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Basho wrote:

THOUGH MY SHANKS ARE THIN I GO WHERE FLOWERS BLOSSOM, YOSHINO MOUNTAIN.

This Yoshino Mountain seems to be a constant reference in many haikus of many Zen poets. In Japan, it seems, Yoshino Mountain has the most tremendous variety of flowers.

I know one place in the Himalayas called the Valley of the Flowers. No man has ever reached there, it is almost impossible. It is thousands of feet deep. You can only look into that deep valley from thousands of feet above. Even looking seems to be dangerous, because the slope is steep, and the snow has never melted on the mountains surrounding the valley. When one person is looking, another person has to hold him by his waist, it is so dangerous. Just a small breeze and you may be gone, shattered completely, not to be found again.

But I have been to the Valley of the Flowers. You can only see from thousands and thousands of feet above, standing there, tremendous kinds of flowers down in the valley.

You cannot find those flowers anywhere else. I could not manage to figure out what even a single flower was -- just rare, absolutely rare.

Perhaps Yoshino in Japan has flowers of such a rare variety of color, fragrance, that Basho says, THOUGH MY SHANKS ARE THIN, I GO WHERE FLOWERS BLOSSOM, YOSHINO MOUNTAIN.

But this is only symbolic.

What is he saying? "Although my legs are fragile, I will go anywhere in the inner space where flowers blossom. Even if it means climbing Yoshino Mountain, or it may mean diving deep into the Pacific Ocean -- if flowers blossom there, I am going there. I am not concerned with my fragile body because inside, the body does not go; only your consciousness, which has no legs, which is not a material phenomenon."

But if you decide that you will reach to the point at the very center of your being -- the Valley of the Flowers -- you will find tremendous color, psychedelic flowers, fragrance that you have never known before.

Basho says, "Don't stop before it, whatever happens. Risk everything and go to the place where flowers blossom." It is not about the outside world.

Zen is not much interested in the ordinary flowers which fade within hours. Its interest is in the eternal flowers which never fade. You have them deep in the valley of flowers, at the very center of your being.

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