Of Morning Glories and Pine Trees
Matsunaga Teitoku on the beauty of impermanence
There’s a saying among Buddhist circles that captures the differences between three of the most popular Buddhist traditions: “Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.”
The saying is imperfect, as generalizations tend to be, but there’s some truth to it. Vipassana stresses the importance of mindfulness, of studying one’s patterns of thought and emotion and the relationships between them. Tibetan (or Vajrayana Buddhism) is famed for its colorful paintings of mandalas and thangkas, which are richly detailed and symbolic of various Buddhist teachings and ideas. And Zen places an emphasis on koans — stories, dialogues, questions, and statements that are meant to provoke what is known as “the great doubt” in Zen.
At the heart of Zen practice is the notion that the real teachings of Zen Buddhism can’t be understood or conveyed by words alone. They can only be felt, intuited, and experienced first hand. As the six-century poet and Third Patriarch of Zen, Sosan, put it in Shinjinmei:
Words! Words!
The Way is beyond language,
Words never could, can not now, and never will describe the Way.
The futility of words didn’t stop Sosan from writing a thirty-six verse poem about the way…
