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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 FENKLE 

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

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11

REGARDING MY PENMANSHIP

I looked at the stuff

I scrawled yesterday:

It¡¯s appropriate-like a confession

of all my life¡¯s crimes.

I should¡¯ve just tossed that brush

and gone to sleep, right?

The paper, crammed with blood-ink

I ground from my aching heart,

Spread wide as the sky-is it an affront

to Heaven?-my body trembles,

Mashed to a pulp, even the source

of thoughts I wrote just now.

12

WEEKEND SCRAWL

As he departed last weekend, having rested for the night,

an old man said,

The world

is like an untraveled thread,

like the skin on a fan,

like the splayed wing of an insect.

His body spread with moxibustion wormwood in the bright blood,

he left,

navel plenty red.

13

WILD FOX

One walks into the worldless text,

One walks out

And when the two meet, each to each ,

they are wild foxes.

14

HOASRE

Buy into this world, and you¡¯re

saddled with some ingratitude,

The paper¡¯s not fit for the floor, but

still, you stain it with perilla oil;

And-naturally-you¡¯ve got to let some

words out beyond those walls.

15

SPEAKING WITHOUT SPEAKING-1

Eoseongjeon, Gangwon province, on

the funeral day of the potter, Old Man Kim:

There was no funeral ceremony or mourners, but there was a rumor

that his wife, who had died thirty years earlier, appeared with her

hair down, and holding onto his bier, she cried, Look here, look

here! Leave me, leave me, at least your fiery anger when you go! and the dead Old Man Kim replied, All of my anger,anger, I made into pottery, pottery.

Actually, this was

a rale told

by the bier-bearers.

16

SPEAKING WITHOUT SPEAKING-2

an old fisherman from Daepo

on the shore of the East Sea; when he:

goes to the sea-he becomes the sea

goes to the temple-he becomes the temple

wherever his life may go

know him as a wave

17

SPEAKING WITHOUT SPEAKING-3

don¡¯t try to tell me it¡¯s good, the valley of the Cave

of the Thousand Buddhas in Outer Seorak

I should be lying there, on that just of rock

gazing up at the sky

Listening to the sound of water

flowing beneath the stone...

18

SPEAKING WITHOUT SPEAKING-4

who painted the mural

in the Museol shrine hall

a stork, a blind carp

in its beak

craning its neck

awaiting the artist¡¯s return

19

SPEAKING WITHOUT SPEAKING-5

On the second of last month

a head monk came

and asked me the meaning

of Bodhidharma¡¯s coming from the West

I told him that Inner Seorak¡¯s ᅟᅲᆷ´ç¹Ç Valley

there are lots of flat rocks.

20

SPEAKING WITHOUT SPEAKING-6

The rugged farmland at the temple

working on the dike between the paddles-

Master! Master! People say they hear

the sound of paddy water

flowing through their bodies!

Life is like that-

a paddy with a broken dike,

thirsting endlessly.

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