The Poetry of Awakening: An Anthology of Spiritual Chinese Poetry

By Joe Lamport

...An anthology of Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty, including poems from the Buddhist and Daoist traditions, that explore the experience of spiritual awakening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953236227

Book preview

The Poetry of Awakening

The Poetry of Awakening

An Anthology of Spiritual Chinese Poetry

Translated by

Joe Lamport

Fomite

All author proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to the Karuna Fund established by the Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM. Upaya is a Zen Buddhist practice and educational center dedicated to the development of the relationship between traditional Buddhism and compassionate engagement with the contemporary world. The Karuna Fund honors the practice of Roshi Joan Halifax, the founder of Upaya.

---

You can learn more about Upaya at the center’s website.

Logo of the Upaya Center

For Du Fu —

---

Only by reading you in Chinese did I discover the path to poetry

through direct struggle, gleaning feeling first,

before puzzling out each character’s meaning

I am the madman of Chu

Who sang for Confucius

And laughed at him too

All the while

In both my hands

A precious jade staff

Tightly I clasped

From The Song of Lu Mountain by Li Bai

Contents

Translator’s Preface

The Spiritual Heritage

Early Buddhist and Daoist Poetry

Hui Yuan

Xie Ling Yun

Master Fu Daishi

Chen Z’iang

The Chan Origin Story in Verse

Poems of the Literati

Zhang Jiu Ling

Yuan Jie

Li Bai

Wang Wei

Bai Juyi

Poems by Hermits, Monks and Chan Masters

Han Shan

Shide

Feng Gan

Mster Yongjia Xuanjue

Chan Master Hsiang-yen

Jiaoran

Layman Pang

Jia Dao

Qi Ji

Glossary

About the Author

Translator’s Preface

The 78 poems I have chosen to translate and bring together in this collection were written in China during the first millennium of the Common Era. They include poems by a diverse group of writers, many of them Buddhists of one stripe or another, others Daoists or fellow travelers of the Buddhist faith. But even among those who identified as practicing Buddhists, it may be misleading to suppose much commonality of faith: Buddhist spiritual beliefs and practices in China evolved considerably over the course of the centuries in which these poems were written. Some of the poets collected here were renowned and avowedly secular, while others lived as reclusive hermits, and still others took up orders and lived as members of a monastic community.

Diverse as this grouping of poets may be, and divergent as their life experiences and doctrinal beliefs were, the poems here represent a singular and quite remarkable poetic tradition, which I refer to as the poetry of awakening. The common aspiration was to express through poetry the nature of spiritual awakening, as they experienced it in their own lives. These are personal poems, deeply felt, which makes them accessible, even though they speak to us from a distant time and strange culture, and address the loftiest and most abstruse of themes.

At bottom, this tradition rests on an unresolvable paradox. The assumption (often explicitly stated) of these poets is that the experience of spiritual awakening is incapable of being expressed in words, no matter how artfully a poem may be crafted. The insights possessed by the awakened mind and heart simply fall beyond the capacity of language. Why write such poetry at all, then? The wonder of this tradition is the continued striving to give voice to the inexpressible. The tension wrapped up in this paradox confers to the poems’ spiritual depth and power.

Something else I find distinctive about this mode of living and writing is the fusion of poetry and spirituality into part of an integrated practice. At their best, these poems are not simply exercises of poetic imagination, nor are they merely descriptive of the poet’s spiritual life. They seem directly integrated into the process of spiritual exploration and experience. Poetry becomes the practice. These are not doctrinal poems even though they occasionally include explicit references to elements of Buddhist doctrine, such as the Three Realms* and the Five Aggregates*. It should not diminish your enjoyment of these poems if