hermit's thatch

The woodpecker that drills futilely at the metal gutters every morning is not adapting to the amount of sunlight at 6:50. Presumably the same bird, it has become as reliable as temple or church bells. Cloudiness or the change in the sunrise does not affect it. At 6:50 the woodpecker alerts the world to its presence and to the time of day – not aware that he has yet to break his fast drilling there.

The Western tendency is to interpret the idea of “learning from nature” as something Darwinian, a notion from Spenser or Hobbes suggesting competition and violence. Nature is seen as “red in tooth and claw,” subject to the principle of “survival of the fittest.”

This is all a projection of Western thinkers ascribing motives to Nature. But understood in a different way — influenced by Eastern thought — Nature is that non-sentient if not inanimate, set of features we experience as mysterious, self-sufficient, reflecting the infinite wisdom of the universe, and from which an unagitated person can “learn”: the sky and stars, the course of water, the lofty and silent trees, the morning glory.

The rain is perfect: steady, sometimes strong, but constant, throughout several days and evenings. I turn off music — any music — in order to listen to the gentle patter of rain, especially at night. The ancient symbol for purification is still fresh, perennial, despite the layers of cultural diversions. The rain pours on the trees, birds, flowers, the man-made objects. One day, caught in the rain while insisting on finishing a garden trim, I want to bolt into the indoors, but, already soaked, I linger, and let the rain wash through me. …

Mahavira, the Jain sage, expressed a truly benign view of looking at trees — and, by extension, all living things: When you see trees in parks, on hills, in the woods, do not say these trees are fit for palaces, gates, houses (which is what the sinful say); rather, say, these trees are tall, many-branched, noble, magnificent (which is what the holy say).

Is that a Painted Lady in the garden? A butterfly, I mean. My field guide is vague. Are the stripes black or brown, close to the wing edge or not, is the orange too light or is it yellow, is there a back tip? I look up to check. Too late. The butterfly has floated away.

Why is it that when I read the original commentators like Bodhidharma or Hui-neng or Dogen or even the poets I understand Buddhism, but when I read modern Western commentators (Steven Batchelor comes to mind), I don’t. The question is rhetorical, of course. There is more Nietzsche and Sartre in the Westerners than Buddha. They seem to write in a late forties-early fifties fog, an imperialist nausea. They are not interested in the perennial, or in whatever smacks of spirituality, being in permanent revolt against culture.

Detachment as a spiritual or philosophical state is dependent upon one’s station, what could be called an “existential context.” The ancient Chinese recluse, typically the educated official renouncing the court, was every bit attached to wife and children, with whom he entered reclusion on some distant and obscure village farm. What about the warning of the desert father about getting too attached to one’s hermit hut? Or is detachment limited only to mystics, more, to sadhus?

Emily Dickinson, the reclusive American poet, wrote that “no verse in the Bible has frightened me so much from a child as ‘from them that hath not shall be taken even that he hath.'” Is there recourse, then, even for one who is completely “detached”?

The bears returned from “the north” yesterday. They spent a while, the three cubs climbing a pine tree to an enormous height (50, 60 feet?), while mother fed blissfully. They headed south again, perhaps past their old place. We are happy to see them.

I’ve been reading a lot of Thomas Merton lately, and came across his poem “Elegy for the Monastery Barn.” I guess I was attracted to the fire event, so recent in our own experience. It’s an early poem for Merton, reflecting a certain sang-froid, seeing the barn as a vain woman adorning herself for 50 years only to perish. “Who knew her solitude?/who heard the peace downstairs/while flames ran whispering among the rafters?” And the last line is strange: ” … the brilliant walls are holy/In their first-last hour’s joy.” Perhaps the liberation of death and the consciousness of that moment is a first yet last hour’s joy. I am immediately reminded not of burning barns but of Hindu cremation. But the poem is a human projection, after all, on a poor, inanimate object, contrived but useful, and therefore deserving of pity. Just as, perhaps, we are poor, animate objects, contrived by God but useful to him, and therefore deserving pity…

I looked up the little Zen poem about the burned barn and the moon. It is by Masahide: “Barn’s burned / now I can see the moon.” Well, forest’s burned, now I can see … what? The vanity of ambition and the impermanence of material things. Wouldn’t make much as a poem, but one must reach for the ultimate sense of events. How many years for a forest to come about, how short a moment for nature to take it back, despite our pleas that she has created something beautiful and that she should leave it. Kai, the destroyer …