Ryōkan

Ryōkan, sometimes called Great Fool, was a Japanese Zen master often seen walking barefoot and unshaven in dusty robes. He was once accused of stealing from someone’s house by an angry mob that tied up a silent Ryōkan while they dug a hole. Before they tossed him in, a passerby who recognized Ryōkan shouted stop, stop! Ryōkan would never steal, the man told the mob. Let him go! The villagers untied him and asked why Ryōkan hadn’t said anything in his defense. You never would have believed me anyway, Ryōkan said as he waved goodbye. He once ignored a benefactor who wanted his prized calligraphy and instead spent the day writing on paper kites for some children. He liked to say he hated calligraphers’ calligraphy, poets’ poems, and cooks’ cooking. When a thief broke into his mountain hut, Ryōkan chased after him with a floor cushion the thief left behind. At 70, he met a young nun named Teishin. They wrote sweet love poems to one another, remaining close companions until Ryōkan died at 74 after a long bout of dysentery. Teishin was one of the few who preserved his poems.

One thousand peaks merge with frozen clouds;
ten thousand paths have no human trace.
Day by day just facing the wall,
at times I hear snow drift over the window.

*

I don’t regard my life
as insufficient.
Inside the brushwood gate
there is a moon;
there are flowers.

To the Flower Thief

You caught a glimpse of
plum blossoms,
like viewing a silver moon,
at a temple beyond
the ragged rocky slope.
You grew a wish to
pull out the entire tree
and bring it home.
A misty spring day,
you couldn’t keep it off your mind.
When evening came,
you left your small village full of ducks,
crossed the large field of
pampas grass,
and passed along
the bird-chirping shore
toward the rough mountain
filled with straight standing trees.
Quietly, you approached
your destination from a rocky path.
When you stood on the fence,
someone saw you and
yelled out “Thief!”
People in the temple
hit the bells,
noisy as a storm on a mountain,
like trying to push down bamboo
with leaves thick with dewdrops.
They called out and surrounded you,
leaving you no way to escape.
So you were called a flower thief.
Since then it’s been many years.
I wonder if you have been rubbing your long beard,
in your low reed-roof hut
on a small mountain,
in this blossom-viewing month.

Many years like new jewels,
have passed through my fingers.
Flower thief,
a thing of the past.

*

The grass hut is tightly closed, west of the stone forest.
In solitude a single pillow faces the hill.
Rising from sickness, I lean on a cane and stand by the river.
Countless peach petals float downstream.

*

If I had known
how sorrowful this world is,
I would have become
grass or a tree
in a deep mountain!

*

In the past,
we used to catch falling plum blossoms
in sake cups.
Now they vainly
fall to the ground.

Melon

I scoop and eat,
tear and eat,
break and eat,
then afterward,
I keep it near my mouth.