Reading the sutras deep into the night,
I look up at the dark night sky,
Listen, all alone, to the cry
of the distant sea—
The 1,000 sutras, the 10,000 treatises,
all just waves blown in the wind.
♦
Excerpted from For Nirvana: 108 Zen Sijo Poems, © 2016, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.
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