Scripture Of The Zen Poem by gershon hepner

The universe is scripture of the Zen,
and while our inner feelings come and go,
its feelings form an archipelago
where on an island prison live most men.
The scripture, when it’s read, helps to release
the feelings which, confined, lead to confusion,
but once they’re understood help to increase
the sense that life is more than an illusion

The scripture of the universe does not
require any priests or temples, and
interpretation of its poetry and plot
is what Zen masters hope we’ll understand
at every moment of our lives. It changes
according to the moment and the season,
sometimes remote as Himalayan ranges,
sometimes approachable with rhyme and reason.

With this scripture we can reach the realm
where thoughts that are exposed are safely bared,
but not allowed by us to overwhelm
the universe that we have always shared
with all the living creatures and the plants
that God created long before the day
that He created Man, whose hierophants
believe that only they know how to pray.

Inspired by an article by Pico Iyer in the NYR, September 25,2008, which will be published as a preface to a new edition of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, in which he described his journey to the high Himalayan plateaus in what turned out to be a futile quest for the snow leopard, climbing, as Iyer points out, in “a realm of allegory” as he returned “to something bare and essential behind or beneath the realm of thoughts”:

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with ‘mysticism, ’ far less the occult.” Nor does it have any time for moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose upon the world, obscuring it from our view. It insists that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been, or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real, what lies beyond our ideas (and they are only ideas) of good and bad. “The Universe is the scripture of Zen, ” as Matthiessen puts it, and the discipline initiates its practitioners in the clear, unambiguous realization that what is, is; the world (enlightenment, happiness) is just that lammergeyer, or bearded vulture, in the sky, this piece of dung, that churning river, all of which have life and blood as our perceptions of them do not….

Early on in the narrative, Matthiessen writes how rain “comes and goes.” This stands for the changeable condition of elements in the high mountains; everything is ephemeral. Yet you also notice, if you’re paying attention, that the phrase itself keeps coming and going through the book and, a little later, “tears and laughter come and go.” It hardly matters that “coming and going” is almost the first principle of Zen, the phrase you find in every Zen master’s haiku; the point is that the words themselves tell you not to take the mood too seriously, “I don’t trust my inner feelings, ” as Leonard Cohen writes in a latte song, having lived as a Zen monk on a lonely mountain, “inner feelings come and go.”


9/21/08