cold mountain (34) (35) (36)

 

34: The Dragon Queen

My tongue is the braided silt of the estuary, my voice a tide running between the banks. My song is a low sluicing cry, the measures of fresh and salt, disturbed by your many boats.

 

35: Spring

Days without end of the same gray dawns, the same dun noons. Winter was over months ago, but spring delays like relief following an illness. I had folded in on myself, hardening like an exoskeleton, brittle in my strength, profound in my vulnerability. When I saw the first spray of cherry blossoms against the thick turquoise of the sky, I cleaved like the ice at the mouth of the river, and all I was ran out to meet the season.

 

36: Old age, sickness, and death

When they build the museum with the old monk’s robes, ring the spirit bells and stake the spoon in the offertory rice for each person who buys a ticket. When they shout in the streets, We will never forget! empty your pockets to the wordless wind and leave your personal history behind like a too-small shoe. When they come to placate the generations, deny your ancestry. When they say, It was the best time of my life, plan a trip someplace you’ve never been. When your strength fails you, learn to carry less.

 

Chinese and English, pp. 58-61, here.

Although I announced in late March that I wouldn’t be posting here until April 5th, I ended up taking an unexpected trip (a man-haeng) just a few days after I got back from the training and ordination for bhikkuni precepts. The result is that I’m ten days over-due getting started again, so I’ll be posting more than one Cold Mountain response a day for awhile to try and even out the days I’ve missed, since I also anticipate a few missed weeks in the late spring and early summer as I transition from Korea to America.

cold mountain (33)

 

here are the sons of elders
not a one has any pants

It’s the old Taoist story: old sage on the mountain is sipping tea naked, visitors to his hut are shocked, get on his case about it, Why are you naked blah blah blah, he answers, All of the universe is my home, this small hut is my pants, what are you doing in my pants, everyone walks away edified, modern listeners chuckle, find some way to work above story into an anecdote over cocktails or even, depending on levels of pretension, an excuse for their own moral or conventional lassitudes.

Let me tell you: Almost no one gets away with walking around naked in the locales where this story is most popular. I’m not arguing the transcendental point of the story or even the poem. But the world applauds in fiction what it won’t tolerate in fact. That the reverse is also true is simply the way things are.

 

The above two lines, which are the last two in the Chinese poem, are not Red Pine’s translation. But, as always, the original Chinese and (Red Pine’s) English are pp. 58-59, here.

cold mountain (32)

 

who can get past the tangles of the world

Up at midnight, the lines of the text in front of me unspooling like ribbon from the bobbin. Awake before dawn, thoughts unraveling like a raw edge of fabric. Trying to serge up the day and the mind with it: the weather is gray on gray, and the clouds turning and folding back on themselves like dough invite all idle thoughts to poke their fingers in. Sinking. A cup of coffee after lunch puts an edge back on, makes neat the seams of work and thought; but the coming evening and the silent fall of an unidentified bird from the bamboo down past my window to an unknown landing draws all speculation and curiosity out again. Somewhere on a ridge a tailor sits, measure and scissors and needle in a basket by his side, idle without lassitude. I’ll go visit him sometime, when I get things together enough down here for the trip. I’ll ask him not for neat seams or even a pair of pants that fit: I’ll ask for sails, and the little boat he left moored at the crossing, and for the compass of a word. And then I’ll go.

 

Chinese and English pp. 56-57 here.

cold mountain (31)

what does he have at home
a shelf full of nothing but books

Never try to do two things at once. Like hold a hand-made oatmeal raisin cookie while setting a book, open, on the bookstand and maneuvering the page-holders into place: recipe for disaster. Sensing that to keep both would be to lose both (the stand teetered, the book tipped forward, the cookie threatened to crumble) I gave up on the cookie for just a moment, and got the book on the stand, pages pinned, with no harm done to the taste of the cookie. Amazing how difficult that was, to retreat from the child-like desire to hold everything in my hands at once. When I was about four (the story goes) I was at the zoo with my parents. I wanted to hold both my ice-cream and my balloon at the same time. My father, convinced I would let go of the balloon while eating the ice-cream, wouldn’t give me one or the other, I forget now which one I held in my hand and which one he held in his, but: hot, frustrated, certain in my young and unexperienced and stubborn mind I was right and he was wrong (the story goes) I sank my teeth into his thigh. No one remembers what happened to the ice-cream, to the balloon. I don’t remember the bite, personally, but my father does. It seems I have always wanted two things at once. It is the same right now, tonight. The cookie-and-book problem? A small sample. How I reach out, trying to hold work, grasping toward prayer, wistfully gazing after friends, worrying about the future. Not even a Hindu goddess could hold all the balloons and dripping ice-creams of my desirous and thirsty heart.

Chinese and English pp. 56-57 here.

cold mountain (30)

Heavy with unknowing and forgetful, how can these hands dance, how will this mouth sing? My feet mingle with the thousands, tangled in russet dust. I am like an old iron cup left out too many seasons. I still gather rain, but no one will drink. I still have form, but don’t remember how to function. The grass keeps growing taller; by midsummer, I will be buried.

Chinese and English pp. 56-57, here.

cold mountain (29)

The darkest wild is the last place you’ll look before turning around and riding straight toward the middle. No deviations to the distant or the near, no confusion about solitude and company. When you walk alone, you tromp with the noise of a thousand horses. When you join hands with a multitude, you all glide forward like the single foot of a ship. Whatever you find at the center-less axis, leave it there undisturbed. Come back to me, come back to me, and come singing a song that threads the miles like an arrow long since shot and gone.

Original Chinese and English translation pp. 54-55 here.

cold mountain (28)

 

make use of her refuge

In the dark, absence is as fearful as presence. What lurks in the corners may just as well be gone when we check, fingers trembling and out-stretched; without absolutes, where will we hide now?

 
Chinese and English pp. 54-55 here.

Those who read Chinese will note that what Red Pine has translated as “refuge” is literally “safe hidden place,” which is how I read it when responding.

cold mountain (27)

a dark stream always babbles

Out in small villages, there are daubed mud houses with thatch for roofs and bricks of fermented soybeans hung to dry from the eaves with straw-twists. They look like an historical set, when just twenty minutes down the highway is a megamart, a Starbucks, and the concrete-and-glass silos of the apartment complexes, launching their inhabitants toward a more modern population density. Nowhere in this peninsular, bound land is untrod ground; “remote” is a state of mind, not a physical inconvenience. Still you see the grandmothers from those villages come to set up small shop on the sidewalks of the cities: hand-peeled garlic, a fistful of chestnuts, spring mugwort, sometimes a few bags of a homemade pickle. They eke it out day by day by the sides of the black streams carrying the conversation of the new world: mid-size sedans and mechanized rice-harvesters, children who eat toast for breakfast, mothers who don’t know how to salt a cabbage and won’t learn, because they have to go to work, men who grew up eating meat five times a week and are twice as tall as their fathers. The distance between generations is vast, like looking over an uninhabited continent, knowing only that on the other side is a house, and your name an echo in it.

Chinese original and English translation, pp. 54-55, here.

cold mountain (26)

 
Heaven and earth can crumble and change.

I would weigh my body down with the bell’s low song in the dark, let it take my flesh and bones with it, sending them off together plunging into the evening ocean.

My breath I would sew to the afternoon sun through papered panes, that it may be long, even, and distinct, warm and clear.

My words I would give to summer light as it etches the world, so that brilliance and precision might become one with beauty, expression without excess.

I would marry my thoughts to spiders, that they can learn the art of building to a purpose.

These impulses, quickening and birthing moment by moment, I would send to the stars, to erupt and extinguish, flare and arc in all ranges of the spectrum.

And the last white blanket, the repository of all that has gathered and dispersed these countless lives, I would place in your hands, all whom I have loved. Shake out the knit-work of my mind, cast me open like a net, weave your fingers into my knots and then undo me, that as we caught each other in life, we liberate each other ever after.

 

I have (thankfully) picked up some translation work. Calligraphy efforts will have to be put on hold until March 21st, but as always, the original Chinese and English translation can be found here, pp. 52-53.

cold mountain (25)

alive a body with limits
dead a ghost with no name

~Han Shan

Maya gave birth to Gautama
for the sake of us all.
She has driven back the pain
of the sick and the dying.

~Songs of the Elder Nuns (Therigatha), Pajapati’s song.
Translated by Susan Murcott.

 

Listen to the wind on the ridge. How she sings of a hollow body, possessing force but not substance. Aren’t we all the same? I am an emptied-out case; I have left my feet at the bottom of the hill and carried my shoes up instead. My limits are the wind through the branches, its rushing against rock, its roughing of the river.

 

Chinese original and English translation pp. 52-53 here.