The American writer Thoreau and the Japanese poet Ryokan were quiet and deliberate men who taught outside of any school. Although neither sought disciples, they became timeless mentors for all who seek the authentic life.
Briefly contemporaries, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Taigu Ryokan (1758-1831) each knew well the truth that their own lives were their best “practice” and most essential teaching. “I, on my side, require of every writer, first and last, a simple and sincere account of his life,” asserts Thoreau at the start of Walden. Ryokan advises in his Kanshi poems: “Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?/ Look for the delusion and truth in the bottom of your own hearts.”
We recall that Henry David Thoreau was born “…in a most estimable place, and in a nick of time,” in Concord, Massachusetts, and planted into a New England community of fertile hearts and minds. While his strong-minded mother, Cynthia, agitated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, his quiet father, John, kept the family afloat through his pencil-making business.
In his writing we hear echoes of Thoreau’s deep native grounds and his strong sense of place in the streets and deep meadows of Concord, and along the edge of Walden Pond and its woods. His footsteps also led him on frequent forays to Cape Cod and Mount Monadnock, as far as Maine and Minnesota, and even to urban New York City and Staten Island.
Ryokan did his walking on his begging rounds and around Mount Kugami, near his native town of Izumuzaki. Izumuzaki was, like Concord, a community for artists and writers, and his father was a scholar of Japanese literature and a renowned haiku poet, as well as the town’s ineffectual mayor.
In his youth, Ryokan trained under a Confucian scholar and poet and began the study of Chinese literature in the original. At sixteen, he surprised everyone by taking up the study of Soto Zen and at seventeen, took his robes and the name Ryokan—“Candle in the Wind.”
By the time Ryokan received approval as a realized Zen priest, he had become outraged at the corruption of practice by vain and greedy Soto priests within the temples, much as Thoreau had with the Unitarians. He abandoned his lineage, refused to take pupils, and sought a private pilgrimage among the common people around Mount Kugami. For Thoreau, disillusion meant abandoning teaching and moving on to Walden Pond, where he could make his own spiritual path.
We know that Thoreau went to the woods for several related reasons, chief of which was to mourn the death of his brother John, and to refresh his vision and sense his grounding in nature. Ryokan sought his own path of Buddhist realization in the everyday life of begging rounds and tasks in the woods.
Beyond their daily meditations in nature, each read deeply the works of the classics. For Thoreau, it was the works of naturalists and fellow Romantics, the classic writings of Greeks and Latins, which he read in the originals, and the earliest translations of texts from the Far East, which he borrowed from his neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Ryokan it was the Taoist writings of the Chang-Tzu, the Buddhist teachings of Dogen Zenji, and the earlier Chinese T’ang poets, which he studied in Chinese. We know that both men studied Confucius.
Significantly, each kept journals as a record their realizations, which were distilled in their writings as informal teachings. Ryokan’s Kanshi poems in Chinese are best seen as an undated journal of poems that correspond to his life’s development, much as Thoreau saw his journals as publishable records of an authentic life. Fundamentally both men sought to live in the moment and record in their writings the relationship between everyday life and enlightenment. Neither achieved fame in his day, yet both have become popular mentors of an authentic life stressing simplicity, trust, humility and finding truth in the details. These two great teachers and writers reveal how close American Transcendentalism was to Buddhism, and the truth that all pretense must be dropped in order to truly awaken.
—Larry Smith
My hut lies in the midst of a dense woods.
Every year the spring ivy grows longer.
No news of men’s affairs;
only the happy songs of the woodcutter.
When the sun comes up, I mend my robes.
When the moon comes out, I read Buddhist poems.
All that I have to report is this:
To arrive at the true way,
stop chasing so many things.
—Ryokan, Kanshi #24
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and limp the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
—Thoreau, Walden
Now in August a cool breeze arrives.
Wild geese head south across the waters.
Like them I wander, a flask in hand,
down green and hilly roads, full of joy.
If I meet a priest, I stop to join him.
If I meet another wanderer, I offer my company.
With what can I compare this life—
weeds floating on water, blown by a gentle breeze.
—Kanshi #70
Time is but the stream I go a fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always regretted that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
—Walden
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms….
—Walden
This spring night, the moon shines through a silver haze,
as we walk along, hand in hand, at our own pace.
Our slightest whisper breaks the silence—
the ducks fly up, beating their delicate wings.
—Kanshi #167
To Kera Shukumon
Who so kindly sent me a parcel of potatoes and pears this second day of December
From walking this hillside, searching for firewood,
I return home at sunset, to find upon my window shelf
a bag of potatoes and pears all packed in soft grass.
Attached is a note with just your name.
Living in these hills, I struggle to feed myself,
especially in winter with only turnips to eat.
And so quickly I boil the potatoes with bean paste.
It runs down my throat like a flood of honey.
After my third helping I find relief,
lacking only wine and my good friend.
Later I store the leftovers in a cupboard „
and take a walk to resolve a problem.
The day of the Buddha’s Enlightenment lays before me,
and I have no gift to honor him at my altar.
My Buddhist neighbors have nothing,
and I cannot borrow again from the other temple.
No, we cannot afford even a basketful.
But then, I remember—your gift, old friend,
to honor our Western sage, the Buddha.
How can I do such a thing, you ask.
Well, the answer is simple: serve the pears with tea;
the potatoes must be boiled.
—Kanshi #150
Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to cards and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but they sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
—Walden, “Baker Farm” section
Delusion and enlightenment sustain each other.
Evident causes and secret reasons merge as one.
From morning to dusk I read my wordless text;
Until dawn I give myself to thoughtless meditation.
Spring warblers whistle to me from wind swept willows.
Dogs bark to me from a moonlit village.
No laws define this feeling surging through me.
How can I bequeath a heart so overwhelmed?
—Kanshi #115
Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer and rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quick-silver will never wear off, whose gliding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh….
—Walden, “The Ponds” section
Frozen snow covers the mountain tops near my house.
All paths to the valley are blocked to man.
Day after day I sit and face the wall of clay,
listen as the snowflakes brush my window.
—Kanshi #15
My most essential progress must be to me a state of absolute rest. So in geology we are nearest to discovering the true causes of the revolutions of the globe, when we allow them to consist with a quiescent state of the elements. We discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of the universe.
The pulsations are so long that in the interval is almost a stagnation of life. The first cause of the universe makes the least noise. Its pulse has beat but once—it is now beating. The greatest appreciable revolutions are the work of the light-footed air, the stealthy-paced water, and the subterranean fire. The wind makes the desert without a rustle.
—Thoreau, Journal; Oct. 19, 1840
Listen, my friend, to the cicadas singing in the trees
and the waterfalls in the mountain crag.
See how the night’s shower has washed the world clean.
Although I have nothing good on my kitchen table,
I offer you a window full of this fresh air.
—Kanshi #149
I sit in my boat on Walden—playing the flute this evening—and see the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me—the moon traveling over the ribbed bottom—and feel that nothing but the wildest imagination can conceive of the manner of life we are living. Nature is a wizzard. The Concord nights are stranger than the Arabian nights.
We not only want elbow room, but eye room in this grey air which shrouds all the fields. Sometimes my eyes see over the country road by day light to the tops of yonder birches on the hill—as at others by moonlight.
Heaven lies above because the air is deep.
—Thoreau, Journal; May 27, 1841
Ryokan’s Kanshi poems are translated by Smith and Mei Hui Huang. Their book of translations, Chinese Zen Poems: What Hold Has This Mountain, is published by Bottom Dog Press.
