Month: April 2021

The transition between winter and spring is especially erratic in a northern climate and elevation. One day the temperature reaches sixty degrees F. with a brilliant, cheerful sun. Surely spring has arrived!

The last of the snow melts. The timorous appearance of green in the garden emerges, from perennial chives and thyme, to the clueless garlic blinking through the straw and looking a blanched yellow from the lack of sunlight. After moving the straw, the garlic, too, is a vigorous green the next day.

But a few days later, several inches of snow fall. Dark clouds reign. A distinct chill returns, as do the additional layers of garments just put away for the arrival of spring. But the plants are hardy, patiently waiting as the snow quickly melts in the next day’s moderation, and the garden’s spots of bright green persist, a sign of resilience awaiting true spring.

One spot is, perhaps, not so fortunate. Down the road, concealed behind clumps of trees, a vernal pond has formed, arisen by recent rains and melted snow. Wood frogs and spring peepers have discovered the pool and vocalize loudly. Wood frogs hold their fascinatiopn — they survive the winter by allowing their bodies to freeze! Less dramatically, peepers join the wood frogs in raucous noise-making, celebrating reproduction, and survival until summer, or whenever the pool dries up. Another cold, dark day comes. The pool is silent. Are its denizens still alive? Who can know, until next spring, perhaps.

T. S. Eliot famously wrote, in The Wasteland, that:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Lilacs appear in the hint of warmth that is the transition to spring, but the unexpected return of snow and cold cruelly strikes down their effort. Or is this not the way it always is, only the foolish or the hardy braving the possibility of the cold returning, of the spring wavering in its intent, too tentative to emerge without fear. What psychological type best survives: the extrovert venturing into the world with the possibility of getting struck down, or the introvert watching critically and skeptically, waiting not for one sign or two but for an abundance that will confirm confidence in the world?

Or can the object of our venturing and watching ever be truly understood, ever be fathomed enough to discern a path, a way, a reliable truth?

The Japanese hermit-monk Ryokan (1758-1831) is a favorite figure in Zen circles as a poet and monk — unexpectedly he is a favorite figure among Japanese schoolchildren. As a hermit, Ryokan regularly played with village children when he came to town to beg alms. Ryokan had stitched several balls of cotton for various games, enthralling the kids and often taking up much of a summer day, the absent-minded Ryokan occasionally forgetting to make his round of alms until late afternoon.

This generous gesture toward innocent children characterized all of Ryokan’s thinking. Someone called him a fool–it was his older brother–but Ryokan embraced the label, himself adding the label of dunce as well. He was certainly forgetful, as many anecdotes show: he would go off on an errand and get distracted by flowers or a vista, and forget his purpose. Once he left a guest in his hut to go off to get something from a neighbor and hours later was found by his guest gazing at the moon.

Ryokan was sentimental about birds, flowers, insects, trees, even his begging bowl. His poems show him teary about old friends not visiting, old friends passed, the lonely sounds of animals in the mountains,the drip of rain at his window reminding him of youth, or when he measures the passing years as each season changes. All of these sentiments he committed to poems, regularly taking up brush and paper when prompted by rain, snow, darkness, cold, memory, cheer, or any other provocation.

His eremitism is that of Stonehouse and Hanshan — mentioning that he has the poems of the latter. This eremitism is a pure and simple Zen. Ryokan studied in a monastery and knows the sutras, for example, but he seldom invokes them. He conjures no doctrines or particular points of view. He only takes to scrupulous sitting meditation — plus the right attitude or frame of mind. He quietly dismisses all worldliness, the red dust of society’s commerce and interactions, and enters the stream of the Way. Ryokan acutely feels his solitude, his outright loneliness at times, and is more open about these sentiments than most hermits, but he would not have life any other way because where he is this way represents the totality of this moment, of the season, of the vista from his window, the necessity of the present, undeciphered, unfathomed, that which must be embraced in quietude, even resignation.

A death poem could be Ryokan’s purest sentiment, a brilliant summary in one poem — except that Ryokan did not intend this poem to be a death poem, just another poem:

What will be my legacy?
Flowers in spring,
the cuckoo in summer,
the crimson leaves of autumn.

Ryokan was sensitive to the significance of weather patterns, the shifts from summer to autumn, the shifts from autumn to winter, the return of spring. He interpreted them as a poet, and lived them as a solitary. But he applied Zen insight to everything, and is remembered for his expression of mushin, of “no-mind,” which is exactly how he lived. For Ryokan everyone should live going about with kindness toward others in a state of no-mind thus entering the Way.

Another notable theme, not contrived by Ryokan but certainly observable to his reader, is his profound sense of mujo, impermanence. As mentioned, Ryokan identified himself completely with the Way, but in what does that consist? It is to identify the patterns of the seasons that in turn reveal the cycles of reality, necessity, impermanence and of letting go. Ryokan did not devise a life-style to pursue the Way, only to sit and observe, to take in the lessons, and to accept this process as enlightenment itself.

We do well to do likewise … plus, we have his poetry.