Poems and nuns and ancient times. And the curious statement about karma.
Worldly people who do not understand me
Call me by my worldly name of Old Zhou.
You invite me to a seven-day religious feast,
But the feast of meditation knows no end. --Huixu (431-499)
Our morning dooryard sit underway.
Yesterday morning, in torrential rain, I sat in green chair with raincoat and black umbrella in an act of odd continuation of some unexplainable new ritual of idiorrhythmic import, some karmic justification of some previous practice beyond memory.
Attention turns to poet nun.
It appears that there is only one extant nun’s poem that predates the Benxing poems. Interestingly, it also one of the earliest recorded Buddhist death-verses, preserved in the Biqiuni zhuan. In the entry for the nun Huixu 慧緒 (431–499), it is said that when she was sixty-nine she attended a vegetarian feast in her honor, and though she was in good health and spirits she noted that it was a fine occasion to say farewell.37 After brushing the following poem for her royal hostess, she took her leave and died a month later.
世人或不知 People in the world who don’t know
呼我作老周 call me “old Zhou!”
忽請作七日 Now I’m invited to a seven-day [feast],
禪齋不得休 but the feast of dhyāna never ends.38
Both Huixu’s poem and the Benxing poems sound the familiar theme of the evanescence of worldly pleasures. Huixu’s poem, written by a fifth-century nun whose life was punctuated by the effects of regime change, pokes fun at the random nature of worldly disrespect and worldly honor in a jaunty manner. The Benxing poems, written by or for a nun lamented by a bevy of peers with the resources to leave a lasting memorial, are elaborately morose. Let us take a closer look at the rich legacy of doom and gloom that supported the founding and maintenance of the Bao shan site.
Eschatological pessimism was part of the spirit of the Bao shan founder Lingyu’s sixth-century era. During Lingyu’s lifetime there were intermittent civil wars following the break-up of the Northern Wei, the Buddhist persecution (574–577) by Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou, the spectacular Buddhist efflorescence under the Northern Qi, and the wars preceding reunification under the Sui. Lingyu’s Dilun (TenStages) exegetical tradition was centered in the capital of Ye during the short-lived Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties, where there was widespread belief that the power of the teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha were spent and the Dharma had entered its final stage (moshi 末世 or mofa 末法).39
(—from © T’ang Studies Society 2009
t’ang studies, No. 27, 2009, 40–65
The Literary Lives of Nuns: Poems
Inscribed on a Memorial Niche for the
by Wendi Adamek
Stanford Humanities Center, USA
Fifteen hundred and twenty six (1526) years ago, regime change and eschatological pessimism, and yet, and yet, the positing of meditation (dhyāna) as balm and antidote.
In addition, on page 46, this:
In Buddhism, the female body is considered to be the karmic result of past evil deeds manifesting in the particular hardships women endure, namely, leaving her own family to be married, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and the obligation to wait on a man.12 Sengshun’s extreme practices could be understood in this context; women practitioners were assumed to have more karmic residue to clean up, and therefore they had to work twice as hard.13 Though the vocations of all the women memorialized at Lanfeng shan are likely to have been viewed in this light by themselves as well as others, in the other memorials we see different facets of practice emerge. (ibid)
This mythological and morphological observation is intriguing.
As is the historical dance done with real and phantasmic sisters who’ve
crisscrossed my life and held my affection and love.
All the invitations, demurrals, and wind-hovering winging along
funnels of lift and turns bringing me there then and here now.
Who are we?
Really?
