THE WAY OF THE WAY — American Zen Association

Richard Collins

Komorebi (木漏れ日): Sunshine filtering through trees

Just over a year ago I attended my elder brother’s funeral on the Oregon coast. A few days later my wife and I took an early-morning hike down a steep cleft in the rocks just off the coast highway. At the bottom of the trail the Pacific Ocean tirelessly batters the stone palisades of the cove aptly called Devil’s Churn. On the way back, I glanced up to see the sun rising over the ridge, tangled in a tall pine which scattered its cold white rays like the spread fingers of a searchlight.

Moments like this don’t come that often, and being lucky enough to capture them in a photograph or a poem even more infrequently, and yet they are all around us always. On the way up the steep path we sometimes need only look up.

The document of that moment serves as the cover of the new Willows Wept Review (Issue 34, Fall 2024) https://willowswept.com/. This image is reinforced by two poems that open the issue.

“A Grave Overlooking Kissing Rock, Oregon” evokes the graveyard where my mother and now my brother are buried, my father’s ashes having been scattered to the wind and waves nearby, three hours down the coast from Devil’s Churn.

The other poem, “The Samadhi of Words,” opens the issue of the magazine. It addresses a question that has long bothered poet-practitioners: the tension (not to say the contradiction) between Zen practice (as a practice of nonattachment to the things of this world, a practice that does not rely on the slipperiness of words) and the practice of poetry (which is an invocation and celebration of the things of this world in words).

This poem, like many that I’ve written in the past year and a half or so, I think of as being “in conversation with” some of the Chinese poets from the Tang and Song dynasties. As I put it in these opening lines from “Formless Merit,” (published in Alien Buddha Zine 61, April 2024):

Here on the mountain, we might not be closer to God

But we are closer to the ancient Chinese poets

Who chose to be closer to nature and themselves.

“The Samadhi of Words” is a response to Bai Juyi’s lament that he can never quite reach the state of peace that comes from nonattachment because he is still attached to poetry. But if samadhi (deep concentration during meditation, or absorption in the activity of the present moment) can be attained through absorption in the penetrating power of words (and we are often told in the literature of Zen that words can certainly spark satori) then poetry itself is a meditative practice, no less a discipline of enlightenment than the arts of archery and flower arranging.

“The Samadhi of Words” begins with a reference to Bai Juyi’s constant longing to deepen his imperturbable Zen practice by achieving the goal of nonattachment. One attachment was his love for his daughter, Golden Bells, whom he immortalizes in two of his most famous poems. In the first, “Golden Bells,” he laments his sentimental attachment to his young daughter because it detracts from his concentration and wholehearted dedication to Zen meditation, or at least puts it off until she is old enough to be married off. But, as it turns out, she does not live that long.

In “Remembering Golden Bells,” he tells of her early death, agonizing over his earlier resentment of her, and realizing that her death, far from freeing him from his distracting love for her, grips him even more firmly through his grief, not to mention his guilt for blaming her for his postponement of his “retirement.”

How to deal with his grief? He writes poems, of course, because poetry is the last attachment. Through poetry he was able to describe the joys and sorrows of attachment, whether it is attachment to a lisping infant or to the whispers of nature. Try as he might to kick the habit of poetry, the urge to scratch the itch of poetry is too much for him when he is moved by nature.

Bai Juyi used to beat himself up

for not being able to rid himself

of poetry, the last attachment.*

The asterisk refers to this poem by Bai Juyi, which I have somewhat freely interpreted:

After deep study of the empty dharma

All life’s flora has fallen away

All but the demon poetry

A glimpse of wind or moon, and, ugh, I’m at it again.

But I ask Bai Juyi to remember that if samadhi is absorption in the dharma gate of the present moment, then the poetry that comes of a deep appreciation of nature (or of the love of a daughter, for that matter) is just as valid an experience as any in our daily life, for it is our daily life that is the field of our Zen practice. As Kodo Sawaki said, echoing Dogen, “Delusion itself is satori.” Our very (flawed) life is itself the steep path of our enlightenment. Realizing (or actualizing) this is the way of the Way, like sunshine filtering through trees.

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[Thanks to Margaret Waring for leading me to this wonderful Japanese word, Komorebi (木漏れ日), with a discussion of the word at this link https://www.awatrees.com/2017/02/16/komorebi-sunshine-through-trees/#:~:text=Komorebi%20(%E6%9C%A8%E6%BC%8F%E3%82%8C%E6%97%A5)%3A%20Sunshine%20filtering%20through%20the%20trees.&text=There%20is%20a%20Japanese%20term,among%20trees%20will%20have%20enjoyed .]