Yuanwu

Birth is the emergence of undivided activity. 
Death is the emergence of undivided activity. 
Filling up the great empty sky,
straightforward mind is always bits and pieces.

Life fully manifests its function
And death fully manifests its function as well,
All within the limits of Great Unbounded Space,
For they are both the moment-by-moment manifestations 
of a sincere heart.

All poetry is subject to the vagaries of translation. I came across this poem in the Shobogenzo, and wondered about an alternative translation for the last line. These are the Kaz Tanahashi and Shasta Abbey translations respectively.


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s