‘This and That’

In a perhaps apocryphal tale, the poet Ryōkan was once robbed in his thatched-roof cottage. Allegedly, after being robbed, he “chased after the thief, stripped naked, and gave him the clothes he was wearing as well.” Once he returned to his hut, he proceeded to sit zazen, naked and alone, and composed his most famous poem:

Left behind by thief
bright moon
in my window

As translator John Slater writes in his commentary on this poem, “Awakening cannot be taken away, and even shines more brightly when every last prop is removed.”

This poem is perhaps emblematic of Ryōkan’s unconventional 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 ordained as a novice monk at the Soto Zen temple Kosho-ji. There, he was given the name Ryōkan (良観; Virtuous Meditation) by his teacher, Genjō Haryō. For the next four years, he trained under Genjō, sitting in zazen, reading Zen poetry, and performing manual labor. When Genjō’s teacher, Dainin Kokusen, visited Kosho-ji, Kokusen allegedly “recognized something exceptional in Ryōkan” and took him on as his own disciple, changing his name to Ryōkan (良寛; Virtuous Broadmindedness). After training under Kokusen for eleven years, in 1790, he received inka, or formal recognition of attaining enlightenment, as well as the additional name Taigu (大愚; Great Fool). Just one year later, Kokusen died, and Ryōkan left the monastery to embark on a pilgrimage to various sites across Japan. For the next forty years, he led an unconventional life as a wandering hermit, never returning to the monastery and instead living in thatched huts along the mountainside, begging for food, and writing poetry. 

In This and That: Short Poems of Zen Master Ryōkan, translators Stan Ziobro and John Slater present a curated collection of Ryōkan’s poetry, broken up into haiku, tanka, and kanshi, or Chinese poems. Inspired by classical Chinese and Japanese literature, and particularly enamored by the writings of Eihei Dogen, Ryōkan turned to poetry to express everyday experiences of impermanence, nonduality, and the loneliness of his solitary life. In the words of Ziobro and Slater, his poems are at once austere and playful, at times ambivalent about his dual role as monk/poet—and about the nature of poetry itself. As Ryōkan writes, “when you see that my / poems aren’t poems / then we can talk poetry.” The poems below gesture at these paradoxes and contradictions and offer a compelling portrait of Ryōkan’s determination, above all else, to “walk in the true way.”

–Eds.

The world flowers and fades like shifting clouds
50 years gone as if in a dream
Tonight in light rain alone in my hut
I pull my robe close and approach the window

Geese honk in the winter sky
leaves blown over distant hills
on a back road home from the village
—smoke rising from every hut—
I hold up my empty bowl

Whatever it takes
if only for one day
out of a thousand years
I want to walk in the true way

In full monastic robes, resolved,
determined, I pass through a group of children
who see me at once and call out:
“Come play handball!”

Life in this world
like a shout echoing
off a mountain
as it fades away

Strive and strain and you’ll never win
but dissolve all craving and what you have is ample
with a few vegetables to stave off hunger
I wear my monk’s robe lightly
travel alone with the deer for friends
or loudly sing along with the village children
I rinse my ears in water from the falls
my spirit a breeze through the mountain pine

In old age it’s easy to wake up from dreams
I wake now and the temple’s empty
one lamp in the niche about to flicker out—
deep in winter night I raise the wick

Days given over to laziness
I leave everything to heaven
with rice in my sack
and wood by the stove
who cares about delusion or enlightenment
the black dust of fame and fortune?
At dusk in my thatched hut just sitting
as the rain starts . . . I stretch my legs

I shaved my head and became a monk
I’ve lived here for years like Buddha
but everywhere people bring paper and brush
and beg me to write them a poem

Poems? no way
when you see that my
poems aren’t poems
then we can talk poetry

♦

From This and That: Selected Short Poems of Zen Master Ryōkan by Ryōkan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater (2026), reprinted by permission of Monkfish Book Publishing Company, Rhinebeck, NY.