Reflections: Pickup or Shut Up

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By enjoying a few most every day, I finally finished reading, several days ago, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, translated by Red Pine. In his Translator’s Preface, Red Pine provides us with some background information on the life of this semi-hermit poet, Han Shan (Cold Mountain), and his two intermittent companions, Big Stick (Feng-kan) and Pickup (Shih-te).

Feng-kan comes first. As Red Pine informs us,

Big Stick suddenly appeared one day riding through the [Kuoching] temple’s front front gate on the back of a tiger.

An auspicious entrance, without a doubt.

The Kuoching temple was a place that Han Shan frequently visited:

Although Cold Mountain’s name was linked with [a] remote and rocky place, he often availed himself of the hospitality of Kuoching Temple at the foot of Mount Tientai, a long day’s hike to the northeast.

At some point, Pickup (Shih-te) entered the picture thusly:

One day Big Stick was walking along the trail that led between Kuoching and the nearby county seat of Tientai. Upon reaching the cinnabar-colored outcrop of rock known as Redwall, he heard someone crying. Searching in the bushes, he found a ten-year-old boy. The boy said he had been left there by his parents, but no one came forward to claim him. So Pickup, as Big Stick called him, stayed at the temple and was placed under the care of Ling-yi, the chief custodian, who put the boy to work in the main shrine hall.

Big Stick and Pickup were each poets in his own right, and Red Pine has provided us with a selection of their poems, with his commentary on most, in sections following the songs of Cold Mountain in the text.

I shall say a few words here about the song of Pickup numbered 36. This one is translated by Red Pine without commentary, allowing for a small, still voice to encourage me to believe that he has done so in order to allow me to try my own hand at it. First the poem:

Those who leave home to be free
and pity the suffering masses
they proselytize for the Buddha
telling others to choose a path
but who can they possibly save
doing whatever they please
descending with everyone else
into the same abyss

I suggest that this song can be translated from a Chinese Buddhist perspective, predating our own world by 1200 years, to deliver a comment on our contemporary Christian circumstances. It seems to me that what Pickup is criticizing here is analogous to what has been characterized as “Cheap Grace” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In the poem’s first line the phrase “those who leave home” refers to individuals who become monks, ostensibly to “free” themselves from a life of Delusion within the “Three Worlds,” i.e., Desire, Form, and Formlessness. But Pickup sees such persons taking on a condescending attitude toward the “suffering masses,” who presumably continue to follow their delusions in the direction of spiritual disaster. These monks piously admonish the deluded masses, having donned an air of spiritual superiority, along with the saffron robe.

Where the poem says “leave home to be free” we can substitute “claim discipleship.” In place of “Buddha” we can understand “Jesus.”

And we see these types in the Gospels; they have given us the adjective “pharisaic.” We have seen them, too, on (for instance) the Fox News Channel. But, Pickup implies, by their fruits we shall know them. As for those with whom we walk today; do they tithe, and work the bake sales, and put in their shifts at the soup kitchen, feeling very good about themselves? And do they receive Holy Communion dozens of times every month, each one convinced that he therefore has the Living God in his pocket?

As we drive through our neighborhoods on our way to work do we compare our rides to our neighbors’ cars, feeling either smug, or envious? Is our workplace an arena in which we daily struggle to gain status and power, in competition and conflict, rather than in a spirit of cooperation and collegiality? Do we masturbate in the shower, fantasizing about running our soapy hands over the forbidden bodies of our neighbor’s wives, or daughters? Are our hearts’ interiors furnished with the artifacts of greed, acquisitiveness, lust , gluttony, pride, and anger? Do we hate those we see as standing in the way of our obtaining all the riches that our hearts desire? And do we rationalize this cupidity as “responsibility?” Do we therefore hate the cross of Christ—or drive it from our conscious minds altogether, in order to avoid acknowledging that hate?

Is our discipleship no more essential to our actual selves than the fashionable jacket we slip into and proudly wear to church? Does Pickup’s poem have us pinned and dried and on display?
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Reflections: Existence Is a Trip

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You may be aware that my profile avatar is a portrait of the great Japanese haiku master, Bashō. In the "Translator’s Introduction" to his translation of Bashō’s classic spiritual travelogue, Narrow Road to the Interior, Sam Hamill gives us these thought-provoking words :

Bashō knew well the Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-sutra and its primary teaching: “Of one thing it is said, ‘This is good,’ and of another it is said, ‘This is bad,’ but there is nothing inherent in either to make them ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The ‘self’ is empty of independent existence.”

Later in the same introduction, Hamill gives us this advice of Bashō on the nature of creativity:

“Learn the rules well, and then forget them.”

And,

“When a great act presents itself, it does so without rules.”

Ah-so.
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Reflections: Linked Allusions

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I can’t seem to get enough of Red Pines’ translations and commentary on the poems of Han Shan these days. His ancient Eastern wisdom seems applicable to nearly everything. Apply the following, for instance, to the message of yesterday’s post:

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People think the body’s their root
and the mind they think is its stem
the mind mustn’t stray from the root
when it does the root’s life ends
still unable to avoid this fate
don’t be too lazy to look in the mirror
unless you read the Diamond Sutra
you’ll make bodhisattvas sick

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In the Nirvana Sutra; 34, the Buddha likened his sermons to a mirror in which one’s true nature is visible. The Diamond Sutra ends with this gatha: “All Created things / are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, or a shadow / like dew or like lightening / regard them like this.” According to this sutra, only by not grasping form can we see our true mind. Meanwhile, Vimilakirti told Manjushri: “I’m sick because other beings are sick. If they weren’t sick, my illness would vanish. Where we find birth and death, we find sickness. When beings are able to get free of sickness, bodhisattvas will no longer be sick.” (Vimilakirti Sutra: 5) A bodhisattva is someone who works for the liberation of others.

Check it out: It's about our relationship to the Other.
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Readings: A Footnote to All-Too-Humanity

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The final editorial footnote to William Empson’s unfinished novel The Royal Beasts: A Fable, has something interesting to say about the human condition. I quote it here in full:

“14. Cf. Empson’s unpublished essay, on Buddhism and Death (1933): ‘the special Buddhist version of a deathwish…is that no sort of temporal life whatever can satisfy the human spirit, and therefore we must work for an existence outside time on whatever terms.’ This concept is not a psychological perversion, Empson goes on to insist, but ‘at the back, I believe, of all the grand examples in the aesthetic of the deathwishes. Shakespeare makes Lear hint at an odd and interesting reflection on this topic when faced with the despair of Glouscester: “Thou must be patient. We came crying hither. Thou knowest, the first time that we smell the air, we waul and cry.” Alone among the young of the mammals the human infant is subject to blind fits of fury at finding itself thrust into the world; it is nasty, he feels, to the point of mysticism, and I suppose Freud could hardly disagree…the desires for absence of stimulus and return to the womb are the obviously Buddhist deathwishes, and are clearly a large element anyway in all but the most primitive religions’ (Empson Papers.)”

In terms of human exceptionalism, this goes along, I guess, with the need to blush…
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Quote du Jour: Open to Grace

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…Ananda! You have sought the secret lore from all the Buddha-lands without first attaining emancipation from the desires and intoxications of your own contaminations and attachments, with the result that you have stored in your memory a vast accumulation of worldly knowledge and built up a tower of faults and mistakes.

You have learned the Teachings by listening to the words of the Lord Buddha and then committing them to memory. Why do you not learn from your own self by listening to the sound of the Intrinsic Dharma within your own Mind and then practicing reflection upon it?

~ Jack Kerouac, Wake Up - a Life of the Buddha
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