Mahesh Paudyal
When poet Krishna Prasai launched his first cycle of Zen poems, Sun-Showers, in 2011, the project had been hailed as ‘homecoming’ of Zen. The poet himself and the critics had their own justifications.
Zen, a phonetic variant of dhyan or meditation, understandably is rooted in ancient Hindu scriptures, though many mistakenly try to locate its roots in Buddhism. Dhyan, from which other phonetic variants of the term arrived, occurs in ancient Hindu scriptures including the Rigveda—understood to be the oldest written book in the history of the humankind—lays an entire ground for the development of dhyan both as a treatise as well as a method. In reality, the history of dhyan or dhyana lies in Sanskritic tradition, and disappears in the mist of history. As the methods for cosmic revelations, on which Zen poetry rests, is obviously equally old. It is this very cosmic revelation through dhyan, which can be approximately translated as ‘contemplation’ or ‘profound meditation’ where Zen poetry sees its roots. Dhi, the root from which the word dhyana springs up, occurs in the Vedas, and refers to imaginative vision, and is a metaphor for wisdom and poetic eloquence. There also is a parallel word nididhyasana, which combines dhyayi, upasana and bhavana, meaning contemplation, dwelling upon and expression of feelings respectively. This means, the entire poetic process is incapsulated in the word nidhidhyasana, which is used parallel with dhyana.
The Hindus have the oldest history of dhyana. To them, it is the way to feel the divinity that rests in every living and non-living entity in creation. It involves containment of worldly inclination and attachments, and concentration on the higher, cosmic force that reveals the unity of an individual soul with the Oversoul—the atma with the Paramatma. These understandings predate the birth of the Buddha, and are rooted in ancient Hindu scriptures. It passed down to Buddhist and Jainist traditions much later. It is undisputed that the Buddha pioneered specialized meditative practices like the Vipassana and the Preksha, but dhyana, as a whole, is rooted in the Hindu tradition. Much later, the Geeta, dated around the fourth century BCE has an entire treatise called Dhyana Yoga, a path to the attainment of God. The Mahabharata as well as parts of Patanjali’s Yogasutras have developed the idea to almost a full-fledge method of self-actualization. Though the dates of these two scriptures, Mahabharata and the Geeta occur quite late in the historical time line and marginally predate the time when the Buddha rose to fame, they however, inherited the idea from texts predating them, especially from the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Rigveda and The Kaushitaki Upanishad can be referred to for the earliest definitions and elaboration of meditative methods. “Manasa dhyanamityekabhooyam wai prana,” says Kaushitaki Upanishad (3.2), which means, “With mind, mediate on me (God) as being prana (the soul).” The idea has further elaborations in other Upanishads, and almost all of Hindu scriptures involve episodes and methods of dhyana. The Geeta builds is up as a methodology, with at least three dimensions to its successful execution: satya (truthfulness), ahimsa (non-violence) and aparigraha (non-attachments).
Patanjali’s Yogasutra, which presents an entire school of mediation, has passed down to our own days, and is becoming a global phenomenon today.
This ancient Hindu ways of meditation lie in the cosmic belief that the energy, that drives the entire living or non-living world, is the same as the one God possesses. The pinda, or the atomic constituent of beings is a part of the energy that drive brahmanda, or the universe. This idea is encapsulated in the phrases ‘yat pinde tat brahmande,’ which means, whatever is in the atom, also is the same in the cosmos. But, this cosmic connectively, to an ordinary human, becomes understandable only through dhyana or meditation. As the Hindus believe, dhyana, which encapsulate the mental process of an individual, bridges two other levels—dharana, the lower mental level in which an individual is regulated by personal opinions about life and the world, and the upper one, called Samadhi, which in fact is the highest order of dhyana, where an individual feels the obliteration of all gaps between the living soul and God. Dhyana, therefore entails ordering of the dharana, by stripping it off all worldly attachments and vices thereof, and honing it upward, towards Samadhi. It will therefore be wrong to approximately translate dhyana as concentration. It is more than that. It is a form of higher-order concentration that allows an escape from all sorts of worldly awareness and delivers and individual towards cosmic awareness. If concentration also allows a focus a worldly dimension of one’s existence, dhyana fully disowns the worldly hangover, and believes in complete transcendence for it, at least as long as one is in the process of dhyana, if not Samadhi.
The ancient Hindu civilization, through the employment of dhyana, was able to interpret the entire cosmos, much before science came to aid the human imagination. Dating as early as what today’s history calls the Iron Age, there were scholars like Bhrigu, who would explain planetary positions and predict solar and lunar eclipse. Dhyan allowed its practitioners to see past, present and future, and there are stories of sages like Markandeya, who is often described at trikaladarshi—the one who could see all three realms of time: past, present and future. Whenever gods, or even ordinary humans, needed power or blessings, they resorted to dhyana, and it always brought to them the blessings of the deities they invoked. The scientific side of the same is that, dhyana allowed them to stop the loss of energy through mundane thoughts and actions, and allows it to get reserved for use with maximum intensity, as and when required. This explains how one feels additional supply of power or energy after dhyana.
When Hindu methods of dhyana shrunk in its expanse in the south of the Himalayas for various reasons, its Buddhist counterpart, which developed much later, expanded northward and flourished. As history testifies, Buddhism that first evolved in the Nepalese soil and travelled abroad, becoming chan in the Chinese mainland and Zen in Japan and the Korean Peninsula. For reasons, Buddhism progressed more outside Nepal than inside, and Zen as a practical version of otherwise abstract and occult Buddhism, gained quick popularity in China and the Far East. Its fundamental nuance is that deep contemplations are gateway even to the common, domestic people, to arrive at sudden revelation of subtle realities of life—including those about mysteries of life and death. The creative part of Zen, therefore, consists of expressions that are laden with such epiphany, bringing to light such facts which are true about life, death and the world, but had not been, hitherto, revealed or expressed. It is meditational epiphany, coming home not through a rigorous process of penance or pursuit, but through a focused contemplation in-situ, that is, while working and staying very much in consonance with the domesticity of life. This approach frees Buddhism of its rigorous path to enlightenment through abstention, renunciation, non-attachment and penance; it allows commoners and householders—means, people of earthly dispositions—to have a gateway of their own to arrive at truth.
Poetry, by dint of its very nature, can immediately catch, document and project subtle revelations in verbal forms. Moreover, the very intimate rootedness of poetry in the philosophical rubric already gives it an advantage, because a reader of poetry is always, already in meditative preparedness, and can respond to the poet, no matter how occult, deep or complex he or she is. Poets have made Zen the content of their writing, and such poems, short and condensed, have gained a lot of popularity over the years as Zen poems.
The shortness of Zen poems should be explained on two grounds. First, since it springs from meditative silence, it does not call for a lot of verbal expressions. The pauses, gaps, elisions and absences are its presence; the absence of verbal gibberish is its power and magic. Such poems challenge the readers to discover fact between lines. It says what it does not overtly way. It suggests.
Secondly, no matter where it germinated, Zen grew in most in the Far East, especially in Japan, and understandably, Japan is a civilization of silence. One marvels at the crowd of people in Tokyo walking across Shibuya Crossing, the busiest traffic junction of the world, and yet, it is pervaded by dead silence. Many Japanese poetic forms stand on brevity of words. Their paintings are all but strokes and blankness; the empty canvas does more communication that the display of colors. Zen poetry, obviously, inherited this trait from its Japanese masters like Ikkyu (1394-1481), Basho (1644-1694), and Ryokan (1758-1831), and chose to be brief, confining itself to a couple of lines, and strikes at hard truths of life. This also becomes plain, when one reads poems by imminent poets like Ko Un and Ku Sang (Korea), Richard Wright and Lucien Stryk (America), Huyen Quang and Tran Quang Trieu from medieval Vietnam, Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckia (Ireland) and Reginald Horace Blyth (UK). We may cozily add some names to the list here from Nepal, the most pioneering one being Krishna Prasai, a poet of high repute.
Since truth, feelings, ideas, facts and realizations have no structure grammared by a set pattern, Zen poetry also chose to keep itself free of structural imperatives. There is no rule about line and length. The only rule is: stay brief; stay condensed.
Referring to Krishna Prasai’s as a Zen poet, mention should be made of his first collection Sun Showers, and the second Sun Offerings due for publication any time soon. The first collection was, in the claims of the poet himself, a ‘resurrection’ of Zen from its hibernated seeds. His allusion is to two historical facts: first, as Buddha was born in Nepal in a Hindu environment, he picked much of his meditative methods from Hindu roots, and much of the Buddhist treatises were written in the locations that presently fall within the territory of Nepal, dhyan, the primordial root of Zen, was born in the Hindu tradition, whose seat is Nepal. By that token, Nepal is the birthplace of Zen. Secondly, for several reasons, Zen in its Buddhist form, prospered more outside Nepal, though its sanatan (uninterrupted) form in the Hindu fabric continued to prosper in Nepal and its south. However, until the recent times, modern Nepali literature had no awareness of this generic variant of poetry called Zen poetry. Therefore, after its exodus or recession in the ancient time, Zen had made a comeback with Sun Showers, as no other Nepali poet before Mr. Prasai have records of writing anything that counts to Zen poetry. Sun Showers received an overwhelming response and almost at once established Krishna Prasai as the only Zen poet in Nepal. Though a few others have followed him, they are yet to come up with any collection termed exclusively as Zen. Therefore, he enjoys that unrivalled position.
Sun Showers was immediately translated into several languages including English, Korean, Sinhala, Bengali, Burmese, Assamese, German, Japanese, Filipino, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and so on. And now, Krishna Prasai is all set to launch his second collection, Sun Offerings.
Many poets are today writing along the line pioneered by Mr. Prasai. My own work Notes of Silent Times have several poems inspired by Zen. Poet and critic Ishwar Ballav discovered Zen-like traits in experimentalist poet Gopal Parajuli’s poems. Poets Manasagni, Shyam Rimal, Chhabi Rama Silwal, Ashim Sagar, Rachana Chakshu, Sharada Ghimire Bhaila, Rajendra Chapagain, Anil Khatiwada and Sharad Ritu are writing prolifically and exploring various dimension of Zen. Certain poems of Momila and Bhisma Upreti are laden with Zen-like realization.
Let’s peek into a poem each by all some of these poets:
A tree
Succumbing to the blow of innumerable strikes,
Never knew
The axe felling it had a handle
Made from one of its own branches.
(Krishna Prasai, Sun Offerings)
***
Without speaking a work
The snow departed
Having recited to me
An epic from inside the grant vacuity.
In reply
I had nothing but a mere scream!
(Mahesh Paudyal, “Mystery”, Notes of Silent Times)
***
A painter made a painting of the sun
And showing the same, yelled—
The picture is prettier than the sun.
Together with applause, he also received accolades and awards.
With the picture in one hand
And the trophies in the other
He reached home at dusk.
Lamps were lighted as soon as the sun was off the eyes.
(Manasagni, “Conceit”, thegorkhatimes)
***
On a rainy day
An old desire
Sleeps off, wrapped in a blanket of memories.
Do not drop from the eaves-gutter, please!
(Sharad Ritu, “On a Rainy Day” thegorkhatimes)
Dear river,
When each single day
You swallow the grief-conches of completeness
And bring home for me
A surge full of tasted berries of hope
From unknown sources
I feel you are Sabari and I your Ram
But when
Arraying all the tiny and false consolations of my near ones
I find myself searching ardently for you
On your banks
I feel
I am Sabari, and you, my Ram!
(Anil Khatiwada, “Waiting”, thegorkhatimes)
***
Since the number of Zen poets is growing fast, it can be safely said the endeavor is destined to become a movement in the near future. And yes, this shall be movement to revive Zen at its own birthplace, namely Nepal, after dormancy of many centuries.
There are reasons why Zen poetry becomes extremely pertinent in Nepal today. Poetry, as of today, has become centripetal all over the world. With whooping and all-encompassing tendencies like globalization sweeping across the world, almost everything from tangible merchandise products to intangible things like art and literature have become commodities for sale. Queering, eroticization, fetish advertisement and allurement have become approaches to invite market at home and sell things out. Who benefits from globalization is an issue of global discussion, but who is at risk is the numerically a small group, whose identity tenets have been marketed, whitewashed and tarnished to serve market interests. Therefore, the erstwhile tendency of universalization of almost everything in hand, including art, literature and culture, has become detrimental to smaller cultures. Leaving the universal at peace, cultures are, these days, turning more and more inward—towards the local, domestic, original and to a great extent aboriginal. Parameters are being redefined; global standards are being negated. Alternative parameters are being spun on the basis of local values. Viewed this way, art works, local in both form and content, are being brought to limelight to counter the overwhelming and generalizing tendency of globalization, which is detrimental to the small sovereignties of art, craft and intangible cultural heritage. Against such backgrounds, a movement towards rediscovering local forms and contents, foregrounding fresh, unused metaphors, resorting to cultural symbolism, and locating poetry in identity matrix has become the poetic norm of the day. It therefore is obvious that Krishna Prasai and other Nepali Zen poets pick Zen as a Nepali variant of poetry, and thus champions the movement of its re-domestication.
The re-domestication of Zen by Nepali poets through their Zen poems, therefore, becomes quite obvious and self-explanatory. Their poems resort to short, epigrammatic and philosophical poems, free in versification and quite dense in meaning. They explore various dimensions of life and the world, contemplating on the obvious, and discovering an extraordinary truth; rooting the verses in the personal, and making them a means of a universal message. This is what Zen does—it takes the personal as its point of departure, and comes up with a revelation that is universal in its import. Birth, death, life, virtues and vices, nature, love, patriotism, divinity, ethics, morality and politics are some of the domains around which these poems posit themselves.
[Critic Paudyal teaches at the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University.]