On dharma and poetry

Thich Nhat Hahn, in his commentary on the Heart Sutra begins with “If you are poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper…”

So, what is it to see as a poet? To see deeply into object or subject with the intent of clear awareness ? To write into or from the space where duality stands still?Another poet asks, “Can a poem, by way of vivid leaps and jolts and/or stream of mind upon silence embody and communicate the sacred experience?” (Heyen)

 Within the world of poetry at large there exists a Sangha, a lineage of poets of spiritual tradition, not all buddhist, or explicitly Buddhist,but a sangha nonetheless, of shared understanding, of intent and engagement with object, silent subject and sacred experience.

 A sangha for whom Poetry addresses the gap between the experience of the sacred and language, a sangha who play at the very boundaries of language

with that gap

betweeen word and experience,

between word and its  meaning

between self and no self.

For this sangha of poets the poem can be a net, woven of words knots and openness, of form supported by emptiness.

Happy are those who know:

Behind all words, the Unsayable stands;

And from that source, the Infinite

Crosses over to gladness, and us.

Free of those bridges we raise

With constructed distinctions;

So that always, in each separate joy,

We gaze at the single, wholly mutual core.

(Rilke)

The poetry sangha of Naropa University was seeded in 1974.  Chogyam Trungpa, a lineage holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist traditions, fled Tibet through the Himalayas at 19.  He went from northern India to England to study comparative religion, philosophy, and the fine arts at Oxford.  Famously upon landing in America in the 70’s, Trungpa said ‘take me to your poets”

 Trungpa was inspired by Nalanda University, which flourished in India from the 5th to the 12th centuries. A university in which Buddhist philosophy and the discipline of meditation provided the environment in which scholars, artists and healers from many Asian countries and religious traditions came to study and debate   Trungpa’s vision of creating a university that would combine contemplative studies with traditional Western academic and artistic disciplines was realised as Naropa University which takes its name from the 11th century Abbot of Nalanda who was renowned for bringing together scholarly wisdom with meditative insight. 

Naropa’s writing school,  Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, was founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman : all three being famous American Beat poets who were engaged with spiritual teaching, primarily buddhism and its relationship to writing.

They emphasise teaching poetry as a dharma art form, grounded in contemplative practice of meditation and teach traditional poetic forms arising from different spiritual traditions, such as the japanese styles of haiku, haibun and tanka, the Indian ghazal, the Arabic qasidah, the Native American sacred chant, Zoroastrian gathas (hymns or verses), the Tibetan doha, such as Milarepa is famous for.  Milareapa is a famous poet of Trungpa’s Kagyu lineage whose teaching was spontaneous poetric form collected as the “hundred thousand songs”. In this lineage doha’s are considered equal in philosophical importance to sutras and commentaries.

It is the Mahayana schools of Buddhism that seem predominatly interested in the play and relationship between language and dharma teaching.  Zen koan practice uses words poetically to through language probe the nature of reality, and mind; using words at their limits to generate affective response of full presence.The great Zen poets use the loops and paradox of words to point towards the experience of wholeness : a dragonfly’s motionless speed, the flow of rock and skylark, a frog’s fusion with water.

Old pond

frog jumps in

splash

(Basho)

Zen poems are also responses of student to teacher , interpretations of koans and responses of mutual understanding.For example, renowned Japanese poet Takahashi  responds to the koan “What did your face look like before you were born?” with

Time oozed from my pores,

Drinking tea

I tasted the seven seas.

I saw in the mist formed

Around me

The fatal chrysanthemum, myself.

Its scent chocked, and as I

Rose, squaring

My shoulders, the earth collapsed.

And then we can hear this moment of mutuality, of understanding and transmission, in the words of a contemporary beat, Diane Di Prima:

Visit to Katagiri  Roshi

 A pleasure,

 We talk of here & there

 gossip about the folks in San Francisco

 laugh a lot. I try

 to tell him (to tell someone)

 what my life is like:

 the hungry people, the trying

 to sit zazen in motels;

 the need in America like a sponge

 sucking up

 whatever prana & courage

 "Pray to the Bodhisattvas" sez

 Katagiri Roshi

I tell him

That sometimes, travelling, I am

Too restless to sit still, wiggle

& itch : “Sit

only ten minutes, five minutes

at a time” he sez – first time

it has occurred to me that this

wd be OK.

As I talk, it becomes OK

there becomes some continuity

in my life; I even understand

   (or remember)

why I’m on the road.

As we talk a continuity , a

   transfer of energy

takes place.

It is darshan, a blessing,

transmission of some basic joy

some way of seeing.

LIKE A TANGIBLE GIFT IN THE HAND

   In the heart

It stays with me.

Naropa’s teaches dharma poetics from the mixed heritage of these traditions of contemplation and academic theory.  They use the slogan of Negative Capability, as used by Keats, to point towards holding that which is not two, of resting in nonduality:“What quality went to form a person of achievement, especially in literature? … Negative capability, that is , when a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

 Looking to the poet and the process of writing dharma poetry as a contemplative art form I think it is best equated with any form of body awareness practice – a form of directly perceiving the object or subject, with a silent clear seeing attentiveness to the moment. As found in Thursday:

I have had my dream--like others--

and it has come to nothing, so that

I remain now carelessly

with feet planted on the ground

and look up at the sky--

feeling my clothes about me,

the weight of my body in my shoes,

the rim of my hat, air passing in and out

at my nose--and decide to dream no more.

Here, William Carlos Williams, writes from moments of meditative engagement, the observation of instruction to himself, to his reader

As a reader the practice of listening to dharma poetry is akin to that of receiving any dharma. It is a present. A reminder.  Your own voice speaking.  A dharma poem at its best can achieve the tremulus balance between pointing to an understanding of the nature of being and also to the emptiness of words themselves.

The poem is an event.

It is a moment that you embody with the poem

During its writing, an aid for the writer; during its reading, an aid for the reader

Anne Waldman, speaking of the relationship between Buddhism and poetry, suggests that  they are both seemingly marginal and demanding, and  from some point of view, a luxury.  From another point of view indispensable.

A luxury that perhaps won’t stop war, or feed the starving, alleviate suffering

and yet..

I will let my teacher Susan Murphy finish, by speaking with you on the act of writing…

“ To understand and begin to use literature that directly knows and expresses the universe, you must shake the mud of words and concepts off your feet and walk freely right through the very centre of words, not eschewing language, not dependent upon it.  Actually language expresses the meaning of existence as the universe just as wonderfully well as birdsong does, or the movement of the branches shaken by a spring wind, or the chewed bone left under the bushes by the dog.” (Upside Down Zen, 69)

(a very short) Bibliography:

What Book? Gary Gach (ed)

Beneath A Single Moon: Buddhism In Contemporary American Poetry Johnson & Paulenich (Eds)

Upside Down Zen Susan Murphy