Translated from Japanese and Chinese by Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnell

Donnelly, Patrick

Miller, Stephen D.

English

ScholarWorks at WMU

Transference Volume 5 Issue 1 | Fall 2017 Article 5 2017 Four Love Poems from One Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate by Jakuzen Stephen D. Miller University of Massachusetts - Amherst, smiller@asianlan.umass.edu Patrick Donnelly Smith College, pdonnelly@smith.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference  Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, German Language and Literature Commons, International and Area Studies Commons, Japanese Studies Commons, Linguistics Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Near Eastern Languages and Societies Commons, Poetry Commons, and the Reading and Language Commons Recommended Citation Miller, Stephen D. and Donnelly, Patrick (2017) "Four Love Poems from One Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate by Jakuzen," Transference: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference/vol5/iss1/5 12     TransferenceStephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly JakuzenFour Love Poems from One Hundred Hōmon hyakushuPoems of the Dharma GateHearing the Name, longing to be reborn 65when my dear lord may I comewhere rumor says you are?the pines of Iki—though it’s youwho exhausts your heart with waitingTHESE WORDS SIGNIFY that the power of Amida’s will is such that anyone who hears the Name and longs to be reborn arrives in that land almost be-fore realizing it, and achieves unshakeable faith.     How impatiently Amida must wait, sleeves of salvation moist, restless with longing! Anyone who un-derstands Narihira’s poem “I should never have left home” must vow to re-turn there in haste. Because I’ve heard that Ikinomatsu is a long sea-road to the west, may I liken it to that land?fall 2017     13Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly JakuzenNever slept  68inside this dreamgrieving my bewildered heart—how many nightshow many dawnsour eyes went without meetingTHE BODHISATTVAS WHO COULD SEE the white whorl of light emanat-ing from between the Buddha’s eyebrows didn’t have hearts indifferent to seeking the Buddha-path, and this scripture says that they never slept.   But for one on the path of love, lost in fleeting dreams, the fact that sleepless nights pile up is really of no benefit.14     TransferenceStephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly JakuzenThoughts of enlightenment alone, no other thoughts  69where shall I rest my heart?adrift on waves of thoughts—then sunk, wondering—is there something? is there nothing?THE DAI SPEAKS OF A PERSON practicing śamatha-vipasyana meditation, considering only the true nature of the phenomenal world, and not mixing in thoughts about other things. Doesn’t meditating upon “am I or am I not?” still the mind in the truth of the middle way?fall 2017     15Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly JakuzenHeart of longing, revering the Buddha path 70 longed-for face  from which I’ve been partedcome, appear even in dreams —lip-of-the-mountain moonHE WHO DIED LONG AGO, becoming “original dew,” when I think of our unendurable parting—the leaves of his words lodged in my heart, causing me to drop dew again and again upon my sleeves—doesn’t the clear form of this friend arise before me, in actual truth, when I’m unable to sleep?  And rises before me all the more whenever I think about when Shakyamuni was alive, a time when no one ever had enough of gazing on his form with its thirty-two aspects, nor ever tired of hearing directly the Law of unimpeded wisdom and the eight virtuous sounds.  But with the cremation wood ex-hausted, karmic opportunity faded up and away like smoke from the śala trees, where is the person who wouldn’t have plunged into thoughts of long-ing and reverence?    Having now entered into the latter days of the Law, for us to be sprinkled with blessing on this wondrous path is far beyond our reach, even if we hang our hearts on this figure of compassion, even if we’re unable to sleep for grieving. In this dream of life and death, why can’t we see the face of the full moon?16     Transference        Therefore it is written, “With single-hearted longing to see the Buddha,/they give their lives./Then with the companions of truth/I appear on Vulture Peak”—a saying not pertaining only to some heaven be-yond the clouds.  If ever a time comes that the Buddha responds to the ap-peal of sentient beings, he will appear in our hearts on the mountain of the middle way.fall 2017     17CommentaryJakuzen was a 12th century priest of the Buddhist Tendai sect, living in Ōhara outside the capital of Kyoto. He left behind three manuscripts of waka poetry; that forty-seven of his po-ems were published in several imperial poetry anthologies of the late 12th century and later is a mark of how highly they were regarded. One of Jakuzen’s most famous collections is the Hōmon hyakushu (One Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate). As the first one-hundred-poem private anthology of shakkyō-ka (Buddhist-themed poems), the Hōmon hyakushu sits at the juncture between the Japanese court’s ongoing lit-erary and religious projects, exemplifying the late-Heian (794 –1185) formula kadō soku butsudō: “the way of poetry is noneother than the Buddha-way.” Each of the hundred parts of Jakuzen’s sequence is comprised of a dai (poem topic, in this case a short quote from Buddhist scripture in Chinese), a waka (31-syllable poem in Japanese) and a lyric prose afterword in Japanese on the same topic. The hundred sections of the Hōmon hyakushu are grouped into ten “books” of ten poems each (modeled on the imperial poetry anthologies), and the four selections here are from book seven, the Love poems (koi no uta).Translating JakuzenJakuzen’s original text is in classical Japanese (and Chinese, in the case of the dai). What makes lexical research for this translation project—translating all one hundred sections and related honka (poems that Jakuzen alludes to in his own poems and prose)—interesting and sometimes challenging is that the themes of Jakuzen’s poems are inherently Buddhist, and often contain terms that can only be found in Buddhist dictionaries. The project of a shakkyō-ka in general is to inflect familiar poetic tropes—about the four seasons, congratulations, separation, love, complaint, etc.—toward reflecting on the teachings of Buddhism. It is especially interesting to observe how Jakuzen adapted the “library” of references and vocabulary associated with poems of erotic and romantic love (a topic Bud-dhism might be thought to deprecate, because of its potential 18     Transferencefor dangerous, deluding passions and attachments) to depict a Buddhist practitioner’s longing for enlightenment, or for union with Amida Buddha in the Pure Land. Thus in the Love section we find familiar references to waiting all night for the lover’s arrival (often in vain), to rituals of betrothal, to the tortures of inconstancy, to painful separation from the beloved, to “sleeves wet with tears”—but all metamor-phosed into the fervent spiritual relationship the practitioner forms, or neglects to form, with the Buddha and the teachings. Translating these poems has required familiarity with both the original secular tropes and models, then working to express how Jakuzen adapted these to a Buddhist worldview, in such a way that the original models can still be felt. It is a poetic truism that great love songs can be redirected toward longing for the divine, and conversely great hymns can repurposed to praise a human beloved. In the case of Jakuzen’s recycling of the love poem project in the context of an overall Bud-dhist poetry project, his deployment of erotic tropes is simultane-ously ironic and sincere. He knows that inflecting erotic longing toward religious feeling creates a grinding of rhetorical gears, in a witty (if not comic) way. But the adaptation is also sincere in that Jakuzen enacts an emotional relationship with ultimate spiritual reality, rather than a mental, theoretical, or legalistic relation-ship. It’s the Song of Songs, rather than Leviticus.Any translator attempting to render a classical Japanese poem into English must first face a very fundamental difference between the two languages, which has exerted a strong influence on the poetics of each. In Japanese every syllable receives the same amount of stress, but English is characterized by the alter-nation of strong and weak stresses. It was natural—inevitable—therefore that syllable-counting became a primary characteristic of Japanese poetry. By contrast, English poetics developed a con-scious attention to the arrangement of strong and weak stresses. Because syllable-counting represents a minor cul-de-sac of Eng-lish poetics, rather than the main road—and because we wanted our translations to work well as English poems—we chose not to imitate the 31-syllable form of the original poems. The translator must address a second fundamental dif-ference between poetry in Japanese and English: Japanese poetry may be written in vertical or horizontal columns, where-fall 2017     19as English poetry is invariably written in horizontal lines. The syllables in waka are understood to be broken into groups of 5 - 7 - 5 - 7 - 7, and these groupings are sometimes rendered as five lines in English translations. But we chose to let the syntax in English take precedence over the original arrangement, draw-ing on a variety of line and stanza management strategies from English poetry, while still trying to achieve a small footprint for the translation.We did wish to reflect in English some of the constraints that the waka form imposed on Japanese writers. For instance, we avoided capitalization except in the case of proper names, and limited punctuation to question marks, long dashes (m-dashes) and a few commas, quotation marks, colons, parenthe-ses, exclamation points and italicized passages for syntactical clarity or emphasis. We broke these self-imposed constraints in a few instances, but only for good cause. Above all, we wished to honor the poems’ breathtaking brevity and compression, which successfully hints at far more than is said outright.When these poems were written, they were not antique; we strove not to make them sound so in our translations. It was our limited goal—difficult enough—to convey the emotional and spiritual arguments of these poems in idiomatic, musical, con-temporary English, in versions that are also accurate enough to satisfy the scholar.A few notes about the individual poems:In the afterword to poem 65, Jakuzen quotes a poem by Ari-wara no Narihira from the Kokinshū (KKS 969), part of which reads sato oba karezu, “I should never have left home.” In the Hōmon hyakushu, Jakuzen constantly alludes to other, older poetry; in this case he uses Narihira’s poem to invoke the trope of a woman waiting in vain for her lover to appear. Narihira’s poem is in the voice of a man who expresses regret for leaving his beloved waiting in that way; in Jakuzen’s poem, the beloved who waits is Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise. In the poem, we translated Ikinomatsu, a place name, as “the pines of Iki,” to give a sense of how in Japanese the word matsu means both “pine (tree)” and “to wait (with longing),” a pun that works in both Japanese and English.20     TransferenceThe afterword of poem 68 refers to “white whorl of light emanating from between the Buddha’s eyebrows” (Sanskrit, ūrṇā; Japanese, byakugō), which was one of 32 marks of an enlightened being, often described as a curl of hair that emits light.The afterword of poem 69 refers to śamatha-vipasyana (“calming-insight”) meditation (Japanese, shikan). According to Yamamoto Akihiro’s A Complete Annotation of the Hōmon hyakushu by Jakuzen (Jakuzen Hōmon hyakushu Zenshaku, Kazama Shobō, 2010), Jakuzen recorded—in another of his poetry collections, Yuishimbōshū—that he studied this form of meditation at Raigō-in temple in Ōhara, under the instruction of Ennin Shōnin. Thus Raigō-in is one of the few places where we can definitively place Jakuzen during his lifetime.In poem 70, as in many Buddhist poems, the moon sym-bolizes the Buddha himself, as well as his teachings; therefore the hidden moon is a metaphor for times of trial for the Bud-dhist practitioner. In the afterword, Jakuzen repurposes the love-poem trope of “sleeves wet with tears” (in this case, wet with dew, a metaphor for tears) to depict the grief of the practi-tioner after the Buddha’s physical form was hidden from view. The afterword also refers to the “latter days of the Law” (Japa-nese, mappō), a period of time prophesied in Buddhist scrip-tures, which was thought by many Asian cultures to have begun in 1052. According to this prophesy, during this age accessing and acting upon the teachings would become an extremely arduous task. The passage Jakuzen quotes near the end of the afterword is taken from the 16th chapter of the Lotus Sutra, “Life Span of the Thus Come One.”Source text: Jakuzen Hōmon hyakushu zenshaku, Yamamoto Akihiro. Kasama Shobō, 2010, pp. 124–25, 129–30, 130–32, 132–34.

Four Love Poems from \u3cem\u3eOne Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate\u3c/em\u3e by Jakuzen

Transference 
Volume 5 
Issue 1 | Fall 2017 Article 5 
2017 
Four Love Poems from One Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate 
by Jakuzen 
Stephen D. Miller 
University of Massachusetts - Amherst, smiller@asianlan.umass.edu 
Patrick Donnelly 
Smith College, pdonnelly@smith.edu 
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference 
 Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, European 
Languages and Societies Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, 
German Language and Literature Commons, International and Area Studies Commons, Japanese Studies 
Commons, Linguistics Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Near 
Eastern Languages and Societies Commons, Poetry Commons, and the Reading and Language Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Miller, Stephen D. and Donnelly, Patrick (2017) "Four Love Poems from One Hundred Poems of the 
Dharma Gate by Jakuzen," Transference: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 5. 
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference/vol5/iss1/5 
12     Transference
Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly Jakuzen
Four Love Poems from One Hundred Hōmon hyakushu
Poems of the Dharma Gate
Hearing the Name, longing to be reborn 65
when my dear lord may I come
where rumor says you are?
the pines of Iki—
though it’s you
who exhausts your heart with waiting
THESE WORDS SIGNIFY that the power of Amida’s will is such that anyone 
who hears the Name and longs to be reborn arrives in that land almost be-
fore realizing it, and achieves unshakeable faith. 
    How impatiently Amida 
must wait, sleeves of salvation moist, restless with longing! Anyone who un-
derstands Narihira’s poem “I should never have left home” must vow to re-
turn there in haste. Because I’ve heard that Ikinomatsu is a long sea-road to 
the west, may I liken it to that land?
fall 2017     13
Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly Jakuzen
Never slept  68
inside this dream
grieving my bewildered heart—
how many nights
how many dawns
our eyes went without meeting
THE BODHISATTVAS WHO COULD SEE the white whorl of light emanat-
ing from between the Buddha’s eyebrows didn’t have hearts indifferent to 
seeking the Buddha-path, and this scripture says that they never slept. 
  But 
for one on the path of love, lost in fleeting dreams, the fact that sleepless 
nights pile up is really of no benefit.
14     Transference
Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly Jakuzen
Thoughts of enlightenment alone, no other thoughts  69
where shall I rest my heart?
adrift on waves of thoughts—
then sunk, wondering—
is there something? 
is there nothing?
THE DAI SPEAKS OF A PERSON practicing śamatha-vipasyana meditation, 
considering only the true nature of the phenomenal world, and not mixing 
in thoughts about other things. Doesn’t meditating upon “am I or am I not?” 
still the mind in the truth of the middle way?
fall 2017     15
Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly Jakuzen
Heart of longing, revering the Buddha path 70
 longed-for face 
 from which I’ve been parted
come, appear even in dreams —
lip-of-the-mountain
 moon
HE WHO DIED LONG AGO, becoming “original dew,” when I think of our 
unendurable parting—the leaves of his words lodged in my heart, causing 
me to drop dew again and again upon my sleeves—doesn’t the clear form of 
this friend arise before me, in actual truth, when I’m unable to sleep?
  And 
rises before me all the more whenever I think about when Shakyamuni was 
alive, a time when no one ever had enough of gazing on his form with its 
thirty-two aspects, nor ever tired of hearing directly the Law of unimpeded 
wisdom and the eight virtuous sounds.
  But with the cremation wood ex-
hausted, karmic opportunity faded up and away like smoke from the śala 
trees, where is the person who wouldn’t have plunged into thoughts of long-
ing and reverence?
    Having now entered into the latter days of the Law, for us 
to be sprinkled with blessing on this wondrous path is far beyond our reach, 
even if we hang our hearts on this figure of compassion, even if we’re unable 
to sleep for grieving.
 In this dream of life and death, why can’t we see the face 
of the full moon?
16     Transference
        Therefore it is written, “With single-hearted longing to 
see the Buddha,/they give their lives./Then with the companions of truth/I 
appear on Vulture Peak”—a saying not pertaining only to some heaven be-
yond the clouds.
  If ever a time comes that the Buddha responds to the ap-
peal of sentient beings, he will appear in our hearts on the mountain of the 
middle way.
fall 2017     17
Commentary
Jakuzen was a 12th century priest of the Buddhist Tendai sect, 
living in Ōhara outside the capital of Kyoto. He left behind 
three manuscripts of waka poetry; that forty-seven of his po-
ems were published in several imperial poetry anthologies of 
the late 12th century and later is a mark of how highly they were 
regarded. One of Jakuzen’s most famous collections is the 
Hōmon hyakushu (One Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate). 
As the first one-hundred-poem private anthology of 
shakkyō-ka (Buddhist-themed poems), the Hōmon hyakushu 
sits at the juncture between the Japanese court’s ongoing lit-
erary and religious projects, exemplifying the late-Heian (794 
–1185) formula kadō soku butsudō: “the way of poetry is none
other than the Buddha-way.” 
Each of the hundred parts of Jakuzen’s sequence is 
comprised of a dai (poem topic, in this case a short quote from 
Buddhist scripture in Chinese), a waka (31-syllable poem 
in Japanese) and a lyric prose afterword in Japanese on the 
same topic. The hundred sections of the Hōmon hyakushu are 
grouped into ten “books” of ten poems each (modeled on the 
imperial poetry anthologies), and the four selections here are 
from book seven, the Love poems (koi no uta).
Translating Jakuzen
Jakuzen’s original text is in classical Japanese (and Chinese, 
in the case of the dai). What makes lexical research for this 
translation project—translating all one hundred sections and 
related honka (poems that Jakuzen alludes to in his own poems 
and prose)—interesting and sometimes challenging is that the 
themes of Jakuzen’s poems are inherently Buddhist, and often 
contain terms that can only be found in Buddhist dictionaries. 
The project of a shakkyō-ka in general is to inflect 
familiar poetic tropes—about the four seasons, congratulations, 
separation, love, complaint, etc.—toward reflecting on the 
teachings of Buddhism. It is especially interesting to observe 
how Jakuzen adapted the “library” of references and vocabulary 
associated with poems of erotic and romantic love (a topic Bud-
dhism might be thought to deprecate, because of its potential 
18     Transference
for dangerous, deluding passions and attachments) to depict a 
Buddhist practitioner’s longing for enlightenment, or for union 
with Amida Buddha in the Pure Land. 
Thus in the Love section we find familiar references to 
waiting all night for the lover’s arrival (often in vain), to rituals 
of betrothal, to the tortures of inconstancy, to painful separation 
from the beloved, to “sleeves wet with tears”—but all metamor-
phosed into the fervent spiritual relationship the practitioner 
forms, or neglects to form, with the Buddha and the teachings. 
Translating these poems has required familiarity with both the 
original secular tropes and models, then working to express 
how Jakuzen adapted these to a Buddhist worldview, in such a 
way that the original models can still be felt. 
It is a poetic truism that great love songs can be redirected 
toward longing for the divine, and conversely great hymns can 
repurposed to praise a human beloved. In the case of Jakuzen’s 
recycling of the love poem project in the context of an overall Bud-
dhist poetry project, his deployment of erotic tropes is simultane-
ously ironic and sincere. He knows that inflecting erotic longing 
toward religious feeling creates a grinding of rhetorical gears, in a 
witty (if not comic) way. But the adaptation is also sincere in that 
Jakuzen enacts an emotional relationship with ultimate spiritual 
reality, rather than a mental, theoretical, or legalistic relation-
ship. It’s the Song of Songs, rather than Leviticus.
Any translator attempting to render a classical Japanese 
poem into English must first face a very fundamental difference 
between the two languages, which has exerted a strong influence 
on the poetics of each. In Japanese every syllable receives the 
same amount of stress, but English is characterized by the alter-
nation of strong and weak stresses. It was natural—inevitable—
therefore that syllable-counting became a primary characteristic 
of Japanese poetry. By contrast, English poetics developed a con-
scious attention to the arrangement of strong and weak stresses. 
Because syllable-counting represents a minor cul-de-sac of Eng-
lish poetics, rather than the main road—and because we wanted 
our translations to work well as English poems—we chose not to 
imitate the 31-syllable form of the original poems. 
The translator must address a second fundamental dif-
ference between poetry in Japanese and English: Japanese 
poetry may be written in vertical or horizontal columns, where-
fall 2017     19
as English poetry is invariably written in horizontal lines. The 
syllables in waka are understood to be broken into groups of 5 - 
7 - 5 - 7 - 7, and these groupings are sometimes rendered as five 
lines in English translations. But we chose to let the syntax in 
English take precedence over the original arrangement, draw-
ing on a variety of line and stanza management strategies from 
English poetry, while still trying to achieve a small footprint for 
the translation.
We did wish to reflect in English some of the constraints 
that the waka form imposed on Japanese writers. For instance, 
we avoided capitalization except in the case of proper names, 
and limited punctuation to question marks, long dashes (m-
dashes) and a few commas, quotation marks, colons, parenthe-
ses, exclamation points and italicized passages for syntactical 
clarity or emphasis. We broke these self-imposed constraints in 
a few instances, but only for good cause. Above all, we wished to 
honor the poems’ breathtaking brevity and compression, which 
successfully hints at far more than is said outright.
When these poems were written, they were not antique; 
we strove not to make them sound so in our translations. It was 
our limited goal—difficult enough—to convey the emotional and 
spiritual arguments of these poems in idiomatic, musical, con-
temporary English, in versions that are also accurate enough to 
satisfy the scholar.
A few notes about the individual poems:
In the afterword to poem 65, Jakuzen quotes a poem by Ari-
wara no Narihira from the Kokinshū (KKS 969), part of which 
reads sato oba karezu, “I should never have left home.” In the 
Hōmon hyakushu, Jakuzen constantly alludes to other, older 
poetry; in this case he uses Narihira’s poem to invoke the trope 
of a woman waiting in vain for her lover to appear. Narihira’s 
poem is in the voice of a man who expresses regret for leaving 
his beloved waiting in that way; in Jakuzen’s poem, the beloved 
who waits is Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise. In the 
poem, we translated Ikinomatsu, a place name, as “the pines of 
Iki,” to give a sense of how in Japanese the word matsu means 
both “pine (tree)” and “to wait (with longing),” a pun that works 
in both Japanese and English.
20     Transference
The afterword of poem 68 refers to “white whorl of light 
emanating from between the Buddha’s eyebrows” (Sanskrit, 
ūrṇā; Japanese, byakugō), which was one of 32 marks of an 
enlightened being, often described as a curl of hair that emits 
light.
The afterword of poem 69 refers to śamatha-vipasyana 
(“calming-insight”) meditation (Japanese, shikan). According 
to Yamamoto Akihiro’s A Complete Annotation of the Hōmon 
hyakushu by Jakuzen (Jakuzen Hōmon hyakushu Zenshaku, 
Kazama Shobō, 2010), Jakuzen recorded—in another of his 
poetry collections, Yuishimbōshū—that he studied this form of 
meditation at Raigō-in temple in Ōhara, under the instruction 
of Ennin Shōnin. Thus Raigō-in is one of the few places where 
we can definitively place Jakuzen during his lifetime.
In poem 70, as in many Buddhist poems, the moon sym-
bolizes the Buddha himself, as well as his teachings; therefore 
the hidden moon is a metaphor for times of trial for the Bud-
dhist practitioner. In the afterword, Jakuzen repurposes the 
love-poem trope of “sleeves wet with tears” (in this case, wet 
with dew, a metaphor for tears) to depict the grief of the practi-
tioner after the Buddha’s physical form was hidden from view. 
The afterword also refers to the “latter days of the Law” (Japa-
nese, mappō), a period of time prophesied in Buddhist scrip-
tures, which was thought by many Asian cultures to have begun 
in 1052. According to this prophesy, during this age accessing 
and acting upon the teachings would become an extremely 
arduous task. The passage Jakuzen quotes near the end of the 
afterword is taken from the 16th chapter of the Lotus Sutra, 
“Life Span of the Thus Come One.”
Source text: 
Jakuzen Hōmon hyakushu zenshaku, Yamamoto Akihiro. Kasama Shobō, 
2010, pp. 124–25, 129–30, 130–32, 132–34.


https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1170&amp;context=transference

Four Love Poems from \u3cem\u3eOne Hundred Poems of the Dharma Gate\u3c/em\u3e by Jakuzen

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