We’re back now, after our 2,023 mile drive from our home away from home in Cave Creek, Arizona, as well as our 23-hour flight time from our home away from home away from home, the otherworldly land of Việt Nam. Hoping to bring a bit of VN’s pháp thuật (magic) back with us, I picked up this quirky woody piece on the streets of Hoi An, drawn to its happy countenance, but not thinking much more of it, other than it’d look cool on one of The Higher Haven’s wooded walkways. Not surprising, there’s more depth to the câu chuyện (story).
“Is this picture taken at your place Brother?” asked the great Nguyen Ba Phuc. “You should use a stick of wood instead of the nail to hang the spirit. Use the nail to make a bigger hole and put a stick of wood into it” (note: always respect, respect, respect when it comes to the sensitive world of the spirit). Then, a short time later: “Do you know who is the bamboo root statue that you have there? That is the famous Vietnamese poet Bùi Giáng’.” Tuyet Voi ~ Wonderfu! I was delighted this figurehead was actually an artistic nod to a prolific Viet poet.
Soon after his long distance, mini text interrogation, Phuc sent over a link to Flowers and Grass: poet Bùi Giáng. Me: “Cam on (thank you) Brother. What does Mia Nguôn mean in translation?” Phuc: “Mua = Rain. Nguõn = Source, origin, or root, Nguõn here understood as the source of a river. All rivers originate from streams in the mountains or highlands and run to a delta before being absorbed by the sea. Mua Nguõn then is rain at the source of the river, making a strong flow of water to the delta. So Mua Nguõn is understood as a powerful stream of Bùi Giáng poems that flow into and uplift Vietnamese culture.”
With thanks to blogs like Hanoi Ink’s old books and dirty fingers, a bit about this poet, scholar, philosopher, literary critic, translator, and essayist, a goat herder who would neither sell nor kill his goats, and a beatnik wanderer. Bùi Giáng was born in Quảng Nam in 1926 and spent his youth in the Central provinces, attending university in Huế to study literature and later serving in the military. In the early 1950s he began to publish criticism on The Tale of Kiều, and relocated to Sài Gòn in 1959. In 1962, he published the volume Rain in the Mountains (Mưa Nguồn), and brought out three more volumes of poetry in the following year. In 1965 his writings were lost when a fire consumed his house, yet he continued to publish essays and translations, focusing particularly on the work of Martin Heidegger and French existentialist authors, including Albert Camus and André Gide.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Bùi Giáng experienced what he characterized to a friend (Thích Nguyên Tạng, who recorded their conversation of 1993) as “brilliant madness” (điên rực rỡ) For several years he wandered in the southern provinces, returning to Sài Gòn in 1971, two years later completing a translation of Antoine de St.-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, the well-loved story, despite its style as a children’s book, of a young prince who addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, loss. and human nature. Poet Linh Dinh notes “After 1975 he slept in a squalid shack next to a turgid pond.” As the author Hai-Dang Phan suggests, Bùi Giáng’s “vagrant life, unconventional poems, and copious translations” might qualify him as “the closest thing Vietnam has ever produced to a beatnik poet.” Bùi Giáng died in HCM in 1998.
Scratching about, I even found the great Vietnamese monk and teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh reference Bùi Giáng, this excerpt from his book Enjoying The Ultimate: “This means there is nothing higher than the path that leads to the silence of nirvāna. Silence does not mean there is no sound, but that there are no ideas of being and non-being, brith and death. The poet Bùi Giáng wrote in a poem: ‘We step across words that have fallen twice’. ‘We step across’ here means we step across the threshold of dualism. Thanks to looking deeply, ideas like being, nonbeing, birth and death fall away and reality appears.” When we do a walking meditation in the steps and spirit of Thích Nhất Hạnh at our Noble Silence Meditation Retreats, we touch that very reality.
Despite Bùi G.’s long sojourn in the city, his poems are primarily, even insistently, works about nature, Mưa Nguồn “evoking nature’s pristine beauty in an idiom that is not just romantic, but mythic.” We’ll leave you with this version of Cỏ Hoa Hồn Du Mục (Nomadic Soul of Flowers and Grass) and with the 2023 retreats and Ceremonies posted, hope you’ll visit soon. Perhaps you’ll catch a lil’ vision for your own happiness as well as catch sight of Bùi Giáng.
Nghe trời đổ lộn nguyên khê
Tiếng vàng rụng rớt gieo về động xanh
Gót chân khơi rộng bóng cành
Nhịp vang đầu núi vọng thành lũy siêu
Thời gian chắc bước bên chiều
Khóc sông bến lạ mưa chiều sớm xuân
Cỏ hoa từ bỏ ruộng đồng
Hồn du mục cũ xa gần hử em
Hear the sky and gushing fenster blend
Golden sounds fall into a verdant void
Heel-dug hollow in the shadow of branches
Reverberating to the peaks, echoing to the ramparts
Time treads firmly in the gloom of ending day
Tears flow at an unfamiliar pier; late rain in early spring
Flowers and grass forsake their meadows
The ancient nomadic spirit is everywhere my love.