If you did not know, I participated in the Jukai ceremony on December 11, 2023, under the direction of Kosho Itagaki, at Temple Eishoji in Rainier Beach. I took refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha and was given the dharma name Koho Ryukan. It may have been Michael McClure who first told me about Dōgen, the founder of Soto Zen. Michael named the creek near his house in Oakland after Dōgen and has a poem in Cascadian Zen after Dōgen. I believe that the Projective poetics espoused by Charles Olson directly lead to the openness of Soto Zen and the death of the ego.
Sam Hamill introduced me to Basho with his seminal translation of Narrow Road to the Interior. Sam was well-versed in Zen parables and told me when I was doing graduate work on Organic Poetry, not to choose a side between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan regarding their disagreement over how a poet should respond to the Vietnam War. I think that tip vastly improved the quality of the essay I wrote: https://paulenelson.com/organic-poetry/letters-of-duncan-levertov/ I now know that Sam was offering me a chance to look at the disagreement from a deeper place than ego.
Of course Kosho was studying Dōgen and Basho long before Sam and Michael and he feels it essential to instruct me on the culture that helped spawn such thinking writers. An excerpt from a recent essay by Kosho on Substack:
🗣️ A Question That Opened a Path
This series began with a conversation I had with a poet friend.
“Why was it in Japan that Dōgen appeared? Why Bashō?”
In trying to answer this question, I undertook a quiet process of reflection—and in that process, I began to notice things.
This was not simply a matter of historical investigation, but of re-situating Dōgen and Bashō within the spiritual lineage of the land… (read more).
Other snippets from recent Substack posts on this subject include:
“A language that listens, not commands….”
“Poetry was not expression — it was attunement…”
“For Bashō, seasons were not backdrops — they were protagonists…”
“The Zen insight that time bestows dignity, not decay…” & many more at: https://substack.com/@kinpukosho1?
This is an ongoing inspiration to me and one that has prompted Kosho to offer to take Bhakti and me to Japan to get a sense of the culture that spawned people like Basho and Dōgen, but also forms like haiku. There is room for up to 15 people on this trip and if haiku inspires you, consider contacting Kosho.
One more note about Sam. The same day Kosho published the blog post linked above, Katie Sarah Zale sent me an old interview Sam did with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air. It seems Sam was tapped into the prophetic realm. Somehow many of us knew that.
