[Poetry Chaikhana] Muso Soseki - Toki-no-Ge (Satori Poem)

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Toki-no-Ge (Satori Poem) By Muso Soseki (1275 - 1351) English version by W. S. Merwin   Year after year           I dug in the earth                     looking for the blue of heaven only to feel           the pile of dirt                     choking me until once in the dead of night           I tripped on a broken brick                     and kicked it into the air and saw that without a thought           I had smashed the bones                     of the empty sky   -- from Sun at Midnight: Muso Soseki - Poems and Sermons, Translated by W. S. Merwin / Translated by Soiku Shigematsu Amazon.com / Photo by CarbonNYC /

============ Thought for the Day: The world is pregnant with miracles. All it takes is for us to approach with quiet and awe, and the most mundane things open themselves into infinities. ============

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Hi Omss -

Don't you like the way this short Zen poem says so much? The spiritual quest is first seen as some sort of construction project, but he doesn't really know what to build or what he's doing so he just digs deeper into the earth -- worldly, material existence -- until he's choked by the experience. It's as if he begins to recognize he's only been digging his own grave, yet even then he doesn't know what else to do.

But insight, that moment of satori or enlightenment, comes almost by accident. "In the dead of night" -- the dark night of the soul when he feels most hopeless and drained, he stumbles and falls. Yet in falling on his back for the first time he is face up and sees the sky. He's stunned and even thought falls away. The sky itself shatters. He pierces through the false sky, which is a construction of his mind -- his thoughts about sky, his concepts and assumptions of all that encompasses his world -- and finally sees clearly sky as it is -- the living, empty spaciousness that overarches and permeates everything.

Earnest seekers labor hard, but the masters seek that strategic stumbling and so see the sky.

==

Muso Soseki first practiced Zen under the guidance of a Chinese teacher but he "failed miserably." He later studied with the Japanese Zen master Koho Kennichi and soon began to unfold into profound awakening, receiving inka or certification of enlightenment in 1339.

Muso Soseki went on to teach large numbers of students and, like many Zen practitioners, write poetry. He also became an advisor to the first Ashikaga Shogun and helped to re-establish trade and communications between Japan and China.

Soseki is perhaps most famous, however, for his profound influence in the art of Zen gardening as spaces to cultivate awareness.

Ivan


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