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Bit by bit life fades like a guttering lamp,
Passes on like a river that never rests.
This morning I face my lonely shadow
And before I know it tears stream down.
Watson’s eyes welled with tears as he recalled that gathering. Watson too had come to “sit” briefly in Japan and had “lingered” nearly forty years. Now he only rarely visited the States, and had visited mainland China only once. Although he had approached Tientai near Cold Mountain’s cave, he had never reached it.
I asked him to read that poem one more time, but he answered, “Maybe it’s too teary a note to end on.” Instead he recited the final quatrain of his own response to Cold Mountain:
Do you have the poems of Han-shan in your house?
They’re better for you than sutra-reading!
Write them out and paste them on a screen
where you can glance them over from time to time.
We laughed. “I do have the poems of Han-shan in my house,” I said, “and have glanced them over for thirty years, thanks to you.” “Take them along when you go on a picnic,” he joked. “I do!” I answered. “I gave my son his own copy of your Cold Mountain on a picnic. Now he loves Han-shan through me, as I do through you.” “He’s fun to play with,” Watson laughed.
After three hours that felt like three minutes, Mike finally unwound the microphone. I glanced at our cups of tea, cold and forgotten. Watson returned his treasured Han-shan to his travel bag and we left the hotel to stroll the grounds of nearby Zojoji Temple, Tokyo’s cathedral of ritual Buddhism.
Wandering the manicured temple grounds, Watson explained his own Buddhist practice, the much quieter discipline of the Rinzai school of Zen. His master would assign him a koan—a famously enigmatic question or assertion—which he had to puzzle out through meditation. Sometimes the master approved his response right away. Sometimes approval took days or even years. He liked that practice, filled with disciplined probing of the mysterious nature of language and thought, letting go of the rational order of the world. “Zen says if you are happy, be happy, if you are sad, be sad. But don’t hang on. Be where you are.”
In the cemetery behind the temple, Watson explained the Japanese ceremony of death. Families placed the ashes of family members at densely packed vertical grave markers, and ritually honored them by bringing water, flowers, and other beloved objects. “If he smoked cigarettes, they might leave a cigarette. It is too expensive for most families to be buried in Tokyo these days, so they go to cemeteries outside the city. There are also cemeteries for those without any relatives to care for them.” He looked up. “That is where I will go,” he said.
Watson declined our offer of lunch, and so, reluctantly, we left him at the Zojoji subway entrance. He waved good-bye and slowly disappeared down the steps, entering the mouth of the cave called Tokyo, his adopted home, his Cold Mountain.
THE ZOJOJI TEMPLE GATE—the original, constructed in 1613—is engraved with text translated on a nearby plaque: “Gate for getting delivered from earthly states of mind: greed, anger, and stupidity.” Burton Watson passed through that gate many years ago, I thought. Much stupidity remained ahead for me, and probably greed and anger too. But my visit with him felt like an important step to begin to shed the husk of this world, like the cicadas whose freshly minted bodies sang throughout the long Tokyo night.
Bashō said:
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die
(translated by Sam Hamill)
Sad at Watson’s departure, I felt a burst of happiness too. His vocation, translator, so often lay buried behind the original author’s more prominent name. Yet my life had been affected by his life’s work, and I had been able to tell him so. The voice ringing in my ears these thirty years, dissolving time and space, was his.
ENCOUNTER WITH THE ARCH-TRANSLATOR
He reads Cold Mountain’s poems slowly—
eyes swimming in the ocean of his father’s gaze.
His warm tones soar like a Pacific breeze
over two continents, three thousand years,
one timeless practice—sitting still, making poems.
He is loud as one hand clapping, awake as a slap in the face,
radiant as his original face, a bug escaped from a bowl,
tears wet as a river longing for its home in the sea.
From the bullet train to Kyoto we watched Tokyo’s suburban factories recede into groves of bamboo, islands of pine, hillsides speckled with dark tea bushes. A familiar snowcapped cone appeared in the distance, iconic Mount Fuji, inspiration for Japanese artists for millennia. Settling in, I pulled from my backpack Watson’s translation of poems by the Japanese Zen hermit monk Ryōkan (1758–1831), a fellow follower of Cold Mountain.
I read that Ryōkan began training for a life as a village headman, the first son expected to follow his father’s path. But he turned instead to a mountain hermitage to enter a life of meditation and poetry; no one knows why. I had an idea. An only son, like Ryōkan, I too was groomed from birth to follow the father’s path, in my case a family business, a staple in Green Bay, nearly seventy-five years old when I was born in 1944.
Yet, as for Ryōkan, that golden suit of clothes held out for me, lovingly and generously offered, never seemed to fit. I recall from a young age a sense of discomfort at family praise that felt unearned, undeserved. So my drift away from my family’s business expectations toward literature, although much slower than Ryōkan’s, and quite painful all around, now felt to me a similar, inevitable step. Ryōkan became a Buddhist monk, then a hermit; I, like Cold Mountain, a husband and father. But in the end, we both found the path toward the mysterious energies of poetry.
Ryōkan took little with him to his mountain retreat, but he did bring his volume of his beloved Kanzan, Cold Mountain.
RYŌKAN NO. 35
Done with a long day’s begging,
I head home, close the wicker door,
in the stove burn branches with the leaves still on them,
quietly reading Cold Mountain poems.
West wind blasts the night rain,
gust on gust drenching the thatch.
Now and then I stick out my legs, lie down—
what’s there to think about, what’s the worry?
I too read Cold Mountain poems after work, my fingertips reading and writing. I also worry—are my poems poems, or just another wayward enthusiasm? Ryōkan offered no comfort on this matter, mocking a “fine gentleman”