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FOR NIRVANA 

108 ZEN SIJO POEMS 

CHO OH-HYUN

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introductory by KWON YOUNGMIN

translated by HEINZ INSU FENKL

Associate professor of English and Asian studies at SUNY New Paltz.

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10

MUSAN¡¯S TEN BULLS

1.Searching for the Bull

Who stamped these left and right prints on my brow?

And who made my self go looking

For my whereabouts, unfindable even for ten million cash?

An arrow that a thousand eyes cannot see,

Which hands cannot grasp, though they extended to knee;

That thief-he steals an abattoir ax, and like an arrow-he¡¯s flown.

2. Finding the Footprints

O famed physician, a thief¡¯s mind¡¯s unknownable, even after you

diagnose his pulse.

Without legal seal, he has sold all the sky and run off

Into lewd joking, into foul words smeared like menstrual blood.

There¡¯s evidence he¡¯s lived his life treading water,

Those traces, dead and bankrupt, guarded by a barren woman,

The fish that tore the net and escaped, caught once again in the net.

3.Seeing the Bull

The shadow stood, with yoke removed, shining in the shade last

night

To heal the laceration, the intangible, as first offense?

I am not yet able to reply the debt of being born into this life.

A shortness of breath, palpitations of the heart-someone is

suffering in a grave pit, above, in the heavens.

It is a procession out of a funeral village with no one shouldering

the bier.

It is the second plowing of the life of a son of a mother¡¯s

illicit love.

4. Catching the Bull

Clutching the nose ring-no vitality, no snare,

How many ten-thousand-step wanderings to find the rule to keep

him bound?

Bandit! Even at death, his life crying with thunder from a cloudless

sky.

The arrowhead¡¯s returning-it¡¯s failed to pierce its mark.

I tried to copy the color of skin that tingles with electric pain,

But what a fate-being able to die, caught in the hinge between

heaven and earth.

5.Taming the Bull

The wasteland of the castle courtyard, with no stone or blade of

grass-

I have cultivated it, as if for punishment, without a plough or spade,

And now, even if Heaven weeps, I know not how to stay away.

The sky makes a seal: the two letters of the ultimate name,

And the sea-unplumbable by any sounding line-

A paddy field needing five bushes of seed rice to be revived.

6. Riding the Bull Home

The rain stopped at the sound of the gong; the water sounded high in

the valley¡¯s sky.

I go bearing news, with the full blossom of a laugh,

Wondering how to bury my soul, and by which family ritual, at my

birthplace.

The dead world is not revivable through a life of crime, and word

gets out

Of my running away to purse a life of a life of thievery, the selling of others goods.

The Yang and Yin symbol remains uncarvablr, regardless the burin

one wields.

7.The Bull Transcended

It¡¯s all right to spit if I have 100 won for the fine money

Just to swallow the hook-as is-what catch could there be?

Even my thoughts of how I¡¯ve lived have absconded somewhere...

The swords of this world-I can find their points with eyes closed,

And the mountain of swords in the next-there are only ten million

blades.

This world or the next-sell it all off, chew cud day by day.

8. Both Bull & Self Transcended

Hee he hee hohohoho wheeheehee whohoho!

Hahaha uhahaha ueee ee huhuhu

Chuckle, chuckle,uauae whoohoohooo hooee!

An incurable psoriasis has spread over the whole of my body,

My eyes, from my last incarnation, speckled with motes in this

five-times-twelve-year cycle(as they count it by hand),

The vast 3,000 worlds destroyed by a single thought, a single stick.

9. Reaching the Source

Lived with a barren woman, brought a butcher into this world,

Incarcerated myself out of self-doubt while I lived high on usury.

Illicit sex for eons, but-ah!-I¡¯m still celibate.

A stone lion by the wayside bit my foot,

But again, since there¡¯s no champion to rise up, and the world¡¯s fallen

over backwards in shock,

I, myself, sit up and try embracing this life.

10. Return to Society

Getting to like the smell of fish, I¡¯m out at market wearing a money

belt.

Get married, throw away the legal wife-shall I try living with a

concubine?

Wooden shoes, those wooden shoes-give one away and still I¡¯m rich.

Sold a wife for 300 won.

Plucked out both eyes and sold those for 300won, too.

I am the leper going to beg for food, to the ridge of the barley field

where the sun comes up-a true leper.

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