Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

by Li Po

The birds have vanished down the sky.

Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

From Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, translated by Sam Hamill, Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, 2000, page 94.

Comment

In his introduction to The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy (Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2017, page xxiii), John Brehm wrote the following in response to the preceding poem: “This kind of seeing requires mindfulness—the intentional, nonjudging awareness of present-moment experience. In my own practice of neighborhood walking meditation I have found that looking intently, without judgment, at the most ‘insignificant’ things—hubcaps, weathered fence posts, gate latches, bolts on fire hydrants, weeds, trash on the street, and so on—has the most profoundly awakening effect.” For me, this kind of attention and awareness is a source of haiku. And sometimes, when I read haiku, I have this feeling of disappearing, absorbing a transcendent unity with whatever the poem is about, even if it’s not a mountain.

Postscript

Whether the allusion is intentional or not, I find a delightful echo of Li Po in the following poem by Mykel Board, from his book Vertical in the Sun (New York: Tsuri-dōrō Press, 2025, page 56):

mountains

—shutting off the radio—

just the mountains

We could probably all write our variation of this theme, this returning to unsullied nature, although its being sullied or not is beside the point. We could also write about listening to music without distraction. What matters is the attention.

—4 August 2026