABOUT THE GREAT WAY,
- BUT, AVOID CHOOSING!
- We suffer, at one and the same time, from excessive pride and
- excessive humility. On the one hand, our intellect rushes in
- where angels fear to tread. On the other hand, we are too humble
- before the Buddhas and saints, not realizing that we too are the
- Buddha, as the "Avatamsaka" ("Kegonkyo") declares:
- The mind, the Buddha, living creatures, --
- these are not three different things.
- Haiku are divided, rather arbitrarily, into seven sections:
- The Season, Sky and Elements, Fields and Mountains, Gods and Buddhas,
- Human Affairs, Animals and Birds, Trees and Flowers.
- With all these but one, the fifth, in the petals of the barley leaf,
- the tender smile on the lips of Kwannon, the moonlight on the valley
- stream, the voices of insects in autumn, the coldness of winter,
- we can see the Great Way that stretches out in every direction,
- throughout past, present and future.
- But when we come to man, to ourselves, it is a different story.
- So, beneath the starry dome
- And the floor of plains and seas,
- I have never felt at home,
- Never wholly been at ease.
- The First Day of the Year:
- I remember
- A lonely autumn evening.
- ~ Basho ~
- Scattering rice too,
- This is a sin:
- The fowls are fighting each other.
- ~ Issa ~
- In "The Sphinx", Emerson tells us:
- Erect as a sunbeam,
- Upspringeth the palm;
- The elephant browses,
- Undaunted and calm.
- But man crouches and blushes,
- Absconds and conceals;
- He creepeth and peepeth,
- He palters and steals.
- In other words, Sengtsan, in declaring that the Way in not
- difficult, is flatly contradicting the experience of mankind both
- in regard to the complexities of ordinary life and the perception
- of the natural poetry of apparently unpoetical things.
- His meaning is faintly adumbrated by the well known verse of Yamazaki
- Sokan, d. 1553, included in a collection of poems he made called
- "Inutsukuba":
- How I wish to kill!
- How I wish
- Not to kill!
- The thief I have caught
- Is my own son.
- This corresponds to the English proverb,
- He who follows truth too closely, will have dirt kicked into his face.
- It is the very search, and the excessive zeal of it, which causes the
- truth to disappear. In our hot grasp the truth wilts away.
- There is no one
- Who dyes them,
- But of themselves
- The willow is green,
- The flowers red.
- If we just remain quiet, and live in all simplicity, no problems arise.
- Were I a king, pensively
- Would I pace the corridors of the palace.
- The path I walk goes through the pine-trees;
- The sea is blue, a butterfly flits by. ~ Miyoshi Tatsuji
- Sengtsan attributes all our uneasiness, our dissatisfaction with
- ourselves and other people, our inability to understand why we are
- alive at all, to one great cause: choosing this and rejecting that,
- clinging to the one and loathing the other.
- There is a profound saying:
- The flowers fall, for all our yearning;
- Grasses grow, regardless of our dislike.
- Other verses that express this fact of the life that comes from
- the death of self and its wants and distastes, are the following:
- Just get rid
- Of that small mind
- That is called "self",
- And there is nothing in the universe
- That can harm or hinder you.
- How delightful it is
- To make all space
- Our dwelling place!
- Our hearts and minds
- Are perfectly at ease.
- D.H.Lawrence says the same thing in "Kangaroo":
- Home again. But what was home? The fish has vast ocean for home.
- And man has timelessness and nowhere. "I won't delude myself with
- the fallacy of home", he said to himself. "The four walls are a
- blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to
- sleep".
- ONLY WHEN YOU NEITHER LOVE NOR HATE
- DOES IT APPEAR IN ALL CLARITY
- There is love and Love, but only hate; there is no such thing as
- Hate. In Love is included that which might be called Hate, what
- Lawrence calls "the dark side of love". In so far as we love, in
- the sense of being attached to a thing, we hate. In so far as we
- Love, whether it be with pain or joy, the Way is walked in by us,
- we are the Way. Ryoto, a pupil of Basho, says:
- Yield to the willow
- All the loathing,
- All the desire of your heart.
- Another didactic verse is the following:
- In my hut this spring,
- There is nothing,
- There is everything.
- ~ Sodo ~ (1641-1716)
- A HAIR'S BREADTH OF DEVIATION FROM IT,
- AND A DEEP GULF IS SET BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH.
- A miss is as good as a mile. The slightest thought of self, that
- is, by self, and the Great Way is irretrievably lost. A drop of
- ink, and a glass of clear water is all clouded. Once we think,
- "This flower is blooming for me; this insect is a hateful
- nuisance and nothing else; that man is a useful rascal; that
- woman is a good mother, and she must therefore be a good wife",
- -- when such thoughts arise in our minds, all the cohesion
- between things disappear; they rattle about in a meaningless and
- irritating way. Instead of being united into a whole by virtue of
- their own interpenetrated suchness, they are pulled hither and
- thither by our arbitrary and ever-changing preferences, out whims
- and prejudices. We suppose this particular man to be a Buddha,
- ourselves to be ordinary people, this action to be charming, that
- to be odious, and fail to see how "All things work for good"
- (Romans VIII, 28). In actual fact, Heaven and Earth cannot be
- separated; one cannot exist without the other.
- Together they are the Great Way.
- The two points to bear in mind are first the nearness of the Way
- and second, its corollary, the fact that we and the Way are not
- two things. It seems so far that we can never attain to it:
- Far, far from here
- Is the Heavenly Land,
- A million million miles away;
- We can hardly get there
- On just one pair of straw sandals.
- But as Ikkyu punningly says:
- Paradise is in the West;
- It is in the East also.
- Look for it in the North
- That you came through,
- It is all in yourself (the South).
- [There is a pun on the Japanese words
- *minami*, south, and *mina mi*, all oneself.]
- The moment you place your happiness in the fulfillment of any want
- or wish, that is, outside yourself, outside the Way, in anything
- but the thing as it is, as it is becoming, at that moment your
- balance is lost and you fall straight from Heaven to Hell.
- Things are one; things are many. The intellect cannot grasp these
- two simultaneously, but experience can, if it will. If we fall,
- only by a hair's breadth, into the error of supposing that we are
- different, weariness and envy and triumph and shame and fear
- succeed one another in an endless train. We must be in the
- condition that Paul describes:
- Who is weak and I am not weak?
- Who is offended and I burn not? (Corinthians, XI, 29)
- If this state could only be attained, we can say of man with
- Matthew Arnold in "A Summer Night":
- How boundless might his soul's horizons be,
- How vast, yet of what clear transparency.
- IF YOU WANT TO GET HOLD OF WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE,
- DO NOT BE ANTI OR PRO ANYTHING.
- Since the Great Way is one, it is impossible for us to be for
- this, and aiding that which needs no aid. There is a certain
- current, a Flow of the universe. We may swim with it or against
- it, float in the middle of the stream or stagnate in a
- back-water, but nothing we can do will accelerate or retard that
- Flow. Yet his Flow is not something separate from ourselves; it
- is our own flowing; we are not corks bobbing up and down on a
- stream of inevitability. It is not as Fitzgerald says:
- The Ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
- But Here or There as strikes the Player goes.
- Or rather, it would be better to say that this is true, and that
- Henley's words are equally true, not in alternation but
- synchronously:
- I am the master of my fate;
- I am the captain of my soul.
- This submergence and assertion of self, this living fully without
- taking sides which Sengtsan urges upon us, is the poetical life.
- The unpoetical life is of two kinds. First, by aversion, we live
- in a limited world, a half-world. Second, by infatuation, we
- exaggerate, sentimentalize, weary by repetition.
- THE CONFLICT OF LONGING AND LOATHING,
- THIS IS JUST THE DISEASE OF THE MIND.
- Something arises which pleases the mind, which fits in with our
- notions of what is profitable for us, -- and we love it.
- Something arises which thwarts us, which conflicts with our
- wants, and we hate it. So long as we possess this individual
- mind, enlightenment and delusion, pain and pleasure, accepting
- and rejecting, good and bad toss us up and down on the waves of
- existence, never moving onwards, always the same restlessness and
- wabbling, the same fear of woe and insecurity of joy. So
- Wordsworth say, in the "Ode to Duty":
- My hopes must no more change their name.
- In addition, the mirror of our mind being distorted, nothing
- appears in its natural, its original form. The louse appears a
- dirty, loathsome thing, the lion a noble creature. But when we
- see the louse as it really is, it is not merely neutral thing; it
- is something to be accepted as inevitable in our mortal life, as
- in Basho's verse:
- Fleas, lice,
- The horse pissing
- By my pillow.
- It may be seen as something charming and meaningful as in Issa's haiku:
- Giving the breast,
- While counting
- The flea-bites.
- There is nothing intrinsically more beautiful or poetical about
- the moon than about a dunghill; if anything, the contrary, for
- the latter is full of life and warmth and energy.
- The "Vaipulya-mahavyuha Sutra" says:
- The lotus arises form the mud, but is not dyed therewith.
- This is expressed less ambitiously in the following waka:
- Just get rid of
- The mind that thinks
- "This is good, that is bad",
- And without any special effort,
- Wherever we live is good to live in.
- Quite devoid of sententiousness or literary ambition, with no
- longing or loathing, Basho's verse on the mountain violets:
- Coming along the path,
- There is something touching
- About these violets.
- NOT KNOWING THE PROFOUND MEANING OF THINGS,
- WE DISTURB OUR (ORIGINAL) PEACE OF MIND TO NO PURPOSE.
- When we are in the Way, when we act without live or hate, hope or
- despair of indifference, the meaning of things if self-evident,
- not merely impossible but unnecessary to express. Conversely,
- while we are looking for the significance of things, it is
- non-existent. Our original nature is one of perfect harmony with
- the universe, a harmony not of similarity or correspondence nut of
- identity. The "Tsaikentan" ("Seikontan") [By Hung Yingming. fl.
- 1600 A.D. A compound of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.]
- says:
- The mind that is free form itself, -- why should it look within?
- This introspection taught by Buddha only increases the
- obstruction. Things are originally one; why then should we
- endeavour to unite them? Chuangtse preached the identity of
- contraries, thus dividing up that unity.
- PERFECT LIKE GREAT SPACE,
- THE WAY HAS NOTHING LACKING, NOTHING IN EXCESS.
- Without beginning, without end, without increase or decrease, the
- Great Way is perfect, like a circle, with nothing too small in
- the smallest thing, nothing too large in the largest. And this
- perfection in the dew-drop and in the solar system we are
- enabled to see, we are driven to see, by the perfection in
- ourselves. Beyond all this confusion and asymmetry there is a
- deep harmony and proportion without us and within us that
- satisfies us when we submit to it, when we take it as it is, but
- can never be perceived or conceived intellectually. This supreme
- Form of Things is called "Formlessness" in the "Hannyashingyo":
- All things are formless, without growth or decay, without purity
- or sin, without increase or decrease.
- In poetry the three are expressed as follows:
- Age cannot wither her not custom stale
- Her infinite variety.
- ("Anthony and Cleopatra", II, 2)
- The young girl
- Blew her nose
- In the evening glory.
- ~ Issa ~
- The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall;
- the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.
- (Bacon, "Of Goodness")
- In poetry as in life, too much soon wearies. This is why we turn
- to Virgil, to Chaucer, to Basho. The circle expresses this
- moderation however large or small it may be. In the Oxherding
- pictures used in Zen, it portrays serenity. The circular mirror
- is used in Shinto. Emerson has an essay on Circles.
- TRULY, BECAUSE OF OUR ACCEPTING AND REJECTING,
- WE HAVE NOT THE SUCHNESS OF THINGS.
- Our state of mind is not to be fatalistic, saying of bad things,
- "It can't be helped", and of good things, "What difference does
- it make?" It must be to want what the universe wants, in the way
- it wants it, in that place, at that time. This wanting *is* the
- Way, this wanting *is* the suchness of things; there is no Way,
- no suchness apart from it.
- The suchness of things is what the poet is looking for, listening
- to, smelling, and tasting. And in so far as he and we listen and
- touch and see, the suchness has an existence, a meaning, a value.
- Unless we taste the world, it is tasteless; it is void of
- suchness. But this tasting is not to be a choosing, tasting some
- and not tasting others. Hung Yingming, following Chuangtse, and
- using almost the same words as Sengtsan, says:
- All the things in heaven and earth, all human emotions,
- all the things that happen in the world, when looked at
- by the unenlightened eye, are seen as multifarious and
- disparate. When viewed by the Eye of the Way, all this
- variety is uniformity; why should we distinguish them,
- why accept these and reject those?
- NEITHER FOLLOW AFTER, NOR DWELL WITH
- THE DOCTRINE OF THE VOID.
- We are not to be beguiled by the senses, by the apparent
- differences of things.
- Rain, hail and snow,
- Ice too, are set apart,
- But when they fall, --
- The same water
- Of the valley stream.
- On the other hand, we are not to fall into the opposite error of
- taking all things as unreal and meaningless. This is the basis of
- much of the poetical thinking of Swinburne, of Shelley and Byron.
- It tinges the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Clough, Christina
- Rossetti. It is the basis of all passive, quietistic thought.
- Both these extreme views are wrong; Yungchia describes the
- position in the following way:
- Getting rid of things and clinging to emptiness
- Is an illness of the same kind;
- It is just like throwing oneself into a fire
- To avoid being drowned.
- IF THE MIND IS AT PEACE,
- THESE WRONG VIEWS DISAPPEAR OF THEMSELVES.
- Dogen has a waka:
- Ever the same,
- Unchanged of hue,
- Cherry blossoms
- Of my native place:
- Spring now has gone.
- Here the eternal and temporal, the unchanged and changing are
- one, because the flowers are allowed to be the same colour as
- always; they are allowed to fall as always. The flowers are not
- separated, in their blooming and in their falling, from the poet
- himself, nut neither is it a dream world, an eternal world where
- all is vanity. It is a world of form and colour, of change and
- decay, yet it is beyond time and place, a world of truth. A verse
- by Gyosei Shonin,
- All the various
- Flowers of spring,
- Tinted leaves of autumn,
- Tokens in this world
- Untainted with falsity.
- The ordinary world and the world of reality are here one; life
- and death are Nirvana. The great mistake of life and of poetry
- is the desire to get away from things, instead of getting into
- them, escaping form this world into the dream world. Yet even
- this world of day-dreams, of escapist poetry, Wagnerian music
- and pictures of Paradise, is also a way of life, is also, when we
- realize it, the Great Way. Thus it is again that enlightenment is
- ignorance, salvation is damnation, Heaven and Hell are one self
- place.
- WHEN ACTIVITY IS STOPPED AND THERE IS PASSIVITY,
- THIS PASSIVITY AGAIN IS A STATE OF ACTIVITY.
- The modern theories of repression may be taken as an example of
- the meaning of this verse. When we thwart nature, suppress our
- instincts, control our desires, the energy thus restricted and
- yet augmented is still active, and may at any time burst forth
- with volcanic force in some unsuspected direction.
- Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.
- In the poetic life precisely the same thing happens. Only the
- charming, picturesque aspects of nature, only innocuous creatures
- are described.
- But this is only one half of life or less; this is not the Way at
- all. But all day and every day, Nature is giving us all kinds of
- experiences, ghastly as well as pleasant. Germs of disease are
- attacking us, wives are unfaithful, children ungrateful, the
- cesspool awaits us, cats catch mice, and men kill one another. In
- tragic drama, a great deal of this is expressed, but in general
- poetry, vast tracts are omitted. A glance at the list of subjects
- for Haiku [See the author's "Haiku", four vols.] shows us how
- limited they are. Here and there a snake shows its head, a
- dustbin or a corpse appear, but these are rare until we come to
- modern times.
- But whatever the subject may be, there must be what Wordsworth
- calls "a wise passiveness", that is, an active rest, such as we
- find described in the following haiku:
- I came to the flowers;
- I slept beneath them;
- This is my leisure.
- ~ Buson ~
- In regard to everything, the double, compensatory use of things
- must never be lost sight of. In summer, we like airy, spacious
- rooms. but the ceiling is low and the walls press in on us. Let
- us bear it gladly:
- My hut has a low ceiling:
- What happiness,
- In this winter seclusion!
- ~ Buson ~
- "Every ceiling is a good ceiling", not merely sometimes, but
- always, for this means that it is good by the mere fact of being
- what it is. And what is it? It is a no-ceiling, it is nothing, it
- is everything, it is what we make it, -- and yet it is a ceiling,
- and a low ceiling at that, in all the four seasons, hot in summer,
- snug in winter.
- REMAINING IN MOVEMENT OF QUIESCENCE,
- HOW SHALL YOU KNOW THE ONE?
- Not only movement and quiescence but enlightenment and illusion,
- life and death and Nirvana, salvation and damnation, profit and
- loss, this and that, -- all these are our lot and portion from
- moment to moment, if we do not realize that the Great Way is one
- and indivisible however we delude ourselves that we have divided it.
- NOT THOROUGHLY UNDERSTANDING THE UNITY OF THE WAY,
- BOTH (ACTIVITY AND QUIESCENCE) ARE FAILURES.
- In other words, mere activity, activity without quiescence, mere
- quiescence without its inner activity, are no good, neither has
- its proper quality and function. Freedom is impossible without
- law, man is nothing without God, illusion non-existent except for
- enlightenment, this is this because that is that. ut freedom and
- law, illusion and enlightenment, this and that are two names of
- one thing. Unless this is realized (in practical life) none of
- these is its real self. This is not this until and unless it is
- that; only when the two are one are they really two.
- In practical life, this means that the composure we feel at home
- among our family, is only an illusion that is broken when we go
- out into the world and meet with vexation and disappointment,
- becoming irritated and depressed. Our activity when playing chess
- is not the true activity, as we see when we are beaten and our
- opponent's face and voice become hateful to us. It lacks the
- balance that preserves the mind from spite though we properly
- enough feel gloomy at losing.
- In the poetical life it is equally important that we realize,
- through each all of the senses, that true diversity is the unity.
- Even in the scientific world, the nature, for example, of a
- many-legged caterpillar is only understood when we know it is a
- six-legged insect. The nature of feathers, skin, nails, scales,
- and so on is perceives when we find that they are all one thing.
- The poet delights is all the many names of things, because he
- knows in his heart that as Laotse said,
- The name that can be named is not an eternal name.
- All the various
- Difficult names, --
- Weeds of Spring.
- ~ Shado
- More specifically referring to the present verse of Sengtsan, we
- may note that the poet has to regulate his creative and receptive
- functions, that is, to unify them, otherwise the true fruit of
- each will be list. On the one hand we get the effusions of
- Swinburne, of Keats and Shelley, with their kaleidoscope of
- words; on the other, the didactic and descriptive verses that
- have nothing of the author in them, only the outside and shell of
- things. A great many haiku suffer from the absence of the life of
- the poet himself, whose abnegation is excessive, for example:
- The thatcher
- Is treading the fallen leaves
- Over the bed-room.
- ~ Buson ~
- IF YOU GET RID OF PHENOMENA, ALL THINGS ARE LOST;
- IF YOU FOLLOW AFTER THE VOID, YOU TURN YOUR BACK
- ON THE SELF-LESSNESS OF THINGS.
- In this translation, the first is taken as things as they
- appear to us, the second as Real Things; the first as
- Emptiness, unreality, the second as the Real Self-less Nature
- of things. If we suppose that all things are illusion, that
- everything is meaningless in the ordinary sense of the word, we
- are misunderstanding the doctrine that all is mind, and losing
- our grasp on the reality outside us. The difficulty is to hold
- firmly in the mind the two contradictory elements.
- In the early morning we work out into the garden and see a spider
- finishing its web. With skill and assiduity all is completed, and
- it sits in the centre, a thing of beauty with its duns and deep
- blue of arabesque designs. A butterfly flits by, drops too low
- and is immediately struggling in the mesh. The spider, though not
- hungry, approaches, seizes it in his jaws and poisons it. He
- returns to the centre of the web, leaving a mangled creature for
- a future meal. A nation conquers the then known world and
- organizes it with intelligence and ability; a great man appears,
- is caught and nailed to a cross, a spectacle for all ages and
- generations. These two examples are identical, despite the
- addition of intelligence, morality, and religion to the second.
- Both are to be seen exactly in the same way though with differing
- degrees of intensity. Whether your children are killed by God
- (allias an earthquake) or by God (allias a robber) or by God
- (allias old age) the killing is to be received in the same way.
- One's attitude to the earthquake and to the robber as such is
- different, since these two things are intrinsically different.
- In the poetical attitude we must have the same lack of censure.
- Our response to things must be similar to that of Maupassant,
- Somerset Maugham, D.H.Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, in so far as they
- have no hatred for the villains or love of the heroes.
Introduction
Page One ... Page Two ...
Page Three ... Without Commentary ... Cleary Translation ... Shinjin-No-Mei D.T.Suzuki
A translation known as Faith Mind by Clark is a W.I.P.
as is the original Chinese