For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems by Cho Oh-Hyun

In the introduction to For Nirvana, Professor Kwon Youngmin recounts his first meeting with poet Cho Oh-hyun. An elderly monk, he says, hands pressed together, approached him in the grounds of Baekdamsa Temple and asked who he was. He said he was a professor of literature and a literary critic. The monk laughed loudly and said, "So, you're one of those people with an attachment to a useless discipline." The professor was dumbstruck. He had spent his life writing books of literary criticism and was now being told it was a useless trawl. I smiled at the professor's trauma. In Paddy Kavanagh's Dublin, where the relationship between poet and critic had more of a sandpaper edge, the conversation would have been an occasion for hilarity. I can imagine the scene in The Waterloo in Baggot Street and the radically different scene in Baekdamsa. Poets in Ireland tend to look at critics with jaundiced distrust: they see them as literary entrepreneurs who steal the poet's thunder for their own advantage, usually monetary. This is patently unfair, but in a society that loves to champion the underdog, neutral observers invariably rally to the underdog standard. In Korea, where poet and critic enjoy a cozy relationship, to the detriment, I believe, of both disciplines, the professor was crestfallen. Master Cho perhaps was having a bit of fun, and Professor Kwon may have taken him too seriously. Thomas Merton has a Chuang Tzu poem which sees uselessness as a very productive Zen value. When Chuang Tzu is told that all his teaching is centered on what has no use, he says, "If you have no appreciation for what has no use, you cannot begin to talk about what can be used," and he goes on to show "the absolute necessity of what has no use." Elsewhere Chuang Tzu says, "the purpose of words is to convey meaning. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten."

My reading of Korean poetry, classical and contemporary, begins with a Chinese poet, Yang Wanli of Sung, and his poem "What is Poetry", (the translation is by Jonathan Chaves, Weatherhill 1975). I begin with Yang Wanli because I believe the Chinese tradition of T'ang and Sung and the Korean tradition of Silla and Koryo share common ground. Poetry East and West has always shifted adherence between romantic and classical values, where romantic stands for reliance on imagination as a vehicle to truth and classical extols the role of reason in the mission to attain truth. Romantic denotes a subjective approach where the poet concentrates on his own experience; classical indicates an objective approach where the poet takes his personal experience out of the equation and looks to society and the real world for inspiration. In English poetry, Ezra Pound's "In a station of the Metro" and Robert Bridge's "London Snow" are typical examples of the two approaches. Romanticism and classicism traditionally enjoy periods of dominance, followed invariably by a reaction against whichever tendency is dominant at the moment and a move to the other side.

Now, what is poetry?If you say it is simply a matter of words,I will say a good poet gets rid of words.If you say it is simply a matter of meaning,I will say a good poet gets rid of meaning.But, you ask, without words and without meaning,Where is the poetry?To this I reply: Get rid of words and get rid of meaning,And there is still poetry.

This is a description of symbolist poetry a thousand years before the French thought of the notion. Symbolism is the bedrock of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, and while English poetry's debt to the Chinese tradition is enormous, it is still only partially acknowledged. Korea's debt to the Chinese tradition is even greater, but today no one really cares.

Yang Wanli's approach stands in sharp contrast to the traditional ki, sŭng, chŏn, kyŏl analysis which has dominated Korean poetry discourse through the ages. Since neo-Confucian thought assumed a dominant role in Chosŏn, words and meaning and the Confucian morality they represent have been central. For more than a thousand years poets and critics have argued about the nature of poetry discourse. Is it about words and ideas or is it about something else? The symbolists say it is about something else, an unresolved complex of emotions in the poet's heart which is distinct from the poem in words. The poet seeks a vantage point for his poem that is pre-sensation and pre-thought.

You cannot take Yang Wanli at face value. He writes a poem extolling the symbolic nature of poetry in a format that is all words and meaning and lacks any symbol. Obviously, Yang Wanli is being ironic; paradox is a major player. As Aquinas noted all those years ago, you shouldn't push any argument too far. There is cogency on both sides of the 'What is poetry' debate; accommodation, harmonization is necessary. While some of the greatest poets in history wrote extempore, others were carvers and trimmers. Six lines was a big day's work for Yeats. He polished and trimmed obsessively, sometimes composing completely different versions of the poem. Ko Un and many other modern Korean poets of my acquaintance are capable of writing several hundred lines a day. Form for Frost was central; without form, he says, writing poetry is like playing tennis without a net. In "Reading T'ao Yuan-ming's poems," Yi Kyubo says:

Sublime rhythm is of its nature soundless;there's no need to strum the lyre.Sublime language is of its nature wordless;it's not necessary to carve and trim.

R. S. Thomas says you make poetry out of words, ideas, the environment. The urge to poetry comes from a passion for language. He says further, you make the poem for yourself, with no awareness of having a public. Auden's claim that poetry makes nothing happen must be seen in the context of the strength of the political left in the 1930's art world. Heaney says the poem begins with a rhythm. In my view this is not at all the Korean experience. A Korean poem, I believe, begins with an image or an idea.

Sŏ Chŏngju's "Poetics" is an important poem though it seems to have escaped the attention of Korean critics who concentrate on the ki, sŭng, chŏn, kyŏl Confucian process:

Deep down in the sealeaving the best shellsfastened as they wereare best left there, too,best left in the sea,

Cheju haenyŏ girlsto pick on the dayto the rocks beneath.for once all pickedthe sea I long for.

dive for abalone,their lovers come home,Abalone poemshow empty the quest,That's why I'm a poet.

Sŏ Chŏngju while recognizing the importance of form, illustrates the impossibility of the poet's task. The poet, he says, is always striving for impossible abalone poems.

So, is language and decoration central to the poet's task? Or does the heart of the poem lie elsewhere? Hyeshim's Small Lotus Pond presents the symbolist position:

No wind, no swell;a world so various opens before my eyes.No need for a lot of words;to look is to see.

Hyeshim decries the importance of words. Obviously, symbolism is pivotal.

The argument about the nature of poetry continues today without resolution. Is poetry a matter of words and meaning or does the poem reside outside words and meaning in a complex of feelings enshrined separately in the poet's heart? In Korea the dispute between pure art and committed art is ongoing. Our best poets tend to advocate pure art; our best critics tend to favor the committed approach. The argument has not been resolved since Chŏng Tojŏn established Neo-Confucian thought at the center of all art thinking at the beginning of Chosŏn. T'oegye and Yulgok thought children shouldn't be exposed to the decadence of Koryŏ kayo. Debates about language and sensitivity are often less concerned with individual freedoms than with enforcing a particular set of opinions. Chosŏn Korea was definitively pro reason and anti imagination. And yet Korea's best poets always managed to endorse the role of imagination in our cultural values system. Kim Sisup concurs with Hyeshim's sentiments:

A vagabond for ten years, I've traveled east and west.I'm like mugwort on a hill.My way and the world's way offer bumpy alternatives.Sniff a flower, say nothing: that's the ultimate choice.

(In Chamshil)

Note the wonderful mugwort image, a perfect description of the badly groomed poet writing poorly groomed poems. And note the admonition to say nothing as the poet's ultimate choice. What does this say about the role of words in poetry?

For Nirvana is a delightful book of poems, the best I have read in a long time. It is significant that these English versions were for many of us a first introduction to the work of Master Cho. It is doubly significant that the poems are in the sijo form, which is hardly at the forefront of poetry discussion in Korea today. This may account for Master Cho's relative lack of exposure to Korea's dwindling poetry reading public. Reading the poems brings back the spirit of Silla, Koryŏ and the best Zen poems of Chosŏn. Many of the poems resonate as hansi though perhaps if read in Korean, the impression would be different. Reading through the volume, I have no doubt that Cho Oh-hyun stands at the symbolic end of the argument on the nature of poetry discourse. It is evident in the subtitle of the book, 108 Zen sijo, with its reference to the 108 torments of Buddhist experience and the almost tautological use of the word Zen. Incidentally, for a Korean the operative word is sŏn not Zen. The poems are trying to express a symbolic world that cannot be expressed, a world where meaning is secondary. It's not that the words are unimportant, but that they are inadequate. In his afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl says, "the teachings of the Buddha…. are like the boat that one rides to the other shore. Once across, one does not need to—or want to—carry the boat around any longer." Perhaps the same can be said for the words of a poem, and perhaps that is the reason Professor Fenkl makes a point of not memorizing either the Korean or the English versions of Master Cho's poems, a gambit, he says, that "allows for new discoveries in new contexts".

In my reading of For Nirvana, I am aware of a constant battle being waged between poems and words, and I believe this is the heart of symbolist poetry. "Distant Holy Man" is a good example. This is a poem that succeeds almost in spite of the English. The 'this one day' repetitions, the expression 'the whole of the sun,' even the phrase 'this single day' all sound discordant in English, and yet the poem overall has immense power. The final line, despite the inversion of the subject, says it all./He may live a thousand years,/but the holy man/is but a distant cloud of gnats.

Again "The Seagulls and the East Sea" is very powerful. Presumably, one of the poems categorized as story sijo, though the distinction between story sijo and sasŏl sijo is not referenced. An old man sits on a rock all day looking at the waves on the East Sea.

I asked him, "Where are you from, old man?"He said, "I'm sure I saw two sea gulls flying over the horizon this morningbut they don't seem to be coming back….The next day he was at the same spot again, sitting in the same pose, so Iasked him, "Did the two sea gulls return?"He said, "the sea was crying yesterday, but today it's not."

This kind of irony is not to the fore in Korean poetry today. What isn't said is more important than what is said, surely the way of symbolist poetry. I am reminded of Tasan's "White Clouds," which points to the need to get beyond thought and meaning.

Autumn breezes blow away the clouds;no shadow weave mars the blue of the sky.Suddenly I long for lightness within,for thought to gently leave this world.

Lightness within is pivotal. I think of Chong Chak's mid-Chosŏn poem "Figure in the Distance", where the landscape is a symbol of what Yeats would have called unity of being and Tasan calls thought leaving the world.

At first, I wondered if the figureon the distant sands werea white heron, but to the soundof piping on the windthe vast expanse of sky and riverfaded into evening.

It is in the absence of thought that we get beneath the surface of the Zen moment. You don't ask what the poem means; you just go with the flow.

"The Green Frog" describes the fright of a frog when a monk dumps out the basin of water he has just washed in. The frog leaped to the top of the well and lay there panting. The poem continues:

But when I tried to compose a sijo poem with that green frog as the subject, I struggled day after day only to fail in the end. I came to a minor realization: whatever words I could come up with—for however many kalpas—to describe that frog would never do him justice.

There are two lessons here, the poet's failure to write the poem and his realization of the inadequacy of words to express his experience.

"Wild Ducks & Shadow," a delightful symbolic landscape, is one of my favorite poems in the volume:

When I ask him—Master Haejang,hero of the hangover drink—for tidings of the mountain temple,he says, Yesterday the wild ducksthat played in the West Star lotus pondwent away, and now, today, onlythe shadow of the dogwood remains.

I'm not sure of the resonance of the dogwood image—it is such a Christian image in the West—but the flowers of the dogwood, white or pink, make an indelible impression. Hyeshim's "to see is to know" is given new affirmation.

"Days Living on the Mountain" deals with the trauma of growing old.

Reached the age when I'm sick of it all.My thoughts, too, knotty like the bones of my bent back,Today I grabbed a stump about to fall over.

Day before yesterday, I went to see Master Hancheon at his templeAnd asked him what made him want to go on living.He couldn't explain in words, so he told me to strike the cloud gong.

Now really, the days living on the mountain—One day crying like a bug in the grass,One day laughing like a flower in the field,Only to see it—the flow that ends the flow.

The 'Now really' phrase encumbers the line, but the rest is wonderful. To see the flow that ends the flow is what life is about. Master Hancheon knew it, but he couldn't put it into words; the dilemma invariably of the poet, beautifully realized here. "My Lifelines" summarizes the poet's quest. It is a remarkable poem:

what I've been seeking all my lifeare the mainlines, the veinsof Zen& poetry

the conclusion I reached today—Poetry is woodgrain, knotted,& Zen is wood's grain, straight

Note how he equates Zen and poetry. The conclusion is quite perfect.

Master Cho directs the last poem in the volume, "Embers" (Afterword), to his readers. It's rather rare for a poet to admit talking drivel. For me, the poem recalls Anne Sexton's "Admonitions to a Special Person" though I feel sure Cho Oh-hyun intended no such connection:

These words I've spewed 'til now—they're all drivel.Mouth ajar at last, as not to tread on earth or stone,This body, infused with brass, in a molten fire.

For my money, any poet smart enough to recognize that his words are drivel has reached the kernel of truth and the heart of poetry.