In a perhaps apocryphal tale, the poet Ryōkan was once robbed in his thatched cottage. Allegedly, after being robbed, he “chased the thief, stripped him naked and gave him the clothes he was wearing.” After returning to his hut, he sat naked and alone in zazen and composed his most famous poem:
The thief left it
bright moon
in my window
As translator John Slater writes in his commentary on the poem, “Awakening cannot be taken away, and it shines even brighter when the last trinket is removed.”
This poem is perhaps emblematic of Ryōkan’s unusual approach to asceticism and awakening. Born Yamamoto Eizō In 1758, in the village of Izumozaki, the budding poet renounced worldly life at a young age and was ordained as a novice monk at the Kosho-ji Soto Zen Temple. It was there that he received the name Ryōkan (良観; Virtuous Meditation) from his teacher, Genjō Haryō. For the next four years, he trained under Genjō, sitting in zazen, reading Zen poetry, and doing manual labor. When Genjō’s teacher Dainin Kokusen visited Kosho-ji, Kokusen reportedly “recognized something exceptional in Ryōkan” and took him on as his own student, changing his name to Ryōkan (良寛; Virtuous Broadness). Kokusen received it in 1790 after 11 years of training Incaor formal recognition of the attainment of enlightenment, and the additional name Taigu (大愚; Great Fool). Just a year later, Kokusen died and Ryōkan left the monastery to go on pilgrimage to various locations in Japan. For the next forty years, he lived an unusual life as a wandering hermit, never returning to the monastery, instead living in thatched huts along the hillside, begging for food and writing poems.
Tendon This and That: Short Poems by Zen Master RyōkanTranslators Stan Ziobro and John Slater present a collection of Ryōkan poetry divided into haiku, tanka, and kanshi, or Chinese poems. Inspired by classical Chinese and Japanese literature, and especially the writings of Eihei Dogen, Ryōkan turned to poetry to express the everyday experiences of transience, duality, and the loneliness of solitary life. In the words of Ziobro and Slater, his poems are both austere and playful, sometimes ambivalent about the dual role of monk/poet—and the nature of poetry itself. As Ryōkan writes: “if you see that / my poems are not poems / then we can talk about poetry.” The following poems point to these paradoxes and contradictions and provide a compelling picture of Ryōkan’s determination, above all else, to “walk the true path.”
– Ed.
The world blooms and fades like shifting clouds
50 years have passed like in a dream
Alone in my hut tonight in a light rain
I pull my robe close to me and walk to the window
A goose honks in the winter sky
leaves blown on distant hills
on the way home from the village
– smoke rises from every hut –
I raise my empty vessel
Whatever it takes
if only for a day
of a thousand years
I want to walk the right path
In full monastic robes, untied,
I decided to go through a group of children
who immediately see me and shout:
“Come play handball!”
Life in this world
echoes like a cry
from a mountain
as it fades
Strive and strive and you will never win
but dissolve all desire, and what is there is in abundance
with some vegetables to stave off hunger
I wear my monk’s clothes with ease
to travel alone with the deer for friends
or singing loudly with the village children
I rinse my ears in water from the fall
my soul is a breeze through the mountain pine
It is easy to wake up from dreams in old age
Now I wake up and the church is empty
one of the lights in the booth is about to go out…
deep in the winter night I raise the wick
Days given over to laziness
I leave everything to heaven
with rice in my bag
and wood by the stove
who is interested in delusion or enlightenment
the black dust of fame and fortune?
At dusk I just sat in my thatched hut
as it starts to rain. . . I stretch my legs
I shaved my head and became a monk
I have been living here like Buddha for years
but everywhere people carry paper and brushes
and beg me to write them a poem
Poems? No way
when you see it’s mine
poems are not poems
then we can talk about poetry
♦
From This and This: Selected Short Poems of Zen Master Ryōkan Ryōkan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater (2026), reprinted by permission of Monkfish Book Publishing Company, Rhinebeck, NY.
The post “This and That” appeared for the first time Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
