Typical Poetic Components of Sŏn
2. Typical Poetic Components of Sŏn
It is vital not to supervene on a subjectivism or relativism when I look into the typical Korean Sŏn poetry. I highlight the culturally embedded formal features or contexts (temporal and spatial characteristics, contents, narratives, ) in the Sŏn poetry.
The universal traits of general Zen poetry: Zen poetry forbids the personal narratives and self-representations as they can be, not to be too much autobiographical emotions over the religious connectivities, as often found in the (post)modern poetry and even common lyric poetry. It asks for more affective restraints, formal simplicity, lucidity, enhanced tropological expressions, linguistic reductionism, etc. At the same time, paradoxically enough, it urges the masters to experience their own individualized enlightening version, supreme mental or spiritual states, to express such mentality most powerfully and uniquely. These dual aspects (personal experience and impersonal expressiveness) may sound paradoxical or irrational to the ordinary audience at the first sight. Never so!
If a master wants to see and experience the real nature of human mind, he first starts from his individual mind, not from the above or external entity. Then, he ex-presses it out to the observing eyes of other monks or the masses in his own creative and innovative ways. In this imminent moment of seeing the real Nature, the immediate reproduction of the looming truth can be recognized at first by cognitive awareness and then affective synesthesia, and then union of cognitive and affective awareness, which is usually called the state of enlightenment, i.e. real active potential to practice in reality what is enlightened. In this illuminating experience, an objective way of expression to reveal such mental discovery should be spontaneously reconstructed and represented literarily to the perceiving others. In other words, the internal enlightening mentality should be verbalized as a communicable mind.[i]
Zen poetry clearly perceives and recognizes these spontaneous and recurrent subjects and objects in the immanent mind and the objects in the transcendental world, out of which Zen masters co-opt some special features for their mental or spiritual illuminations. They are asked to reveal the mental experience of personal enlightenment concretely and vividly, not abstractly or metaphysically. Their literary representations should not be conceptions or concepts, but the experience itself of the things as they are, i.e. the universal wisdom on how the enlightenment occurs attainably, since it is nobody but themselves that experience the real Self-Nature or enlightenment.
In this context, the depiction of the real enlightenment, a newly uplifted mental state, needs somewhat different verbal communication to express its imminent state of vivacity, immediate and profound. This representing literariness of immediacy calls for new narratives, more natural and vivacious to the real inner Nature of mind, more powerful enough to draw out the deep truth. Accordingly, its narratives are to reconstruct the pure self of the Zen poet (master) and represent it for the readership of or availability to the general public. This transformative faculty of the mental states into a readable literariness requires quite a new literary creativity and its transferring techniques. As a result, Zen poetry can surpass other types of poetry in the sense of description, communication, understanding of the self and world, and life mystery itself.
Based on this fundamental universality of Zen poetry, Korean Sŏn poetry has developed its unique features in accommodation with its own environmental and ethological constituents. The typical traits of the Sŏn poetry can be traced in three aspects; formal aspects (coherence, organization, stylistics), contents aspects (meaningful themes, compelling ideas, imminent values), and literary techniques (union of opposite qualia, indefinite reality, and transcendental metaphors).
In formal aspects, Sŏn poetry uses the rhetoric of condensation, conceit, disconnection, paradox, parallelism, figurization of things, which are almost similar to the rhetoric of modern poetry. Its style is short, concise, semantic-based, metaphor-centered, and 4 line-prevalent. It is the linguistic form that represents the final thoughts of Sŏn Buddhism poetically. In other words, Sŏn takes up a literary medium of expression, called poem, to represent the state of enlightenment experienced by the Sŏn practitioners. In Sŏn poetry, contents are preemptive, not form. In contents aspect, Sŏn poetry likes to catch up the life as it dashes to the master. It is to concretize the external things for better understanding of the supremacy of life, or reality itself. Naturally, it likes to get down to the bottom of the Self-Nature. In techniques, the basic writing techniques can be said as paradoxical usages, which frequently use “the union of opposite qualia, indefinite reality, and transcendental metaphors” (Song 2006: 13).
The union of opposite qualia (metaphors) signifies to distort the normalcy and daily routineness and to let the normal and abnormal be harmonized into a more uplifted mental state. It is oneness of opposite elements towards a higher spiritual dimension. Good examples can be cited as follows; “holding a hog in an empty hand,” “The bridge flows and the water stays clean,” “A muddy ox ploughs the (celestial) moonlight on the water.” The transcendental metaphors are to find a figure of speech which finds similarity in two dissimilar things. It is a metaphoric expression to find sameness in dis-sameness. Good examples are found in “Mud is the bone in the green stone” (Hyuchong), “Go to One Two Three Four/ Come four three two one.” (Mukyŏng) The idea of indefinite reality reflects the fundamental principle of Sŏn, where they don’t distinguish the essence of mind from the physical phenomena. The Sŏn’s reality is to cut off the logical barriers still lingering in the symbols of poems and to transcend the judging mind or dialectical selective mind. The words, phrases, or Sŏn poem itself consist of endless realties and create them on indefinitely, not just implying symbols. A good example can be the poem by Hyobpong below.
[i] Of course, verbalization is a side-effect of enlightenment, not its own target. It is a kind of virtue or grace from the enlightened monks. That’s why the conative stage (actualizing or practicing the mental enlightenment into real action) is so emphasized in Sŏn Buddhism.