Plum Blossoms Amid Fallen Snow: Dogen’s Chinese Kanshi

From the time of Shakyamuni, Buddhist masters have questioned the ability of language to express reality beyond discrimination and conceptualization, and yet these masters all tried to express this reality using language, including Dogen.  That said, sometmes it can be difficult for students of the Way to grasp what Dogen is saying.  To help his monks (and us, students from later generations) recall important points, Dogen encapsulated many of his teachings into short poems that we might hold lightly in our minds.  For this purpose he wrote a total of 60 Japanese waka and 450 Chinese kanshi.  (Kan means Chinese and shi means poetry.)  Later, in the 17th-18th century, a certain Soto Zen scholar-monk named Menzan Zuihō, when he was old, thought what a shame it was that many young practitioners do not have access to these poems which are brief and uncomplicated and truly helpful for understanding Dogen.  So he made a collection of them for our sake.  One prevelant theme is snow, a symbol for the unity of the one and the many.  Another is advice to a Zen person who had either asked Dogen a question directly or requested advice in a letter.  In this series we will look at six of his kanshi carefully and listen to numerous others and a few of my own for fun.