Poet captures Taoist's spirit in 'Monastery'

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Book Critic

"LIVING AT THE MONASTERY, WORKING IN THE KITCHEN," poems by Eric Paul Shaffer. Leaping Dog Press, paper, $12.95 Publication celebration For "Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen" Refreshments and poetry 7 p.m. Nov. 16, Borders Books & Music, Kahului, Maui

But Eric Paul Shaffer's latest poetry collection comes with instructions: "Do your work. Stop. Listen. Eat. Wash your bowl. Sit still. Breathe."

The Maui writer's poems are as deceptively simple as these instructions. To live that simply is a difficult thing, even for monks, as is made clear by this collection, inspired by the life of a cook and janitor in the Buddhist-Taoist monastery of Kuo-ch'ing in the T'ien-t'ai Mountains of China during the T'ang Dynasty (8th century).

The cook, Shih-te, is famous in Taoist annals as the companion of the master Han-shan. Abandoned and orphaned, Shih-te is given a home at the monastery called Cold Mountain. There, he turned a skeptical eye on the the monks, who seemed to him to be chasing enlightenment so hard and missing it at every turn.

Shaffer, who lives in Upcountry Maui now, studied under a translator of Han-shan's poetry and then later met Red Pine (Bill Porter), who had translated the 49 poems of Shih-te, the cook-janitor and friend of Han-shan ("On Temple Walls").

Shaffer was delighted with Shih-te's cynicism and humor, and felt a kinship with him. At one time, Shaffer was a teacher in a Japanese university who did not understand Japanese well enough to fully participate in the life of the school; he was, he recalls, "amongst but not of." Similarly, Shih-te lived in a monastery but was not of it and was certainly not considered a candidate for enlightenment. He scrawled poems on walls, sneered at the monk's prissy ways, laughed loud and passed wind loudly.

Musing on Shih-te's works one day while lounging in the hot sun on a friend's houseboat, Shaffer rolled off the edge into the icy water, hauled himself back onto the deck and began writing poems in Shih-te's voice — "textless translations," he calls them, with a brazen humor worthy of his inspirer.

A great deal of this collection is about teetering on the edge, about jumping off (or not), about words trembling on the lip.

In one poem, Han-shan and Shih-te find an old man sitting on a cliff's edge, left there by his son, who lacked the courage to push him over (a solution, then, for the problems of caring for the aged). The man is laughing and refuses to fall over or be pulled back. "All for nothing," he giggled, "all for nothing." This is finely distilled Taoist thinking: Tao (translated as "The Way") embodies a belief that all our accomplishments, all our struggles and the things we hold dear are nothing; to follow The Way is to calmly, even joyfully, let life have its way with us. Sitting on the cliff's edge, the old man knows this.

Another image in these poems is that of rice — rice being washed, rice steaming, rice in bowls. Rice is nourishment but also can nourish greed; cooking rice is Shih-te's work and the source of his musings.

Those who debate the legitimacy of putting words in a dead philosopher's mouth will miss the point: If Shih-te is at all as Shaffer has imagined him, he'd find such an argument a great joke — as though such niceties mattered when the truth is being told. More important to consider is Shaffer's skill and his poetic gift: to capture a world and a way of thinking as elusive and yet nourishing as the steam from a pot of bubbling rice.

And to follow instructions: "Read. Stop. Listen. Eat. Wash your bowl. Sit still. Breathe."