-
Early in his Defence of Poetry, Shelley
undertakes to define art in relation to a "principle"
of "harmony" that "acts otherwise than in the lyre,"
the Aeolian image he deploys to explicate his thesis
that poetry is "the expression of the Imagination" and
that it is "connate with the origin of man" (480). This
principle of harmony undermines all notions of
perspective in art, all presumptions of there being
anything like a separate poetic self or a separate
cosmic force creative in itself and inaugural of human
productivity. The aesthetic base of this harmony, if it
can be said to have a base at all, is meditative
unfolding rather than hermeneutic perception. Art for
Shelley is a journey from selfhood (a relational mode
of subject-object dissociation) to full personhood (an
opening process aligned with interdependent
origination). The method of this journey is not
self-affirmation or self-projection, as the term
"expression of the Imagination" may imply, but
self-emptying exposure to a prior Buddhistic oneness
with all beings, an "origin" dislocated in time and
space yet forever emergent in the moment and accessible
through poetry as a mode of spiritual practice.
-
We get a glimpse of this journey, as I wish to call
it, in the two sentence groupings comprising the
four-sentence discourse on poetry at the head of the
second paragraph of the Defence. The first two
sentences offer what for all practical purposes we may
call a conventional dualistic framework for
understanding poetry, Shelley's term for all art or
creative achievement:
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the
expression of the Imagination": and poetry is connate
with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over
which a series of external and internal impressions
are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing
wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their
motion to ever-changing melody. (480)
The compound construction of the first sentence,
augmented by the second sentence's image of humanity as
instrumental to a variety of inspiriting forces,
suggests that art is one thing, humankind something
else. Despite the implications of the term "connate"
(inborn, congenital), the sentences, taken together,
convey a basal dualism reflected in and extended by the
effort to define. Shelley, possibly in keeping with the
Defence as a discourse about rather than a
demonstration of poetic theory, employs the language of
dyadic construction to explore what must here be
perceived as a relationship between creativity and
human origin. The wind, as the preferred item in this
dual construction, plays upon the awaiting harp,
quickening it to "melody." Shelley thus objectifies his
subject, creating a perspective necessarily outside
that which is to be examined.
-
The second grouping of sentences, however, offers a
different strategy for understanding human creativity,
one that moves well beyond the relational notion of
humankind as an instrument of forces sympathetic to yet
other than itself:
But there is a principle within the human being, and
perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts
otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody,
alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the
sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions
which excite them. It is as if the lyre could
accommodate its chords to the motions of that which
strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound;
even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the
sound of the lyre. (480)
Shelley's syntax here is noticeably convoluted,
confounding cause and effect through reference to a
"principle" that "produces" harmony "by an internal
adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the
impressions which excite them." The internality of the
process is displaced. The "sounds or motions" discerned
as functions of the harp are depicted as adjusting
paradoxically to the very "impressions which excite
them." The two dimensions of Aeolian
activity—functional adjustment and inaugural
impulse—arise integrally, as if from within each
other. Additionally, as the "impressions" which strike
the chords are themselves conceived as both "external
and internal" to the lyre, to recall the earlier
grouping, the locus of adjustment is itself displaced
into an indeterminate rhythmic activity. There is, as
it were, adjusting, but no separable object that is
doing the adjusting. One cannot find here a projective
subject to range against an object or, conversely, an
inspiriting object to range against a passive subject.
The "proportion of sound" itself may be "determined,"
as Shelley puts it, but its "origin," to use his
earlier term, is mysteriously hidden in the activity it
appears to excite. The principle of harmonic
accommodation adumbrated in these sentences offers an
image of humankind, not as a separate instrument over
which inspiriting forces play, but as a displaced
process of interactive creativity inclusive of yet
beyond the dyadic configurations of wind and harp,
external and internal, self and other, and, most
importantly, beyond the dual notion of poetry and
humanity as related forms rather than as mutually
pervasive events.
-
The problem here is that the principle of harmony
specified in this passage as a condition of unity
beyond the melodic constructions of the harp is an
enacted process: it "acts," to recall the third
sentence, and "produces." It does not, however, remain
stable enough for either the poet or the reader to
apprehend it existentially in a discursive context, a
point Shelley seems to be making when he says, later in
the Defence, "Every original language near to
its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the
copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of
grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely
the catalogue and the form of the creations of Poetry"
(482). Discourse can talk about the interactive process
of accommodation suggested earlier in the
Defence, but the closer it comes to the "source"
of the process, the closer it also comes to what
Shelley calls "the chaos of a cyclic poem." To the mind
seeking a definition of what at its origin is a process
of mutual disappearance of one thing, say wind, in
another, say "lyre," the preoccupation with form, the
melody indicated in the first grouping of sentences,
must give way to participation in the "chaos" of the
creative process itself, enacting through reading what
the poet does in writing. And what the poet does is to
enact a displaced spirituality. "A Poet participates in
the eternal, the infinite, and the one," says Shelley
later in the Defence; "as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not" (483).
Like the displaced internality affirmed earlier in the
mutual adjustment of wind and harp, the poet is himself
displaced in time and space. Without "time," "place,"
and "number," he is without perspective, literally
beyond the proverbial fulcrum by which he would move
the lever of his understanding.
-
What Shelley offers in place of such understanding
is a holistic mode of life itself enacted through
image. "A poem is the very image of life expressed in
its eternal truth," he writes elsewhere in the
Defence (485). Such life, however, is not
available to us through a stable perspective outside
the interactive dynamics of a unitary, ongoing
creativity. A "poem," he says in explication of the
theme of eternality expressed above, "is the creation
of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human
nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which
is itself the image of all other minds" (485).
Shelley's image of the mind of the creator as reflected
in "all other minds" finds an illuminating analogue in
Hua-yen Buddhism—Fa Tsang's Hall of Mirrors.
(Hua-yen is "one of the five traditionally recognized
schools of Zen" [Ferguson 317].) Affirming one day that
"One cannot really understand Totality in an immediate
sense before reaching Enlightenment," the Tang Empress
Wu asks the Buddhist master Fa Tsang (A. D.
643-712):
With your genius, however, I wonder whether you can
give me a demonstration that will reveal the mystery
of the Dharmadhatu ["the Infinity and Totality of the
Buddha's Domain"]—including such wonders as the
"all in one" and the "one in all," the simultaneous
arising of all realms, the interpenetration and
containment of all dharmas, the Non-Obstruction of
space and time, and the like? (Chang 23)
Fa Tsang responds by building a room lined with
mirrors on the ceiling, the floor, all four walls, and
in the corners. He then places in the center of the
room an image of Buddha "with a burning torch beside
it" so that in "each and every mirror" one finds
"reflections of all the other mirrors." Asserting that
"The principle of interpenetration and containment is
clearly shown by this demonstration," Fa Tsang explains
that "These infinite reflections of different realms
now simultaneously arise without the slightest effort;
they just naturally do so in a perfectly harmonious
way. . ." (Chang 24). The harmony that Fa Tsang remarks
expresses the Zen Buddhist understanding that mind as
the condition of "Enlightenment" Empress Wu seeks is
not limited to individual skulls. Explaining that "the
mind is timeless and permeates all" and that "Its
function is not merely that of perception and
cognition," the nineteenth-century Japanese Soto Sect
priest Tanzen asserts that "It [mind] is limitless,
containing all phenomena—mountains, rivers, the
whole universe. A fan can soar skyward, a toad fly, yet
never outside the mind" (Stryk and Ikemoto 91). In Fa
Tsang's demonstration, mind and form, like hall and
mirror, implode upon each other. The individual mind
both contains and reflects all things as any given form
both contains and reflects all other forms.
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Shelley's perception of a poem as the "the very
image of life expressed in its eternal truth," together
with his notion of "the mind of the creator" as imaged
in "all other minds" during the act of creation,
qualifies, in the manner of Fa Tsang's demonstration,
mind and form as a creative interactive process both
reflective and productive of a dynamic unity at the
base of life. While the forms remain stable, the
endless reflection of form in every other form keeps
the perceiving eye in a state of endless motion. It is
not motion, however, that impels us to look always to
the future. Nor is it motion that impels us toward the
past in quest of the elusive origin "connate" with
poetry. Rather, it is motion in which origin, as well
as past and future, is always here in the present
through the mutual reflection and interaction of each
form, or poem, as creative process itself. As the mind
of the creator is a moving composite of actions
reflective of and implicate in the minds of all others,
therefore without beginning and end, there is no
beginning and no end to creativity. Creativity subverts
linearity through what Fa Tsang calls the "principle of
interpenetration and containment" (24)—what
Shelley, I believe, is affirming in the cyclical claim
that a poem "is the creation of actions according to
the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in
the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of
all other minds" (485). For Shelley, form and function,
or form and action, to use his vocabulary, are mutually
embedded through an originative process of
interpenetration as a mode of mutual containment. Each
form reflects all other forms, and each form contains
all other forms as the mind of the creator both
reflects and contains all other minds. The Japanese Zen
philosopher Nishida Kitaro sees this process in terms
of interactive consciousness itself: "The act of
consciousness consists in this dynamic interpenetration
of subjectivity and objectivity" (84). The journey from
melodic constructiveness to harmonic oneness accrues
through a process of opening upon origin, or "source,"
as itself the endlessly shifting, endlessly emergent
containment of one thing in and as all other things.
One journeys to such an origin only in the sense that
one encounters it as already existing at the base of
one's being—"perhaps within all sentient beings,"
as Shelley puts it—and as available through the
process, decidedly paradoxical, of engaging in oneself
the very forms, the very melodic constructions, one
must necessarily get beyond.
-
With few exceptions, however, Western critical
thought has difficulty understanding this principle of
mutual penetration and containment in creativity as the
actions of a vital, though centerless, unity. Jerrold
E. Hogle, for example, in a study significantly
entitled Shelley's Process: Radical Transference and
the Development of his Major Works, articulates the
importance of action in Shelley. But, as the subtitle
of his study indicates, he comprehends the process in
the dualistic terms of transference and development
rather than of mutual containment. "There is no
'undifferentiated unity' from which Shelleyan thinking
or writing develops," writes Hogle. There is, rather,
what Hogle calls a "motion between at least two
'externalities.'" Closer in understanding to the dyadic
fluctuations implicit in melodic constructiveness than
to the multidirectional accommodations of codependent
harmony, Hogle's concept of "motion" views Shelleyan
process as "a drive toward a counterpart rising ahead
of it and a harking back to a different one receding in
its wake." The "harking back" that Hogle affirms,
however, does not result in a mode of absolute
containment of mutually creative minds in the present.
It contributes, rather, a unidirectional "drive" toward
an ever-receding future: "It seeks a future
relationship that may carry forward a portion of a
previous one now outside it and already dissolved"
(10).
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While Hogle's notion of a decentering process at
work in Shelley's practice goes a long way towards
explaining the poet's railings against what Hogle calls
"a self-contained Immanence" (6), it does not
appreciably alter our sense of Shelleyan "harmony" as a
bridged togetherness of self and other, inner and
outer, past and present. There is yet for Hogle's
Shelley a power, "an 'invisible influence,'" causing
all these "fadings and changings." This power,
according to Hogle, "is the permanent, though
self-concealing, self-mover causing all these
transpositions, and it is the actual movement from
state to state that turns one coloration into another
without revealing any self-contained point of departure
(any 'seed' leading to the 'flower' and its changes)"
(11). The poet in this state of continual transition
toward the future is forever divorced from the present,
even from himself, moving like a latter-day
deconstructor from one interpretive perching point to
another in a process of endless deferral.
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Subsequent commentaries seem for the most part to
confirm and extend this fundamentally binaristic vision
of Shelley's life and poetry as a mode of endless
perceptual quest rather than of existential fulfillment
in the eternally unfolding originative moment. Kathleen
M. Wheeler, for example, attempts to substitute the
term matrix for center in dealing with Shelley's
philosophy. But in so doing, she comes dangerously
close to denying the poet's preoccupation with origin:
"In Shelley's matrix or field theory of consciousness,
there is no centre, no origin. . ." (14). There are
instead for Wheeler various "centres" that work in
relationship with equally various "circumferences."
This paradigm frees us from the notion of a
"self-contained Immanence," to recall Hogle's
terminology. But it does not free us entirely from the
dualism, admittedly subtle, of the centering process
itself and the attendant notion of a projective subject
located in time and space. Concomitantly, the process
of circumferencing, however shifting and variable it
appears, does not elude the notion of containment as
boundary. Origin as a process of endless unfolding
gives way in critical discourse to variable
demarcation, the process of a perceptually based
constructivism preoccupied with definition rather than
with existence.
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Given the force of these binaristic wrasslings, as
we might call them, it is not surprising to find a
recent commentator, Tim Milnes, arguing that Shelley
maintained a kind of "duplicity" regarding the entire
question of epistemic centers: "like many modern
'ordinary-language' philosophers he maintained a
patient indifference or double-mindedness concerning
the relation between the fixed 'centre' of knowledge
and an impermanent 'circumference' of experience" (5).
Despite Shelley's claim in his letter to Medwin that
his "mind is at peace concerning nothing so much as the
constitution & mysteries of the great system of
things—my curiosity on this point never amounts
to solicitude" (qtd. in Milnes 5), Milnes insists that
"At the same time, his curiosity never waned into
insouciance, but mediated between an inherited
Cartesian epistemic imperative to seek a (perhaps
unattainable) ground for a knowing relationship with
the world, and an emergent view of our relationship
with the world as one which was not soley or primarily
predicated on knowing" (5; italics Milnes's).
The "peace" that Shelley remarks in his letter to
Medwin, a condition arguably resonant with the Aeolian
"harmony" mentioned in the Defence, is
explicated in terms of mediation and doubleness,
idiomatic initiatives that rely on a presumed
distinction between "knowledge" and "experience" and
that by their very nature subvert the implicit oneness
Shelley affirms at the base of his practice when he
avers that "poetry is connate with the origin of
man."
-
If we are to appreciate fully the "harmony" of his
poetic theory, we must, I think, read Shelley in two
directions at the same time. Having moved, for example,
from the first two sentences of paragraph two of the
Defence forward to the second two, we are
invited to move backward to and through the first
grouping to live, rather than simply understand,
Shelley's notion of origin. If poetry is indeed
"connate with the origin of man," it is of the nature,
not only of human life, but of life itself. And life
itself, as Mark Lussier reveals in a recent study of
Romantic dynamics, is for Shelley not a linear
progression from one point to another but a process of
"rhythmic oscillations" depicted in the emerging
science of Shelley's day as wave theory. "This rhythmic
presence, shared by cosmos and consciousness alike,"
writes Lussier, "allows Shelley to argue that: [Poetry]
'is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge .
. .'" (163). Like centering and circumferencing,
harmony may act "otherwise," as Shelley puts it, than
melody. But it nevertheless embraces and folds into
melody as melody, rightly encountered, opens onto a
prior and enabling harmony. It is the aesthetic
counterpart to the cause-effect process in Fa Tsang's
Hall of Mirrors. "Fa Tsang held that earlier and later
events mutually require each other," writes Charles
Hartshorne. "Effects are as necessary to their causes
as vice versa" (64). A truly oscillatory process is one
in which both dimensions of aesthetic
experience—melodic constructiveness and harmonic
priority—die into each other as the creative
mind—a mind continuous, as Lussier affirms, with
the universe—experiences its own creativity as a
mode of eternal fading or dying. "A man cannot say, 'I
will compose poetry,'" writes Shelley later in the
Defence. "The greatest poet even cannot say it:
for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some
invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens
to transitory brightness" (503-4). Neither the wind nor
the "transitory brightness" it appears to inspire can
be separated from the mind, the "coal," that is
simultaneously producing and undergoing the experience.
As Shelley writes in yet further explication of the
process, "this power arises from within, like the
colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is
developed, and the conscious portions of our natures
are unprophetic either of its approach or its
departure" (504). As the very coloring of a flower is
itself the functioning of the flower's emergence, so
fading, transitoriness, is the function of its
creativity. But creativity, the ambient field of a mind
continuous with the universe, is eternal. We die in
creativity not to be reborn in another form but to
manifest as none other than the universe itself. Fading
is the function of creativity, which is in turn the
eternally unfolding collyrium, the necessarily
"transitory brightness," of our inherent oneness, or
original harmony, not with but as the oscillatory
cosmos. Consciousness located in a separate self must
of necessity remain "unprophetic either of its approach
or its departure." The creativity Shelley is describing
occurs in the realm of no-self, or non-self, a place,
if you will, where death is neither loss of one state
nor transport to another.
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Nowhere in the Shelley canon do we see this process
of creative death enacted more forcibly and succinctly
than in the famous "Ode to the West Wind." Comprising
both a perceptual and an experiential context for
understanding the poetic principles set forth in the
Defence (the "Ode" was composed approximately a
year and a half before the Defence), the first
two tercets of the last stanza of the "Ode" reveal the
poet as both a suppliant and an intendant of the West
Wind. The mode of this interactive dynamic is a
displaced voice whose movement from preoccupation with
lyric expression to concern with harmonic oneness forms
around a generative meditative self-emptying that
illuminates the spiritual features of the journey
implicit in the second paragraph of the Defence.
Addressing the wind, Shelley says:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit
fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! (57-62)
We cannot find in this passage a still point, a
center, from which to launch an expedition into
understanding. Like a hall of mirrors, Shelley's poetry
teases the observing eye into endless motion. But the
motion is not linear, moving from one point to another.
Nor is it eschatological, moving from a presumed
beginning to an expected end. Rather, the motion here
is all interanimate. The death implicit in the falling
leaves is at the same time the voiced life of the
forest upon which the wind plays. Harmony is tumult.
Sadness converges into "Sweet," and the plaintive note
of longing in the voice of the suppliant is inseparable
from the persistent imperative in the reiterated "Be
thou." To be the lyre is to be the wind itself. To be
the wind is to be empty of all abiding form while at
the same time inclusive of, indeed productive of, the
very forms that reveal it. Caused by the rotation of
the earth, which is itself caused by the universe,
invisible, unheard, unfelt, literally unperceived
except through the motions, the tonal variations, and
the sensations produced by the objects upon which it
plays, the wind is at once all things and no-thing in
particular, a "cyclic" event without beginning and end.
To be the wind itself rather than to become one with
it, as a dualistic frame of reference might impel us to
infer, is to be, in the moment of creativity, nothing
less than the universe itself. It is to move beyond the
melodic configurations of metaphor and transcendence to
the harmonic empty field of generative oneness as all
things. One emerges, or opens oneself, as creativity in
the mode of each thing's dying into all other things
and of all other things' eternal dying into each thing.
Or, as the famous Ocean Seal of Hua-yen Buddhism
expresses it, "In One is All, / In many is One." Beyond
all notions of inaugural force, "One is identical to
All, / Many is identical to One" (qtd. in Odin
xix).
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In Zen terms, Shelley's "Be thou me, impetuous one!"
expresses the central principle of Buddhist
metaphysics:
Here, O Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very
emptiness is form; emptiness is no other than form,
form is no other than emptiness; whatever is form
that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness that is
form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions,
impulses and consciousness. Thus, O Sariputra, all
dharmas [teachings] are empty of own-being, are
without marks; they are neither produced nor stopped,
neither defiled nor immaculate, neither deficient nor
complete. (Conze 140)
Known as the Heart Sutra, this passage,
recited daily in Zen temples throughout the world,
incorporates the Buddhist principle of
impermanence—of all things being in a state of
eternal change—to advance the notion that all
things are empty of abiding form yet implicate in all
other things. Emptiness, therefore, is not absence, the
nihilistic surmise by which a dualistic frame of
reference might understand it, but, in the words of
Masao Abe, present patriarch of the Kyoto School of Zen
Buddhism, "true Fullness" (Abe 10). The dharma,
the teaching by which this principle would be
understood, is at one and the same time the practice of
emptiness embodied in the forms themselves (Robinson,
Johnson, and Thanissaro 324). To understand emptiness,
one must practice emptiness. To practice emptiness, one
must allow oneself to be all things. "Emptiness empties
itself," writes Abe, "becoming non-emptiness, that is,
true Fullness" (10).
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Given the force of these interactive dynamics, the
central question for Buddhists and for readers of
Shelley alike must of necessity be one of methodology.
How does one be the emptiness, be the wind, in a
context that moves beyond all modes and forms of
dualistic understanding? Shelleyan criticism tends to
answer this question in terms of transcendence. "The
man rises from his state of prostrate surrender to join
himself to the force of the wind," writes Irene H.
Chayes, "master it—fulfilling his [Shelley's]
boyhood ambition to 'outstrip' it (ll. 50-51)—and
turn it into an instrument of his own." The process,
for Chayes, is one of simple inversion: "Passive
becomes active and active, passive; agent and medium,
performer and performed upon, change places" (Shelley
623-24). The result of this inversion is for Chayes a
new transcendentalism, one in which "the man raises
himself to a level above both the human and the mundane
natural" (Shelley 624). A similar dualism informs
Richard Cronin's thesis that the poem expresses "a
contrast within itself between rigid order and
uncontrollable energy" (232). Reinhard H. Friedrich,
writing a few years later, avers that "The last two
stanzas of the 'Ode' intensify the dual states of
despair and hope that are characteristic for the
prophetic and visionary experience, but their
passionate urgency applies most strongly to the
prophet-poet himself who yearns for release and
transcendence" (167). Another critic, Simon Haines,
views the final section of the "Ode" as exhibiting
"something of the odour of megalomania, the sheer
desire for power without the limiting sense of moral
fallibility" (161). Recent studies of the Asian
influence on Shelley continue a line of dualistic
commentary inseparable, perhaps, from Western epistemic
traditions.[1]
"Shelley's prayer 'make me thy lyre' presents the wind
as a singer," writes Asha Viswas. "The poet wants to be
a passive instrument of this singer." Comparing Shelley
to the "poet seers" of Vedic lore, figures who "pray to
the Maruts [phenomena of nature] to spread their hymns
far away," Viswas affirms for the poet a condition of
eternal "desire" as a transcendental base for his
relationship with the world. "Thus the structure of a
poet's desire never changes. It transcends time and
space" (92). Such transcendence, however, serves only
to leave the participant in yet another relational
field—a new and higher condition, perhaps, but
one that begs endlessly for further resolution.
-
For Buddhists, there are no limits to the process of
identification, of opening upon interdependent
origination as the grounds of one's being, and no
authoritative dialectic by which the act may be
systematized. Unlike other spiritual traditions,
including Gnosticism, Pantheism, and forms of Christian
apophasis and via negativa, the Buddhist
understanding of oneness does not rely on the
monotheistic perception of a centrally located source
or an indwelling force or principle that acts to create
coherency. "Monotheistic oneness does not include the
element of self-negation and is substantial," writes
Masao Abe, "whereas nondualistic oneness includes
self-negation and is nonsubstantial" (24-25). As such,
Buddhism offers a generative alternative context for
helping readers explore and understand the full
theoretical implications of mind and form as the
moving, integrative basis of creative enterprise.
-
Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes meditative
self-emptying as a harmonizing end sufficient unto
itself, offers an equally generative alternative
context for helping readers understand the practical
dynamics of the interanimate oneness at work in voidist
documents and acts. The oneness of "One is identical to
All, / Many is identical to One," to recall the
Ocean Seal, inheres in a monadic experience
beyond representational logic. "Truth simply can't be
re-presented," writes the modern Zen priest Steve Hagan
(5). As a Soto Sect practitioner, Hagan is affirming
the principle of oneness iterated succinctly in the
School's leading Japanese philosopher, Dogen Zenji
(1200-1253): "We have to accept that in this world
there are millions and millions of objects and each one
respectively is the entire world" (Cleary, Timeless
Spring 12). Acceptance inheres in identification
rather than in accession to a principle of oneness or
in an individual's mystic joining with a perceived
force or power. Zen meditative practice is particularly
useful here in helping us understand that Shelley was
already the wind prior to his appeal. The answer to the
question "How does one be the wind?" lies not in
perception—that is, in the dual frame of
reference by which one seeks that which is susceptible
of definition, therefore separate from the seeker
herself—but in the continual practice of
self-emptying as an end in itself. The lesson surfaces
with remarkable clarity and precision in the
twenty-seventh case of The Blue Cliff Record, a
major training manual for the Rinzai (Chinese, Lin-chi)
tradition in Zen Buddhism. The case revolves around a
conversation between the tenth-century Zen master Yun
Men and one of his disciples: "A monk asked Yun Men,
'How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?'
Yun Men said, 'Body exposed in the golden wind'"
(Cleary and Cleary 176). Variant translations depict
the master as responding with "That's wholly manifest:
golden Autumn wind" (App 131) or simply with "Golden
Wind!" (Shimano 23). The disciple's question to his
master is, in the words of his latter-day translator,
"What will happen when thoughts, ideas, opinions,
emotional reactions, psychological problems,
attachments, expectations, life, death, sickness, and
old age all fall away and our minds become bare?"
(Shimano 24). The master's response, tairo gimpo
in Japanese, may be rendered loosely in English as
"become the living body of the golden wind" or
"manifest golden wind as yourself" (Shimano 24). The
term tairo is both indicative and imperative.
One must be literally the golden wind of absolute
emptiness (freedom from such attachments as those
listed above) in order to be consentaneously the
absolute fullness of life in all its forms—the
"Totality" of "Enlightenment" Empress Wu asks Fa Tsang
to demonstrate. Eido Shimano Roshi, aware of the
complexity of the term tairo, does not attempt
to translate it directly. Instead, he translates the
master as saying simply, "Golden Wind." The wind
embodies for Shimano both the ontological and the
epistemological at once: it is what one is seeking to
be, and it is simultaneously the process of knowing by
which one will become it. "Golden Wind blows away the
monk's streams of delusions," writes Shimano, while at
the same time "perfectly revealing" the master's "own
state of mind" (25), the state of perfect selflessness
and oneness with all things. Put another way, we may
say that it is what Shelley means when, to recall the
Defence, he says that "A Poet participates in
the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as
relates to his conceptions, time and place and number
are not" (483).
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To be empty of thought and yet to be in a state of
"conceptions," as Shelley calls it, a state in which
"time and place and number are not," is to be free of
thought as representation. Thought as we know it must
die in the very act of its being deployed in order that
our original nature, what Empress Wu refers to as
"Enlightenment," may manifest. The modern Zen Master
Bernie Glassman states the case as follows:
Intrinsically, we are enlightened, we are the Buddha.
Not just us, but everything—sticks, flowers,
trees, stars. But experientially, we are not
enlightened because we have yet to experience this
fact. Without such experience, without such a
realization, the intrinsic, though real, is just
words to us. (16)
Getting to this state of "realization," of literally
making real our "origin," to use Shelley's vocabulary,
requires that we give up our ideas about reality.
"Whatever notion we may have about emptiness is not
emptiness," writes Glassman, "but merely an idea of
emptiness." In giving up our ideas about reality, we do
not come to see another reality. Rather, as Glassman
puts it, combining the indicative and the imperative,
we "Just see everything as it is instead of the concept
we have of it." If we can see that "The concept is not
the thing itself," we will, in Glassman's terms, see
"This world as it is, and that's what emptiness means"
(18-19). Thoughts, to put it another way, must die in
the very act of their emerging so that the thinker may
see that which he already is.
-
Shelley affirms the same principle, I believe, when
in the final lines of the "Ode" he says to the
wind:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (63-70)
What is perhaps so difficult for Western readers to
understand is that the act itself of dying is the act
of awakening. William Keach, for example, offers a
reading of these lines that accepts "death and change,"
but he sees the process in the dual terms of triumph
and loss, "the fierce triumph of temporal life to which
imagination and desire and will themselves belong; that
is what Shelley's style works persistently and
brilliantly to realize" (40). Death in creative
awakening, however, or death as a giving up or a
letting pass the very thoughts our minds are forever
conjuring, is not a matter of triumph and loss. It is,
rather, the actual manifest oneness of the universe
itself. This manifest oneness is for Shelley a matter
not of belief but of awakening practice, a being
"through my lips" the awakening of "Earth" itself, not
just "mankind."
-
From the Zen perspective, the lesson on practice as
itself the awakening of the earth surfaces with
remarkable poignancy in yet another Zen anecdote
involving wind:
As Zen master Pao-ch'e [n.d.] of Mount Ma-ku was
fanning himself, a monk came and said, "The nature of
wind is permanently abiding and there is no place it
does not reach. Why, master, do you still use a fan?"
The master said, "You only know that the nature of
wind is permanently abiding, but you do not yet know
the true meaning of 'there is no place it does not
reach.'" The monk said, "What is the true meaning of
'there is no place it does not reach'?" The master
just fanned himself. The monk bowed deeply. (Yasutani
106-7)
Commenting on the monk's first question, Hakuun
Yasutani says that "the spirit of the question is,
'since sentient beings are originally buddhas, why are
practice and realization necessary?'" (Yasutani 97).
The monk understands, as all students of Buddhism
would, the lesson iterated so bluntly in the important
Nirvana Sutra: "All beings have the
Buddha-nature." What he does not understand is the more
existential affirmation, as conveyed in Zen master
Dogen's revisionist translation, that "entire
being [Japanese, shitsuu] is the
Buddha-nature" (61). Popularly rendered as "All beings
are the Buddha-nature," the revision cuts to the
understanding that Buddha-nature, rendered frequently
as "original nature" or "original face," must be lived
beyond its representations and its meanings as conveyed
in texts and teachings. Addressing the second question,
in which the monk asks Yun-men the "meaning of 'there
is no place it does not reach,'" Yasutani explains that
"his real question" is "'What is this buddha-nature
with which we are originally endowed?'" (Yasutani 97).
The monk is obviously having difficulty getting beyond
the dual frame of reflective thinking with its
tendencies to definition rather than lived experience.
In remaining silent and continuing simply to use his
fan, however, the master, again according to Yasutani,
"exposes his buddha-nature and thrusts it forth. He
thrusts forth muji [nothingness, emptiness]; he
unsparingly reveals his original face" (Yasutani 97).
He abandons definition, together with the entire
framework of representational thought, for the simple
"act," to recall Shelley's term, of harmonic oneness.
Practice is the evocation of oneness.
-
Shelley's insistence on "incantation" rather than on
interpretation as the means of approaching his poem,
together with his concluding question about winter and
spring, is a variant of Pao-ch'e's fanning. Shelley is
enacting rather than simply representing the "origin"
he will affirm later in the Defence as "connate"
with poetry. He is asking the same of his readers.
Denied the reassurance of a definitive response, we are
invited to go back through the poem to engage the
practice of self-emptying implicit in its incantatory
dynamics. That dynamics can, from a Zen perspective, be
viewed in terms of the threefold process Dogen offers
as the base of all Buddhist meditative practice:
To learn the Buddha Way is to learn one's self. To
learn one's self is to forget one's self. To forget
one's self is to be confirmed by all dharmas
[teachings as things themselves]. To be confirmed by
all dharmas is to cast off one's body and mind and
the bodies and minds of others as well. All trace of
enlightenment disappears, and this traceless
enlightenment continues on without end. (41)
The effect of this procedure, what Dogen describes
as being "confirmed by all dharmas" (41), is expressed
poignantly in the widely popular claim by Shitou that
"A sage has no self, yet there is nothing that is not
himself" (Cleary 391). Intrinsically (to recall
Glassman's term), there never really was a separate
self to empty. Empress Wu was already in a state of
"Enlightenment," of oneness with all things, though she
was not awake to it. The meditative enactment described
by Dogen, which appears like a movement from self to
non-self, is in essence an opening upon an original
interanimate oneness that is always here and that,
again in Dogen's words, "continues on without end"
(41).
-
A cursory glance at the overall movement of thought
and image in the "Ode" provides a glimpse of this
meditative process as Shelley intuited it. The first
three stanzas correspond roughly to the first fold of
Dogen's claim that, popularly rendered, to study
Buddhism is to study the self. Addressing the wind
first as a "breath" (stanza 1), then as a "Dirge"
(stanza 2), and finally as "Thou who didst waken from
his summer dreams / The blue Mediterranean . . ."
(stanza 3), Shelley affirms that the wind is an
awakening process aligned with death. The wind in these
early stanzas, however, is yet other than the poet
himself. It is a force to be apprehended, pursued, and
appealed to by a self that is yet other than what it
discerns. In stanza 4, however, Shelley commences the
process of self-forgetting, longing first to be a
"leaf," then a "cloud," and finally a "wave," anything
that can be taken up by the wind. This
longing—together with the declaration, "I fall
upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" (54)—implies
his understanding, perhaps intuitive, that the separate
self is nothing but an inhibiting illusion that must
give way to one's initial identity with all things. The
stanza's concluding couplet, however, with its
assertion that "A heavy weight of hours has chained and
bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and
proud" (55-56), signals that the process of
self-forgetting is not complete. Shelley is yet
attempting to define something in relation to a
perceived self and so is caught yet in the dualistic
frame of seeking to know what can never be apprehended
through ideas. It is not until stanza 5, with the death
of thought itself as definitive process—"Drive my
dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves
to quicken a new birth!" (64-65)—that the poet as
a separate self disappears into his practice ("my
lips"), into prophecy itself as that which is beyond
affirmation and denial.
-
Beyond definition, one with the earth upon which it
plays, Shelley's "Wind" (69), no longer identified as
autumnal, is also one with the poet as the practice
itself of poetry—a practice that extends beyond
writer and reader to effect the awakening of earth
itself. Caught up in the interfluent dynamics of this
creative breeze, the reader encounters concomitantly a
state of spiritual unknowing or non-knowing that opens
upon ever-new possibilities for awakening to the full
sufficiency of the lived moment. As the monk simply
bows and the master simply continues fanning, leaving
students of the koan in the state of what Zen
calls "no-mind" (Suzuki, esp. 28-29), so Shelley simply
withdraws, leaving us in a state of questioning that
should, if we take literally his reference to
incantation, drive us back into the processes of the
poem as a self-emptying enterprise sufficient in itself
to the evocation of human "origin" as the act of
harmonic oneness with all things. The process is, for
all practical purposes, a poetic variant of what Zen
calls zazen (Japanese, meditative sitting).
"Zazen reveals the total reality of interdependent
origination," writes the modern Zen master Shohaku
Okumura. "When we let go of thought, we put our whole
being in the reality of interpenetrating reality. This
is how we are verified by all beings" (114-15). In a
variant of Shelley's question to the wind, we may well
ask: Are we equal to the task?
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