On Hearing the Chant of Intercession at the Temple of Heaven’s Stillness at Ch’angchou

Hsü Chih-mo

Like hearing, couched on one’s back amid long-stemmed rioting grasses in the sunlight welcome as fire’s warmth, the first summer call of the partridge which sounds from sky’s edge up to the clouds and echoes from clouds back to the edge of sky;

like hearing, through the tropic air eiderdown-soft of a desert night when the moonlight’s tender fingertips stroke lightly one by one the scorched fragments of rock, hauntingly, hauntingly borne from afar the sound of a camel bell which nears, nears, and again moves away…;

like hearing, in a sequestered valley of the hills where the bold stars of dusk alone illumine a world bereft of sunlight and the grasses and the trees are bowed in silent prayer, an old fortuneteller, blind man led by a young boy, the clanging of whose gong reverberates through this realm of lowering dark;

like hearing, on some ocean rock savagely struck by breakers tiger-fierce while a black cloudwrack bandages tight the sky, the sea in low and gentle tones confessing its every crime before the storm’s menace;

like hearing, among Himalayan peaks, echoing through innumerable ravines of shining snow the rush of clouds from beyond the sky driven by winds from beyond the sky;

like hearing, from behind the scenes in the theater of life, the onstage symphony which blends laughter of vanity with screams of pain and despair, wild yell of rapine and massacre with shrill song of death wish and suicide;

I have heard the chant of intercession in the Temple of Heaven’s Stillness!

Whence comes this godhead? Earth has no second realm such as this!

Sound of drum, sound of bell, sound of stone chime, sound of wood block, sound of the Buddha’s name…as this music rolls and flows in stately measure through the great hall, stilled are the eddies of numberless conflicts, toned are the clashes of numberless bright tints, dissolved are the numberless hierarchies of men….

This sound of Buddha’s name, this sound of bell, sound of drum, sound of wood block, sound of stone chime (swelling in harmony filling the universe, loosing a speck of the dust of time) brings to fulfillment an endless number ofkarma centuries long;

whence comes this great harmony?—cessation of all movement, cessation of all disturbance in the radiant sea of the stars, in the pipe-song of the Thousand Earths, in the flood of Destiny;

to the limits of Heaven and Earth, in among the hall’s lacquered pillars, on the brow of the Buddha image, in the wide sleeves of my robe, in my ears and at my temples, in the pit of my stomach, in my heart, in my dream….

In my dream, this moment’s revelation, blue sky, white water, warm soft maternal bosom of green grass, is this my birthplace, this the land of my belonging?

Shining of wings in infinity soaring!

Flow of joy from the source of Enlightenment, manifest now in this great, solemn calm, this calm of Release, harmonious, limitless calm!

O hymn Nirvana! Extol Nirvana!