Buddhist Tensions: the Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong

Picking Flowers

If you want to pick flowers, you have to hike.
Climbing up, don't worry about your weary bones.
Pluck the low branches, pull down the high.
Enjoy alike the spent blossoms, the tight buds.

Ho Xuan Huong (1772-1822 / Vietnam)

Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong was a powerfully independent and outspoken woman living at a time when that was very rare. The energy and mastery of her poetry was so high that it helped elevate the status of Vietnamese to that of a literary language. Although her words are infused with Buddhist understandings and images, Ho Xuan Huong had a defiant, highly critical relationship with the Buddhism of her native Vietnam.

One of the tension points present in her work revolves around sex and sexuality. She was a frequent critic of the pious sounding Vietnamese monks who scoffed at women expressing themselves sexually, but then courted and slept with female devotees and concubines. In addition, she fiercely questioned the double standards of a patriarchal society where men did as they pleased when it came to romantic relationships, while women were confined to roles of dutiful quietude.

Ho Xuan Huong was anything but quiet about sexuality, as the following poem attests.

Swinging

Praise whoever raised these poles
for some to swing while others watch.

A boy pumps, then arcs his back.
The shapely girl shoves up her hips.

Four pink trousers flapping hard,
two pairs of legs stretched side by side.

Spring games. Who hasn't known them?
Swingposts removed, the holes lie empty.

Many of Ho Xuan Huong's poems read like expressions of freedom. Not longing for it, but actually living and breathing it. If you want to pick flowers, you have to hike. Climbing up, don't worry about your weary bones. Literally, there's the experience of climbing up a hill or mountain. Where I'm living right now, there is a small mountain that the locals like to climb to get exercise and look out over the city in the valley below. I have climbed to the top multiple times. Every time, there has been a point where I consciously chose to be ok with having some aches and pains, and then - as if by magic - I experienced a jolt of renewed energy that helped me reach the summit. Metaphorically, the same lines of the poem can taken as a directive for life. If you want to reach your dreams, you have to let go of fretting and obsessing over every, little obstacle that appears along the way.

As many great poets do, Ho Xuan Huong captures beautifully the fleeting quality of our lives. Particularly that of high moments, and how a wrong decision while on top of the mountain can bring you tumbling down. In another poem laden with sexual images and tension, Huong offers both high level pleasure and a caution to not go too far.

The Jackfruit

I am like a jackfruit on the tree.
To taste you must plug me quick, while fresh:
the skin rough, the pulp thick, yes,
but oh, I warn you against touching --
the rich juice will gush and stain your hands

Beyond pleasure, the richness of the natural world explodes from Huong's poems. Clearly in love with all the wonders of the waxing seasons, spring and summer, she readily invokes the beauty and vibrancy of each in her words.

Spring-Watching Pavilion

A gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by worldly dust.

Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside-down in sad puddles.

Love's vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.

Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten

Here, Huong offers a poem that appears to be passive, but actually is active and full of tension. A gentle, somewhat melancholy start paired with a fierce, declarative ending. Talk of sadness coupled with the deepest expression of love itself.

Overall, she leaves us with an overriding message pointing directly to spiritual liberation. One that isn't separated from the seemingly mundane and material world around us. The pulpy jackfruit is love. The sad puddles are love. The hike to pick flowers is love.

And love is liberation. Available to all, regardless of who we are perceived to be (or not be) in the world.

The spring breeze is our every breath

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

Zen Master Ikkyu, 1394-1481

Many years, we here in Minnesota are still being swallowed up by winter clouds. This year, not so much. All around, the trees are budding. The lingering snow and ice is melting. And the air is filling with the songs of returning birds.

The same might be said of how people experience awakening, enlightenment. Most of the time, it seems to be some thing distant, buried under the snow of our sufferings and attachments. However, it need not be that way. Even in the worst winter storm, there is a spring breeze waiting to be discovered.

Ikkyu stands exactly where he is in this poem. There's not much desire for something to be radically different, just description and acceptance of what is. And also weariness. A weariness that isn't what it seems to be.

The spring breeze that isn't in the relative moment is fully alive in Ikkyu's heart/mind. In the poem, it breathes a love into everything that is, just as it is. And in doing so, he moves beyond being owned by that relative reality.

That weariness isn't of a man who's been beaten down by the world. As I see it, it's of a man who has grown tired of riding the emotional tides of life's endless changes.

Whatever comes, he's ready to embrace it.

I must remember that the budding trees will someday be rotting logs. I also must remember that the rotting logs contain budding trees.

The spring breeze is our every breath.

Zen Desire

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

Zen Master Ikkyu, 1394-1481

I have been thinking this morning about delay. Specifically, how delay is felt, experienced, and the desire behind it. When things don't come to us when we want them to, or expected them to, we call it a delay. We say we are in waiting, putting a future focus on what's happening now. And often, in the process, stepping out of the now all together.

Something was desired to occur at a certain time. It didn't. Now what?

When faced with that now what, we tend to experience a taking over by desire. Instead of using our desire energy to move through life, we become owned by it. Controlled by it.

Although it may not have been the case, in Ikkyu's poem, I sense a bit of longing for spring. Both for the literal spring and, also, the spring of waking up to some part of his life he continues to miss.

When desire owns us, everything seems to be colored by lack.

When desire is a tool used by us, there's no lack of abundance.

Being in waiting for something can live in either of those fields. You can wait for spring without being controlled by it.

But that's easier said than done. Those winter clouds too often feel ominous to me. Even when there's no storm in sight.

May this be the winter of burning through the hut's flimsy walls.

Seizing the Seasons: On Identity and Zen Effort

There is no I and there is no other.
How can there be intimacy or estrangement?
I recommend giving up trying to get there by meditation,
But rather, directly seizing the reality at hand.
The message of the Diamond Sutra is:
Nothing is excluded from our experienced world.
From beginning to end,
It inevitably exposes our false identities.

Layman P'ang (740-808)

This is quite a jolt of a poem, don't you think? This whole "exposure" process is interesting. Natural. How every spring, the snow melts away and reveals both a round of casualties and, also, a round of new life. Body of a squirrel. Barren tree. Rotting couch cushion. Tulip blooming. Burst of bee balm. Newborn robin. Shiny bicycle.

How every autumn the trees go bare, the grass goes brown, the wild growth of summer goes underground.

Natural, and yet how often are we simply afraid of being exposed. Of undergoing this expanding into view, and/or stripping away?

Spring comes to our identities. And so does winter. I once taught in English classrooms; now I do not. I once was afraid of public speaking; now I do it all the time.

But being in this movement between the seasons is easier said than done. Especially given how our mass culture tends to highly discourage such flow. And how so many of us are disconnected from the actual seasons themselves, the planetary ebbs and flows happening all around us.

This fierce call to "seize" from Layman P'ang, to me, is a reminder of that disconnection. How our minds figure out so many ways to impede our life from bursting forth completely. And because of this, there's a need for strong effort. For rousing up a willingness to be exposed again and again.

It seems to me that we have the option to be proactive, deliberately choosing to explore our various identities and ways of being in the world, or to be dragged by the world screaming and kicking into such work. Either through bottoming out experiences, or at the end of our lives, when there's no time left to live out the insights.

I invite you all to reaffirm your commitment to being more proactive. To reconcile with the seasons - inwardly and outside of yourself.

Today, I embrace late autumn, with all its cloudy, cold winds, sweeping away whatever needs to go.

A Short Meditation on Spring Arriving

There are all kinds of ways to avoid the natural environment. To act like you aren't part of the earth. But even so, you can't escape it: we are all, still, just mud and clouds.

This time of year, when winter is disappearing and spring is stepping forth, often feels unstable. ,One hour, you're slipping on half melted dirty ice and getting honked at by some woman in a grungy car, and the next you're marveling at the beauty of the first opened flower, the miracle of breathing, just being alive together.

Some of the plants in my apartment window have suddenly started sprouting little clones of themselves. Tiny sage bushes, strands of mint, leaves of lemon balm. A few others have sections which have suddenly dried up, as if the life that was there was borrowed to make the new life in a neighboring pot.

Seasonal transitions aren't given their due in modern culture. We wake up with a cold, and shrug it off or complain about it. We feel a new calling or interest, and fail to connect it to the ways the Earth is shifting.

The fleeting, ever shifting nature of life is more apparent right now. And whether you choose to honor it or not, the sometimes dramatic nature of change is never too far away. Step on the wrong sheet of ice and you're gonna fall through. Overturn a loose stone and find the ground below has been colonized by weeds.

We are the seasons and the seasons are us. As spring unfolds all around you, pause and remember. Taste the sun that stands higher in the sky now, bringing forth new life.

The Zen of Wild Turkeys and Snakes

It was a beautiful day here in Minnesota. Sunny. Light winds. Spring time temperatures. The perfect conditions for having encounters with other creatures!

Now, I'm not talking aliens. I'm talking wild turkeys and snakes.

After parking my bike this morning, I walked behind a construction site near our zen center. Turning the corner, I came nearly face to face with two wild turkeys. Wild turkeys sightings have become more common in the city in recent years, but I haven't been close enough to almost touch one - until this morning. As they strutted along in front of me, I just stood there, watching their funny necks move, and thinking "what is this?"

What is this? Not just the turkeys right in front of me, but the whole experience of living at that moment. Their appearance startled me out of morning sleepiness, and that general apathy we so often have towards our lives when things aren't "exciting" or "dramatic".

Apparently, being startled into the moment was the story of the day. This afternoon, as I biked on a trail along the Mississippi, I felt myself lost in gaze. The sun shining over the river, and all the little green plants shooting from the ground after a long winter were just too much. Gazing at it all as I peddled, I felt a bit punch drunk, loving spring for being spring. At one point, I vaguely saw something laying in the middle of the trail, and before I knew it, I had run over a snake.

It was a small snake, and I'm guessing I only hit it's hind end because almost immediately after I registered it's snakeness, and my tire going over it, the snake was gone into a patch of brush. I stopped and went looking for it, but couldn't find it.

Later, I took a hike in the woods - maybe a mile away from where I hit the snake. It was a section that had been partially cleared away, where shrub trees mingled with upturned soil, broken beer bottles, and chunks of stone near the river shore. I was enjoying walking around down there when a train came along the tracks and slowed to a stop not too far from me. Figuring I was trespassing, I decided to make a quick exit, walking back up the hill I had come down into the wooded patch from. About half way up, I looked down just as my foot was about to land on - you guessed it - another snake. Two in fact. Almost exactly the same size and color as the one I had hit.

I watched as the snakes slithered away, and then finished the walk back to my bicycle. No creatures were upset the rest of the way home.

Cosmic, Muddy Spring

"Cosmic Spring" - Frantisek Kupka, 1871-1957

It's not here yet. Or maybe it is, inside the heart. Even as some of the pile of snow here melts, the threat of another dumping tempers any thoughts of spring.

15th century Zen poet Ikkyu says it well in this poem:

My Hovel

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

These days, there are all kinds of ways to avoid the natural environment. To act like you aren't part of the earth. But even so, you can't escape that connection: we are all, still, just mud and clouds after all.

The contrast between the images in Kupka's painting and in Ikkyu's poem seem quite fitting, don't you think? The former sky high and the later absolutely earth bound.

This time of year, I find that the two come and go, sometimes by the hour. One hour, you're slipping on half melted dirty ice and getting honked at by some woman in a grungy car, and the next you're marveling at the beauty of a painting, the miracle of breathing, and visions of the future.

Some of the plants in my apartment window have suddenly started sprouting little clones of themselves. Tiny sage bushes, strands of mint, leaves of lemon balm. A few others have sections which have suddenly dried up, as if the life that was there was borrowed to make the new life in a neighboring pot.

This is a tough time to stay balanced in my opinion. The fleeting, ever shifting nature of life is more readily apparent. Step on the wrong sheet of ice and you're gonna fall through.

How do you work with this time of year? How do you weave the muddy and the cosmic together, moment by moment?