Best Buddhism Poems
know thyself; is your life on the right track
aligned with, refined by, the principles of dharma
refrain, abstain, be kind and be calmer
meditate, seek meaning: find moral momentum
all actions count on this trip to nirvana
I looked at the horrible faces,
agnostic,
I look at the beautiful faces,
pristine,
I looked for a summer in the midst of winter,
and for repose in a gruelling duel with death and oblivion.
I looked for salvation,
looked outside the door for breath and bread.
I looked towards the sun,
and inwards,
and moved upwards and moved closer to the stars,
within the cyclone of your scars,
within the summer of your love.
I looked before overlooking anything,
and beyond hope,
and before tomorrow and happy as I was
I kissed life on the chicks and sat
next to a pumpkin
and read limericks.
I looked within your eyes and tried to find out if they were true,
and since they were true I looked further into your heart,
and without further I do I said can we be one?
I sat under the bodhi tree and said can I be a bodhisattva,
and I was open to love and open to desire,
and open to freedom of movement
and the amorous rain fell on my toes and it felt so free.
I looked into your eyes and within your heart and saw love,
and saw possibility and discovery and laughter.
For I had tasted your love so much,
and tasted your dreams in my sleep.
I looked within you, within me, and tried to find your peace,
our peace.
Beneath boulders and slab, weathered and worn,
consciousness is a whisper, a clarity undistracted.
A refraction of light and sound, repeated and reborn.
Conscious yet unaware, the timeless undertow subtracted.
For this is the Ground of Being.
All conscious particulate above and below are invisible,
we are seafaring sailors of soul and free choice.
Our various solutions and resolutions are indivisible.
In Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we rejoice.
For this is the Ground of Being.
All living and dying offer myriad paths of travail.
Beyond time and space, there is a fundamental permanence.
As creatures of longing, we hold each other in the gale.
Our love, our deepest well, illuminates our transcendence.
We are subatomic dust entangling faster than light.
Our collective dreams and memories sparkle and dazzle.
Bodhisattvas like Jesus Christ lift sufferers into sight.
But our nonlocal transpersonal synchronicity still baffles.
Episodic and spontaneous, our passions and thoughts,
this is our realm of flash and fury, our daily wakefulness.
Forces of energy and matter, the mystery hidden in quartz,
this is our realm of sand, soil, and sea, our lifelong earthiness.
Wavelength collapse turns possibility into actuality.
Deep consciousness transforms our physical world.
Spirituality grants us creative engagement with reality.
Our inner light reaches the same limits as the fabled.
For this is the God of Being.
In Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is an enlightened person who gives up his personal salvation in order to save all living beings through mercy.
To hear, to ignore the consequences,
to give up everything, to sever ties
with common sense, to go along with senses
which choose the bumpy roads to the skies,
to bare yourself, to strip away enigmas
of body, to expose private parts
of soul and, notwithstanding norms and stigmas,
to answer the last call for lonely hearts.
That’s bodhisattva’s way. It's pretty hard
to answer calls of every lonely heart.
31.10.2019
for contest LAST CALL FOR LONELY HEARTS – COLLABORATION
sponsored by Line Gauthier
Climbing up
The rugged slope
I follow a rope of mountain creek a map has never found
Cold rapid pulse
I hold from its succulent wrist
Cup my thirst
To the empty canteen of my hands
Sip to lips
My body vibrating against the loose blue canopy
Overhead
Heart pounding
Out of breath
I slip
From the beating sun
To a cloak of Alpine Spruce
Lean to the shaft of those feathered flung spears
Burrowed heads
From an ancient ambush
Stuck
Into the mountainside
I slump
In their mint shade
Arms wrapped best I can
Around 700 years of growth
The Buddhists say
Detach
But perhaps
They’d forgive my weakness
(And maybe this is why and when
Jesus was baptized and split from Buddhism as well)
For believing we are in a beauty of here and now
And oh God my God
My wife and children re-born
At the foot of these hills
Laboring along the same silvery path
Calling out like lost Caribou calves
I am here I am here
I echo back
As I tear like breeze
In the angled needles of these trees
I am certain all have souls
Living forever and ever and ever and ever.
The snow's drifting
my mind's drifting...
Five foot bamboo
now stands at two
under blizzard's remains
measuring maybe three.
Here in the bamboo garden,
bowed but unbowed
by Winter's weight,
the evergreen kisses
its own feet, the Earth
altar receives prostrations.
There's a Buddha in there
somewhere.
The snow, Oh-so pure
so white, so tailored to fit,
every nook, every fold
the entirety of entirety.
The snow, though white,
how soonafter tinged
by grime, and trodden black.
My mind, Oh-so sure
so right, so failured. Dimwit,
every nook, every fold
the entirety of entire me
(the entire me of entirety?)
There's a Buddha in there
somewhere.
Only a moment,
So quickly passing away:
Waves on the ocean.
Firing blanks,
i missed nothing.
‘Twas all for naught.
I
Alan Watts says we live forever
In children if we can bear
There is no joy in going on, ever
And ever as a dying tree or flower
II
He was a brilliant Brit, knew nirvana!
Died as American, in California
Barely making 59 years, once pastor
Presbyterian in Pennsylvania
III
I need to research why he quit
He was undoubtedly good at it
For faithfulness few scholars matched
His authenticity, universality. Unmatched
Continuation of stories about Sariputra
Once a jerk came to Sariputra and asked him:
- You say the same goal has different ways to reach: a good man follows the path of virtue; a yogi seeks solitude; a philosopher goes to the library and a believer - to the temple. I don’t believe, I can’t read, I hate loneliness, I’m a bad person, I have no goal. What is my path?
- Go away, - Sariputra said.
That's how the jerk got enlightened and found his way.
Our plane went down in the mountain snow, but I was alive
I walked on ice in the thin air, the only way to survive
Then on a ledge, I saw that light, a valley pure and green
With rivers rolling, flowers blooming, almost like a dream.
I stumbled down a narrow path to find a monastery gate
From probable death to verdant life, I seized my change of fate
An old monk gave a smile on an ageless face
He led me to gardens within gardens, a place to meditate.
I met the Lama, and he said, "It's good here, but here’s the deal
This place don't age, and folks don’t change, it’s a place for wounds to heal
But climb those mountains, break those walls, and boy, you’ll surely see
That out there time still moves, and freedom isn't free"
I stayed ten years in the gardens, a story never told
Then I met a woman on a path, such radiance to behold
I told her, "Darlin’, this ain’t home, it don’t change and there's no goal
Come with me, I know a place to make you whole."
"It's got Ponderosa Pine and mustangs run and eagles fly
My Dad is a rancher, Mom teaches under that big sky
I have so many friends there, if you come, you'll see
I wish now she hadn't listened, because freedom isn't free.
She took my hand, we climbed that wall, balanced on a ledge,
Between paradise and a snowy realm, we teetered on the edge
I knew we had to go, pulled her into time's flow
To a grounded planet where I hoped we both could grow.
The helicopter found us, landed safe on that frozen lake
She looked into the icy mirror, but the ice began to break
Her reflection showed a face grown old, I felt the sudden chill
Her movements became slower, but I was hoping still.
I reached out once more, but she died outside the door
She should have stayed in Shangri La, it shook me to the core.
I did make it home, but they've broken rules here too
It's not the same as it was, not grounded in what's true
Less room for us to grow, a lesson Dad taught me
You're fooled by utopia, then find that freedom isn't free,
There's a lost horizon somewhere and I sometimes feel the call.
Because we've long left Eden's garden, and we're in free-fall.
I sit under the trees
Later
My neighbor said
“I enjoyed watching you pray.”
“What do you mean?”
“You sat there so still
Head tilted up for a very long time.”
“I suppose so
But actually I was entranced
By the crowns of the Oaks sweeping the sky
And that Cooper’s Hawk nest along for the ride
Swaying basket beneath a parachute
“A Fledgling teetering on the edge
“Doesn’t fly at first
Thinks
Then falls head first
“Batting tree trunks
Talons raking the bark
Crushing the branches in a humiliating commotion
Leaves ripped away
“Tumbling upside down
Wings hoisted half way to the planet
Then like magic
The bird fastens
To something close to the harness of an orbit
“Latches upright to a branch
Shakes its head
Furrows its brow
Eyes narrow to stirrings on the green mezzanine
Below
“Just like that
A Hawk reincarnated by hunger.”
“But I saw your hands clasped.” She says.
“Instincts, I guess.”
The Buddha insists on the absence of ‘I'.
We banish the self if we ardently try.
I’ve done meditation
and hoped for salvation.
So who became Buddhist? The Buddha — not I.
Once Sariputra has paid a visit to the UN meeting.
- Social justice remains an elusive dream for poor people around the world, - the first speaker said.
- Besides economic efficiency, side effects, funding mechanisms and political feasibility that can be taken into account, - the second one underlined.
- To us, social justice is about the emancipation of men and women, - the third specified.
- Social justice for all Indonesian people is symbolized by the gold and white paddy and cotton plant, - the fourth speaker described it in a pretty metaphorical way.
- It is time to call world by its true name: social justice, - the fifth stated.
When the sixth one, a serious, bearded man, headed to the rostrum, Sariputra got bored with looking at them.
«There is neither dream, nor poor and reach, nor economics, nor side effects, nor efficiency and feasibility, nor emancipation, nor men and women, nor Indonesia, nor gold and white paddy, nor cotton, nor world, nor social justice», - Sariputra thought and, taking a yawn, went to the Maltsevsky market where, they say, a blind man was given a knitted shawl.
I'm woozy with the uncertainties of life.
I'm staggering back and forth,
slamming into one wall and then another.
I cling to a banister
wondering how it can be
that I'm even alive.
Bitter to be still living.
Grateful to have survived so long.