Enlightenment (satori in Japanese) sees into the secret ground or hidden life of things. Life is revealed in a manner that, as Thomas Merton says, ‘evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held and studied as object, because it is not ‘a thing’. It is not reached and coaxed forth from hiding by any process under the sun, including meditation’.

This seeing-in-depth is the heart and life of Zen. It is a ‘seeing’ that cannot be put into words, yet what is seen, is mirrored all around us, in the life of ‘heaven and earth’. Zen, with remarkable delicacy and skill, has down the ages made use of poetry (and other arts) to express the wonder of ‘wondrous being’. As we see from texts like the Platform Sutra, poetry was often also used by Zen Masters to test the depth of a disciple’s in-sight. It was in this way that Hui-Neng was chosen as the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen (Chan).

However, Zen poetry, like Zen itself, is not the sole preserve of East Asia. Many expressions of Zen are to be found within our own literary tradition, as pointed out some years ago now by that great expert on all things Zen, R. H. Blyth. Over the course of the retreat we shall be looking at various aspects of Zen-poetry and contemplating the spirit it seeks to reflect. So our main task, while sharing and enjoying some superb poetry, will be to reflect on the life of the poetry itself, a life that liberates us - and the world - from all our usual modes of ‘object’-ification

For people brought up in the cultural traditions of East Asia the ‘seat of thought’ is not the brain but the heart. So, for example, when Buddhists refer to mind, they point not to the head, but to the chest. What they are pointing to is not merely a rational faculty, but one uniting the functions of the head and heart. At its best, i.e. when fully developed, this mode of ‘seeing with the heart’ represents a fundamentally different way of experiencing the world.

Central to Saint-Exupery’s wonderfully telling story The Little Prince is this same distinction, between a rational, objective mode of seeing and a ‘seeing with the eyes of the heart’. Buddhists in Korea and Japan underline the difference when they talk of ‘the small mind’ and ‘the big mind’. The ‘small mind’ is calculating, fearful and ego-centred while ‘the big mind’ is grounded in a fundamental openness and clarity of vision which resonates directly with the world around us.

But, as that most profound of teachers, Martin Buber, taught, the heart is not merely an open receptive dimension of our being, but also an active, expansive opening to the world. This is no generalized or abstract opening, however, but a genuine response to whatever is before us - a man, a tree or a river. As Buber himself put it: ‘responsibility is to be brought back from the province of specialized ethics, of an ‘ought’ that swings free in the air, into that of lived life. Genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding…A dog has looked at you, you answer for its glance, a child has clutched your hand, you answer for its touch, a host of men moves about you, you answer for their need.’

Meditation is our surest and most direct means for developing greater awareness, clarity and emotional balance. On all our retreat days we practise a form of meditation called ‘mindfulness of breathing’. This practice when undertaken with diligence leads, according to Buddhist teaching, directly to Enlightenment - freeing us from fear and sorrow and even from death itself. In the words of one of the most ancient of Buddhist texts:

• Mindfulness is the path to the deathless
• Heedlessness is the path to death
• The mindful do not die;
• But the heedless are as if dead already.

           The Dhammapada, II 21