Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going —
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
Hi Friends,
There are many accounts of Zen Buddhist monks who predicted the timing of their own deaths and then faced their passing with absolute calm. In 1360, at the age of seventy-seven, Kozan Ichikyo is said to have written this poem on the morning of his death, laid down his brush, and died sitting upright. Just a few days before, he had called his pupils together, ordered them to bury him without ceremony, and forbade them to hold services in his memory. The pupils obeyed — in part; Ichikyo’s verse remembers him centuries later.
This translation comes from the anthology Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death compiled by Yoel Hoffmann, a professor of Eastern Philosophy and Literature at Tel-Aviv University and Kyoto University.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, I am sending out one poem per day for the duration of the month. To learn more about National Poetry Month, visit www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.
Best,
Ellen
Correction Note from the next day’s poem-a-day: Dear Friends, First off, I have a correction to the April 5 poem-a-day: It turns out that the current year is 2010, not 2261, and therefore Kozan Ichikyo’s 1360 verse has not been remembered “over 900 years later” — at least not yet. My apologies for the error; I switched monks on you at the last minute and failed to update that figure!