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The Zen poet Shiki has written:
SUCH SILENCE; SNOW-TRACING WINGS OF MANDARIN DUCKS.
The Zen poets have created a totally different category of poetry called haiku. It does not have many words as other poems have many words. A haiku is a very small piece, but very existential. You don't have to read it, you have to see it.
SUCH SILENCE ... now don't listen to the words 'such silence', but feel it, experience it.
SUCH SILENCE; SNOW-TRACING WINGS. Such high flight that it leaves traces OF MANDARIN DUCKS on the eternal snow of the mountains. Seeing this miracle, you fall into a deep, undisturbed peacefulness.
The haiku is not a song to be sung, it is a song to be experienced and seen. You have to visualize it.
Another poet:
HERE AMONG THE PLUM TWIGS, DRY, YET BLOOMING, THE ORIOLE'S SILENT SONG!
In fact haiku cannot be translated. These words are only approximate. Chinese and Japanese are non-alphabetical languages. They have a totally different world. For example: HERE AMONG THE PLUM TWIGS. You have to use the alphabet, ABC, but in Chinese or Japanese or Korean, it is not letters that are used. You will see pictures of plum twigs, you will see the picture for 'here'.
Everything is a picture. So when you read a Zen poem, remember that it is pictorial.
HERE AMONG THE PLUM TWIGS, DRY, YET BLOOMING, THE ORIOLE'S SILENT SONG!
Here it is possible, in this silence, to understand. This silence is not just a word. You are drowned in it. It is showering on you like rainfall. And suddenly in this silence, a cuckoo starts singing or crickets start their songs. It becomes a haiku.
Poetry has been lived for the first time in haiku. In other languages, poetry has been written but it has not been lived. And the difference is Gautam Buddha's experience, which opens a new dimension - the existential.
Particularly in this country, people are so concerned with words - scriptures, VEDAS, continuous commentaries upon commentaries. In the whole world, there have never been so many commentaries. Just on one book, the SHRIMAD BHAGAVADGITA, there are one thousand commentaries, and those are the famous ones, others may have been lost. But one thousand commentaries? It is as if people lived only words.
In Zen you have to drop the habit of bringing every experience into words. For example, the moment you see a beautiful rose, something inside you immediately puts it into language. Something inside you says, "What a beautiful rose." You cannot remain silent - "What a beautiful morning, what a beautiful sunset." Can't you remain without any words, just watching the sunset? Then you would become almost a part of it. Then it would not be something separate from you, it would be something very intimate and very close. To live poetry, to live music, are by-products of Gautam Buddha's experience.
Ikkyu wrote:
BUDDHISM IS THE SHAVED PART OF THE SAUCEPAN, THE WHISKERS OF THE PEBBLE, THE SOUND THAT ACCOMPANIES THE BAMBOOS IN THE PICTURE.
The bamboo is very much loved by the Zen poets for its tremendous quality of being hollow. Out of this hollowness of the bamboo, a flute can be made. The bamboo will not sing, but it can allow any song to pass through it.
In meditation you have to become hollow, just like a bamboo, so that the whole, the existence itself, can sing its song through you. You become simply a part, dancing, because the wind of the whole is passing through you. The energy of the whole has taken possession of you. You are possessed, you are no more, the whole is.
This moment, as the silence penetrates in you, you can understand the significance of it, because it is the same silence that Gautam Buddha experienced. It is the same silence that Chuang Tzu or Bodhidharma or Nansen .... The taste of the silence is the same. Time changes, the world goes on changing, but the experience of silence, the joy of it, remains the same. That is the only thing you can rely upon, the only thing that never dies. It is the only thing that you can call your very being.
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