One Time, One Meeting

“Glory be to God,” wrote the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, “for dappled things. / For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow.”

An archaic form of “brindled,”“brinded” means “streaked” or “having patches of a darker hue.” Couple-colored skies are at once dark and light.  Other dappled things, as seen by Hopkins, include “finches’ wings,” “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,” and “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.” All are parts of the interdependent body of reality, and all are included in Hopkins’s vision of “pied beauty.” (1)

Zen teachings, ancient and modern, accord with Hopkins’s vision. The Heart Sutra declares that in sunyata, the absolute dimension, “nothing is defiled, nothing is pure.” “Defiled” and “pure” are dualistic concepts, projected by the human mind upon undifferentiated reality. Seng-ts’an’s Faith-Mind Sutra elaborates  the point, cautioning the reader against the delusions attendant to dualistic thinking. “It is due to our grasping and rejecting,” writes Seng-ts’an, “that we do not know the true nature of things.” Attached to our preferences, our liking and disliking, we “remain in a dualistic state.” However, if we can free ourselves of our attachment to “refined” and “vulgar” and other comparative concepts, we can see “the ten thousand things” just as they are. We can recognize that they are “of a single essence,” and we can “walk in harmony with the nature of things, [our] own fundamental nature,” freely and undisturbed. (2)

The non-dualistic outlook articulated by Seng-ts’an may also be found in the literature of Zen, particularly its poetry. The wandering poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), best known for his idyllic haiku, “The old pond– / frog jumps in / sound of water,” describes, in a less decorous haiku, “a fishy smell– / perch  guts / in the water weeds.” In yet another, he records the experience of “fleas, lice, / a horse peeing / near [his] pillow.”(3) And Gary Snyder (b.1930), a Zen practitioner and committed environmentalist, describes an “eight-petaled yellow ‘Shell’” sign and a “blue-and-white ‘Mobil’ with a big red ‘O’ // growing in the asphalt riparian zone / by the soft roar of the flow / of Interstate 5.” (4) Whatever his political views, Snyder does not condemn these emblems of corporate America. On the contrary, in Snyder’s vision, as in Hopkins’s and Basho’s, pleasant and unpleasant, refined and ugly phenomena are parts of the great, indivisible body of reality. All are worthy of regard.

So, too, are the brindled skies of our inner lives, where the “ten thousand sorrows”  consort with the “ten thousand joys.” Should we venture to look inward, we might well discover the counterparts of fish guts and horse piss, fleas and lice in our psyches. And if we are meditative practitioners, we might also discover traces of what the Tibetan master Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism,” by which he meant pride in spiritual achievement. Unlike Vipassana (“insight”) meditation, Zen practice does not encourage inspection of the emotional subtexts of our thoughts, such as might occur in psychoanalysis, but it does encourage an open, non-judgmental awareness of the motley images that cross our minds. And ultimately, the aim of the practice is not only awareness of changing thoughts and images but also contact with “original mind,” the timeless ground of being, from which those thoughts and images have sprung.

March, it might be said, is the month of dappled things. Patches of snow coexist with patches of grass, gray slush with crocuses and snowdrops. Looking out on that piebald landscape, we can wish impatiently for April and an end to winter. Or, as Hopkins did, we can appreciate the streaks of darkness and light, while also intuiting the underlying whole. Before our eyes is the changing relative world, where things are, in Hopkins’s phrase, “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” Beyond our eyes is absolute reality, the beginningless ground of being, whose beauty, in Hopkins’s words, is “past change.”

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(1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty.” See http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html.

(2) Seng-ts’an, “Verses on the Faith-Mind,” tr. Richard B. Clarke.  See http://www.mendosa.com/way.html.

(3) The Essential Haiku, ed. Robert Hass (Ecco 1994), 35, 39

(4) Gary Snyder, “In the Santa Clarita Valley,” Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker and Hoard 2004), 67.