Some moody bits inspired by Nature
An early-thirteenth century Japanese poet:
“When I’m looking at the Moon
I become the Moon.
The Moon that I’m watching.
Becomes me,
And I merge with the World,
Becoming one with it.”
The title of a sixteenth-century Japanese monochrome picture:
“Monkeys That Are Trying to Catch the Reflection of the Moon in the Pond.”
In the fourteenth century, Japanese Zen monks taught that the contemplation of Nature in the wild or of the garden carefully and specially designed for contemplation, could open the way to the comprehension of the Truth of Being, to reaching satori.
In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to the experience of kenshō, “seeing into one's true nature”. Ken means “seeing,” shō means “nature” or “essence.”
Satori and kenshō are commonly translated as enlightenment, a word that is also used to translate the terms bodhi, prajna and buddhahood.
From the book, Notes Written Propped on the Pillow, by a Japanese noble woman who lived at the end of the tenth-early eleventh century:
“How sad is the old garden with the pond covered in duckweed and overgrown with fragrant reeds in the intermittent rains that keep falling in the late autumn. Everything is in the dark shades of green.
The overcast sky is low overhead and it makes your soul ache.
The pond covered in duckweed and overgrown with reeds is full of melancholy charm, and it is so enchanting to see it covered with thin ice on an early-winter morning!
The neglected pond is so much better for contemplation than a pond which is well-cared for. If you lie down on the bank you can watch the moon through the tall wild grasses.
The moonlight is both sublimely beautiful and sad…”
From Henry Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854:
(Walden is Thoreau’s best-known book which records Thoreau’s experiences in a hand-built cabin, at Walden Pond, where he spent two years in partial seclusion near Concord, Massachusetts)
“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes [drinks] delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, [I become a] a part of herself [Nature is she in English]. As I walk along the shore of the lake, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump [sound] to usher in the night and the notes are borne on the rippling wind over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity s rippled but not ruffled...”
Isn’t it amazing that similar feelings and thoughts are recorded hundreds of years apart? And Thoreau never read Japanese poetry or prose or knew anything about Zen!
How come the Chinese and Japanese were so much ahead of the Europeans in their appreciation of Nature?