On Flowers and Grass and the great Vietnamese Poet Bùi Giáng

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.

Về Vẻ Dẹp Của Sự Không Tồn Tại ~ On The Beauty of Non Existence

I’m taking part in my meditation teacher Shinzen Young’s Home Practice Program this weekend, a chance to take a mini retreat and meditate with people around the world employing extremely effective guided techniques via a telephone conference call. The work we’re doing this weekend brought to mind the double whammy we orchestrated for our Winter Break this year, filling our personal time for renewal and retreat with Shinzen’s year-end, year-beginning retreat, and then only days later leaving for Viet Nam. Talk about generating the energy of some serious after shock, after glow, and widening freedom! Having returned home now to the western USA, I had a chance to review some of the retreat dharma talks and Group Process AMA’s or Ask Me Anything sessions (Shinzen being the Me in AMA), and discovered an interesting link between the trip and retreat.

One fascinating aspect of Vietnamese culture is the rich, colorful relationship Vietnamese people share with death, as well as a connection to the family’s or Gai Dinh’s ancestral line. Altars acknowledging life’s spiritual source are ubiquitous — within every business, in every home, even out in the rice fields, with small huts dedicated to the land God, tiny ladders included to assist deities in accessing offerings of fruit and candy. At funerals, grieving family members don white rather than black, hearses morph into ornate dragon mobiles, and the whole procession is often followed up with a Ha Noi marching jazz band, complete with a bugle corps, booming bass drum and higher-stepping, baton-wielding drum major. My guide in the north on this trip Dinh Quang Tuâń enlightened me to a ghastly ritual around burial. After three years entombed in a concrete crypt, a decomposed body is exhumed in preparation for its final resting spot amongst other family graves. Bones are washed clean and then arranged in a certain ceremonial container or smaller casket. Putting gloves and socks on the putrefying corpses’ hands and feet help retrieve hand and foot bones. Pretty hardcore, hands on stuff, as Tuâń admitted it took him days afterward to reacquire an appetite.

Not to shock with esoteric, Vietnamese death rituals, but readers of this blog or Higher Haven visitors know I’m a major fan of conveying how our practices provide real resources in the face of death and the looming reality of impermanence. Death rightly considered can be considered a great renewal, the shaking off of the old and transition into a new state. Per Shinzen’s counsel, “Death isn’t something you solve, death is something you resolve,” informing one’s life’s focus and decisions. As the Lakota people are fond of saying: “We were born to die”. When you have some resolution with the Mother of All Fears, you have a healthier relationship with death, life, and fear in general.

This story has been up for six weeks, posted February 12th, but I’m so happy to make this cool new addition, inspired by my friend Aaron giving it a read and shouting me out this early Sunday morning. Aaron is the not at all ugly American who played a critical role in my first trip to VN in December 2007. “Just read your last two blog posts Lovely,” texted Aaron. “And I have witnessed the exhumation Ceremony in real life once, with a friends’ family, gruesome and touching at the same time.” I was thrilled by this, and so Aaron went on to explain beautifully: “Yes, that Ceremony was amazing. It was a full moon, a bit drizzly and I was observing the family exhume the body, as non-members of the Gai Dinh or family cannot assist. And then the unboxing and the cleaning of the bones, it was all quite amazing and made me feel very organic and human, detached and spiritual. A few days later we carried the little box with the bones, all carefully laid, to the family cemetery, some distance away in the country, the place of final rest.”

Cut to being back now and reviewing some of the retreat materials, I was so moved by the very first question from the AMA or Ask Me Anything sessions. As to those concrete resources in the face of the dying process and our own mortality, it’s here confirmed by a very cool exchange between Shinzen and fellow student Ian on a zoom call.

IAN: “Happy New Year Shinzen. And happy new year to all my fellow travelers in this room. Before I ask my question, I want to say thank you to you Shinzen for all the work you’ve done for us all. And thank you for the way in which you model kindness, generosity and joyful service, as it’s very meaningful to me.” Ian then goes on to ask Shinzen about a particular technique Shinzen employs when teaching children how to meditate that involves interlocking the fingers and lightly touching the thumbs, and to focus on the thumbs. “Every now and then I have a moment of extraordinary stillness, where just that sensation is alive within me. And I’m incredibly alert, but I also feel incredibly small, as I’m just reduced to that tiny perception. And I had the thought the other day, I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a conscious, peaceful death? Curious if this is what it's like being on the brink of death. And so inspired by that thought I wanted to ask you: is that part of what we’re doing here? Are we learning how to shake hands with death? I had the hunch that’s one of the things we’re learning to do.”

Shinzen: “Poetically speaking, we are shaking hands and becoming intimate with the death activity. But we’re also shaking hands with and becoming intimate with the life activity. Both. That’s poetically speaking. Physically speaking, if you’re prepared to experience as T.S. Elliot put it, ”Your greatness flicker” He has a line in Prufrock, one of his poems, something like, you know Death’s coat man? He has this line — “And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid” So when we all are well aware that all the great stuff we’re doing, it’s all going to be taken away, it will flicker away and the coach man says, ‘It’s time to go.’

In Prufrock he was afraid, but if you become intimate with the death force, like you say, very small (Shin touches his thumbs together), you also become intimate with the life force, with the forces of expansion, whether you’re aware of it or not, that smallness was informed by an invigorating vastness. And so, in our practice, as we become intimate with life, we are also intimate with death forces, affirmation and negation, call it what you want. To that extent we are well prepared for the physical dying process and the prospect thereof. You can’t predict with certainty, but there’s a high probability it will be a liberating experience. I’m not saying it won’t be challenging, but it will be familiar territory. And you’ll know what to do.”

On VietNam : Hañh Triñh Làm Lañh ~ A Healing Journey

Xin Chao. Bạn khỏe không độc giả thân mến của tôi? Hello. How are you my Dear Readers? It’s been exactly one month since we last engaged, and although I’ve been away, I’m happy to report a triumphant return to Mỹ, aka America, after a thirteen-day healing journey to the otherworldly land of Viet Nam. From the mountains north of Hanoi surrounding the White Tay village of Mai Chau — pictured beautifully above — to the South China Sea beaches of the central coast, and on down to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the former Saigon and before that Prey Nokor, Viet Nam is one endless, ancient Altar. Gifts were given, offerings offered up, Ceremonies performed, and the blessings back continue on and on and on.

Throughout the ages, Viet people have practiced powerful, enduring rituals, welcoming the Lunar New Year with solemn rites, traditional foods and wholesome fun. Tet is a super sacred time for the Vietnamese, as a massive migration occurs just prior, with millions of people returning to their home and village from around the country and the world. Historically, Tet is considered incomplete without fatty meat, picked cabbage and onions, red couplets, Neu poles for the home altar, firecrackers, and Chung cake, banh chung being the most authentic Vietnamese cake. Rich or poor, all Vietnamese prepare a feast that serves as a New Year’s Eve offering. This is a symbolic invitation for the ancestors to return home and also enjoy traditional dishes, after which their descendants can sense their prescence, feel their support and reap worldly blessings. The modern world may have simplified many traditional Lunar New Year activities, but Tet remains a spiritual constant for Vietnamese people past and present. I was a delighted participant.

I asked my ban, my good friend and the great guide Nguyēn Ba Phuc how to say, “A Healing Journey” in Vietnamese. He’s pretty quick with a joke or the answer to any query, so I was surprised he needed time to figure it out. “Hành Triñh, that is the journey,” he said with throaty confidence. “Hmmmm… the healing journey? Let me think.” We spent the last leg of the trip in the rural countryside amongst the gardens of the town of Cai Lây, celebrating The Year of the Cat at the home of the sweet-hearted Viet nông phu (farmer) Nguyēn Vān Cu, otherwise known as Mr. Haiku. “Làm Lañh, it’s Làm Lañh” Phuc later informed me, as we walked amongst the Water Apple and Dragon Fruit Trees on Haiku’s land “When the cut on the arm goes from being hard and painful to softening and coming together, that is Làm Lañh. When you quarrel with someone, you have the disagreement, but then you make a reconnection and you no longer bicker and are friends again — that is Làm Lañh.” Being blessed to celebrate the New Year, offering prayers and tobacco at the altar of Haiku’s Gai Dinh (family), we’re happy to bring home the spirit of and share stories of Làm Lañh. Thêm sớm (more soon) Chao Tam Biet.