Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

Confused and stumbling inside city walls
though time’s three regions are boundless,

life’s vagrant pleasures blinding the eye
though insight plumbs beginning and end,

we spend our youth awaiting tomorrow,
then watch twilight ruins of age close in.

Sudden as a lightning storm, this dreamed
sleight-of-hand scatters away in a flash:

even good fortune that never leaves you
can’t slow the steady vanishing of a life.

We imagined another Spirit-Vulture Peak,
another Jetavana of temples and gardens,

and now, cascades tumbling free at the hall,
we’ll sit gazing into all perfect emptiness,

and sunlit forests gracing these windows,
we’ll talk out the inner pattern’s mystery.