I’ve read this poem many times since first encountering it in college, but this is the first time I've revisited it since beginning to practice Zen Buddhism in January 2008. So here, for what they're worth, are the observations of a sophomore Buddhist, still new to the practice.

In Zen, too, there is keen awareness of the impermanence of the body, and of all material things no matter how vividly present to the senses. But there is no dualism that admits the soul to communion with the permanent at the altar while consigning the flesh to the dust of the churchyard. Death happens to the whole person--nothing of the individual "I" survives.

It’s rather what becoming dust and ashes means that distinguishes Zen from nihilism. All forms, including that of a living human body, are empty, but emptiness does not have its privative sense. It is a generative nothingness from which being emerges and to which it returns, a ground of being, as silence is the ground of speech or music. One is rejoining something one had always belonged to, even though one’s common-sense perception sees life as separate from it.

Shunryu Suzuki compares the course of a human life to a waterfall. When the river goes over the edge, it separates into distinct droplets that feel their separateness. But when the waterfall reaches the bottom, each droplet rejoins the river. “How very glad the water must be,” says Suzuki, “to come back to the original river!” He thinks of water, the element of fluid change and generation, rather than dust or ashes.(Our bodies are mostly water, so the analogy is not as far-fetched as it may first appear.).

For a 17th century Christian version of this same extended metaphor, see "The Waterfall," by Henry Vaughan, which envisions not just a rejoining with the other water but a resurrection ("All must descend / Not to an end, / But quick'ned by this deep and rocky grave / Rise to a longer course more bright and brave"); the earthly stream is but a lower analogue to the poet's "invisible estate"--that is "the channel [his] soul seeks, / Not this with cataracts and creeks." But with Suzuki, the water remains merely "this." What awaits us at the end is already here.

It is of course much easier to entertain Suzuki’s metaphor than to live its conception in practice, to let go of one’s fear of death--just as it is easier to profess than fully to believe the Christian doctrine of resurrection.

the river? Was the separation for Suzuki an undesired, undesirable, or unnatural happenstance? No big deal one way or the other? Is annihilation the supreme aesthetic? Yet if a particular droplet has enjoyed individuated consciousness in some form or another, why does that not constitute a permanent value aside from the connection to the original water, whether the inevitable return is welcome or not? Especially if that humble droplet left us other droplets with a Requiem or a Flatiron Building, or a fond memory, or penned something like Church Monuments.....

Thanks for the reference to Vaughan, Paul Breslin, and for the contemporary Buddhist take on this poem – for the fresh perspective.

Church Monuments makes, as RP says, an incomparable exemplar of the poetic force of syntax -- expository, analytic, kinetic -- and so stripped down that it can leave an allusive impress on as bare a phrase as "which also".

RATES OF COMBUSTION


The air thins and clears
above eight thousand feet and distances
draw nearer: a silver pine snag
falls in the forest and over decades
disintegrates

as layer under layer
the rings of yearly growth break down in fragments,
the fat years and the lean,
fissure and crumble slowly inward
toward heartwood

which also crumbles, fracturing
beneath the pry and wedge of ice and insects,
snow, sunlight, rain,
the slow combustion of decay,
till all that's left

where the thick trunk lay
is a long strip of woodchips making a path
through the encroaching brush,
a strew of cubic segments the size
of fingerbones,

the ridges of the grain
still visible on their striated faces
of burnished muted copper.
Come evening, a fading bed
of coals gives back

that brazen tarnished glow
below a grill of gaping rainbow trout
— the trout we feast on fattened
on mosquitoes that swarm at dusk
to feed on us.


*

Beg pardon if I offend by posting my own poem here. "which also" was deliberate allusion but in retrospect the whole poem looks like a response to Church Monuments -- not precisely Buddhist but in that direction -- Sierra psychedelic pagan small b buddhist, say.

Yes, in that direction--and damn good too.

Inkberrow,

The droplet clings to its separateness now, but perhaps feels otherwise once it rejoins the other water. Were you unhappy before you were born that you were not alive? Will you be unhappy when you are dead that you are no longer alive? Does "you" have any meaning except in between?

Zen Buddhism does not require us to despise poetry, music, architecture, and the other arts (indeed, Zen monks have written a lot of poetry, and the spare beauty of Zen temples and rock gardens is widely admired.) But it does say that works of art, though wonderful, are finally impermanent like everything else, though they may stick around for a few thousand years. Even mountains are constantly in slow motion, and eventually in about 5 billion years the sun is expected to expand beyond the orbit of earth, so the planet, even if intact till then, will be gone too. Zen practice is about learning to live without guarantees of permanence.

There remains Buddha-nature, which works of art can point toward but inevitably fall short of representing. It is neither permanent nor impermanent, and it is not something we can "have" or keep. The effort to cling to it only alienates us from it, since clinging, or grasping, is the cause of illusion and suffering. Even clinging to Buddha is still clinging.

If you want a far better dharma talk than a newbie such as I can give, read the Heart Sutra, and then Abbott Obora's commentary on it in The Second Zen Reader, ed. Trevor Leggett. The Shunryu Suzuki quotation comes from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which is also a good way in.

Or, better yet, get someone to teach you how to do seated Zen meditation and keep doing it regularly--every day or nearly every day. The teachings will gradually seem less weird, and certainly not nihilistic.

Zen frightened me at first. Then I found that Huang Po, a ninth-century Chinese Buddhist teacher, had described my fear over a thousand years before I was born:

The substance of the Absolute is inwardly like wood or stone, in that it is motionless, and outwardly like the void, in that it is without boundaries or obstructions. It is neither subjective nor objective, has no specific location, is formless, and cannot vanish. Those who hasten toward it dare not enter, fearing to hurtle down into the void with nothing to cling to or to stay their fall. So they look to the brink and retreat. This refers to all those who seek such a goal through cognition.

(The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, translated by John Blofeld, pp. 30-31)

Since I make my living by teaching critical cognition of literature, it took a while to let go of the cognition-hammer and realize that what I was "seeking" was not a nail--and that seeking was the surest way not to find it.

PB: Since I make my living by teaching critical cognition of literature, it took a while to let go of the cognition-hammer and realize that what I was "seeking" was not a nail--and that seeking was the surest way not to find it.

Wow, that’s heavy. I hope, along the way, your students gain a better understanding and appreciation of the literature, as well.

Sorry about the formatting on the other thread, Paul Ever since I downloaded a Sophos program, as recommended by Slate, my computer has been screwed up. I have since uninstalled the program and am working on getting back to a half way decent performance from this computer.

Can you offer any support for this position:

It is easier for a Camel to miraculously show up in the pack of Marlboro LIGHTS in my pocket than to get a response from you.

And truthfully Paul, water has stranger properties than you may imagine. Let me know if I can supply you with some links.

In the "pry and wedge of ice and insects" (and the steady eating/temporary fattening of trout, people, mosquitoes), I find a distinct parallel to the bowing, kneeling, falling down flat: in Jim Powell's poem and in "Church Monuments" a phenomenon I'm much aware of these days: the difference between my own time and Time on a larger scale.

A couple of posts worth reading, that may belong here as well:

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Paul, I know we're far afield of Herbert's "Church Monuments," but since you might be the only practicing Buddhist I know, I'd like to ask what you think of the idea that Buddhism lacks the altruism of the Abrahamic religions?

Hi again Paul, sorry about the “Wow” comment. That came out more on the snide side than I intended. Look, a poem is made up of X amount of words and X lines. A poem that rhymes (my favorite, by the way) contains X amount of lines that rhyme. I don’t think it is out of line to call into question whether or not they rhyme, or to ask if a word might have been chosen, purposefully, because it didn’t quite rhyme…or to suggest that a different word might improve a poem.

I may be off base, but I can't help sensing a dualism in what you describe which is analagous to one of orthodox Judeo-Christianity's ironclad dualisms----the devaluation of life and our indivuduated consciousnesses, memories, and accomplishments, as compared to something Higher. I hear you concerning the inappropriateness of assigning a nihilistic aspect to Zen Buddhism, and that art and beauty for their own sakes are not necessarily spurned in the service of some hermit/ascetic's reductionism (though there's some of that element in great Christian and Buddhist figures). Nonetheless, there's a clear hierarchy established in what you say between the impermanent, mostly-illusory here and now, and the beatific ascension to some higher plane or mode of relating, once we've "shed our skin", so to speak. Likewise for many Christians life here on Earth is a temporary, hopefully-brief sojourn in a vale of tears before achieving true meaning and satisfaction, one's real identity and destiny, by reabsorption into that greater Reality which was present all along. Meanwhile, subjectivizing the "I" and "you" of self and self-consciousness, and mhence materiality, by means of question-begging and semantical inversion, seems at first blush to be no more and no less than the mental gymnastics Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, and Buber engaged in, with the result that one may always rationalize a Build Your Own Pizza conception of reality if one is so inclined.

Well, it's not a dualism (this and not that) so much as a contradictory both/and//neither/nor.

The Heart Sutra says there is "no path, no wisdom, no attainment. Indeed there is nothing to be attained." What is real is just the here and now, experienced differently. There is no reality except precisely here and now. If you observe your own mind, you'll find that you're constantly making stories or movies in your head that involve the past (remember when I; wish I could go back to the day when; it embarrasses me to remember . . .) or the future (hope x happens; I worry that y might happen). While we're doing that (or while we're writing posts for the Fray, for that matter), we're distracted from what's going on at this moment, right where we stand.

Very interesting reading, Paul. And what a delight to come across such a well thought-out and exquisitely written piece of prose on a mere message board. One tends not to expect much from The Fray, so it is exhilarating when a post like this comes along.

Your post makes me think of the Zen poem of Chiyono, who had struggled for years to achieve satori. Then, while observing the moon's reflection on the surface of the water in a bamboo bucket. The bucket collapsed and she achieved her enlightenment. She wrote:

Suddenly the bottom fell out:
No more water:
No more moon in the water:
Emptiness in my hand!

That feels to me like what you are talking about regarding life and death. Life is a construct, beautiful but transient, meant to be perceived and enjoyed but not to last. The pail of water is such a great image here because it is a fragile, mostly "water-filled" vehicle upon which some beautiful dancing image may be displayed. Perhaps that parallels (unintentionally) the concept of duality in that it reveals a body (the pail of water) and a soul (the image of the moon, the thing that animates the water). Yet the "soul" cannot exist without the body; it has not the permanence of the moon. And when it is gone, we realize it has only existed in the perception of it.

I suppose one could also interpret this in the Platonic sense, the reflection of the moon being merely the image of a primal, perfect, permanent form. And yet we know that the moon itself is neither perfect nor permanent. It just lasts longer than we do, and to its ultimate worth may be added the creative exhalations of poets, good and bad, over the years human beings walk this planet.

Mary Ann, I'm poorly qualified to represent Buddhism after just 20 months in the practice, but I'll answer as best as I can.

Buddhism is often said to lack a sense of sin. But it does teach precepts--the Five Grave Precepts, which I accepted at the Ju Kai initiation ceremony, are:

Do not kill

Do not steal

Do not engage in sexual misconduct

Do not lie

Do not take intoxicants. (To avoid violating the spirit of the previous precept, this disclosure: I allow myself one glass of wine or one beer with dinner, since this amount does not intoxicate me.)

So it's sort of like a short version of the Ten Commandments. The first four of the five Precepts correspond to Commandments 6-9..

One feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that Buddhism lacks is belief in divine retribution awaiting transgressors or non-believers and divine reward promised to believers. Accordingly, there are no religious grounds for aggression against non-Buddhists or heretical Buddhists, and in practice Buddhism has been the least bellicose of the major religions.

Some have even questioned whether or not Buddhism is a religion, since it requires no belief in a god or gods. Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, is regarded as a human being, though he is revered as a bringer of enlightenment. It is possible to practice Zen and also continue to be a Jew or Christian, as some members of our sanga (the equivalent of "congregation") have done.

"I don’t think it is out of line to call into question whether or not they rhyme, or to ask if a word might have been chosen, purposefully, because it didn’t quite rhyme…or to suggest that a different word might improve a poem."

HAP, who said it was out of line? My verse reply to you (on another thread) merely stated that the sounds of words change over the centuries, so that what rhymed in the 17th century doesn't necessarily still rhyme in the 21st.