Customer Reviews

Chinese Zen Poems: What Hold Has This Mountian

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This book is a well-chosen cross-section of Chinese Zen poetry. It also supplies one of my favorite items in translations of foreign poetry - the original text. The strength of this book is the broad stretch of time covered, as indicated by the organization of the index: pre-T'ang dynasty, T'ang, Sun, Yuan, Ming, Ch'ing. This breadth also means, however, that not all the poetry is of the quality one find's in more focused collections ephasizing the masters Wang Wei, Han Shan, Li Po... Several of these collections appear as "selected sources" in this book.

My favorite in this volume is The Flow and Seed Sequence, a series seven poems written by the Zen Patriarchs beginning with Bodhidharma (d. 536) with poems added to the series nearly 2 centuries later. The translations do an excellent job of retaining the concrete imagery typical of Zen poetry e.g. from Liu Chang Ching "All along the trail of moss, / I follower your wooden shoeprints". We find inventive descriptions of concret images in Liu Fang-Ping "The Big Dipper slopes; / the Great Bear bends down". There are also unusual mentions of doubt from Wang An Shih "Often I doubt the Buddhist way, / that nothing truly exists".

Despite its many good attributes, this collection failed my ultimate test: rarely was I enticed to read and reread a poem. I would still recommend A Drifting Boat or Cold Mountain first. But to even be worthy of comparison to those volumes is strong praise.