First Days of Spring—the Sky

 

First Days of Spring—the Sky

 by  Ryōkan

1758–1831

 Translated by Stephen Mitchell

First Days of Spring—the Sky

First Days of Spring—the Sky

First days of Spring—the sky

is bright blue, the sun huge and warm.

Everything’s turning green.

Carrying my monk’s bowl, I walk to the village

to beg for my daily meal.

The children spot me at the temple gate

and happily crowd around,

dragging on my arms till I stop.

I put my bowl on a white rock,

hang my bag on a branch.

First we braid grasses and play tug-of-war,

then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball

in the air:

I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.

Time is forgotten, the hours fly.

People passing by point at me and laugh:

“Why are you acting like such a fool?”

I nod my head and don’t answer.

I could say something, but why?

Do you want to know what’s in my heart?

From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

A poet-priest of the late Edo period, Ryokan (1758-1831) was the most important Japanese poet of his age. His poetry and his character belong to the tradition of the great Zen eccentrics of China and Japan. His reclusive life and celebration of nature and the natural life also bring to mind his younger American contemporary, Thoreau. Ryokan's poetry is that of the mature Zen master, its deceptive simplicity revealing an art that surpasses artifice. Although Ryokan was born in eighteenth-century Japan, his extraordinary poems capture n a few luminous phrases both the beauty and the pathos of human life, reaching far beyond time and place to touch the springs of humanity.

When Ryōkan,on his daily rounds of alms gathering, is hijacked by the village children, he happily puts aside his begging bowl and joins in their singsongs and kickball. And when his behavior arouses the scorn of more practical-minded adults, Ryōkan asserts the deep power and absolute rightness of his joy: “From the beginning of time: just this! just this!” He does not bother replying to the people who ridicule him, but he does tell us where joy can be found: in the present moment. Indeed, Ryōkan’s “just this!” is Zen in a nutshell—just this moment, nothing added, pure consciousness stripped clean of all our self-centered stories and desires. The people who pass by are caught up in reaction, judgment, aversion, just as we all are. But Ryōkan does not judge them. The poem wonderfully dramatizes two ways of being— one that is childlike, spontaneous, open to sudden delight; the other rigid, reactive, always with better things to do than play with children or act like a fool.

The truth of impermanence, as Ryōkan says, is “a timeless truth.” It is not historically or culturally conditioned. It is not an idea but a process, observable anywhere at any time. Buddhist poets of ancient China and Japan have been more finely attuned to that truth, as exemplified in any Hiakus.