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SGI Quarterly
A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education
Soka Gakkai International Quarterly Magazine
Number 51
ISSN 1341-6510
IN THIS ISSUE:
The Poetic Heart:
Connecting Humanity
January 2008
SGI Quarterly
A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education
January 2008
Soka Gakkai International Quarterly Magazine
Number 51
CONTENTS
Feature:
Introduction ..........................................................................1
Poetry in the Air: Interview with Sarah Wider .....................2
Restoring Our Connections by Daisaku Ikeda .....................5
The Rose and the Nightingale: The role of poetry
in Persian culture by Dr. Hossein Elahi Ghomshei..............6
So Much to Say, So Much to Do by Hector Verdugo..........8
The Light of the Poetic Spirit
by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali ...........................................10
Poetry, Flame of Hope by Thiago de Mello.......................12
When I Walk by Eleanor Margolies...................................13
Poetry is not only words on a page (p. 2)
Around the World: ..................................................................22
Poetry Awards; “My Revolution” in South Africa; ChinaJapan Normalization Commemorated; Betty Williams
Delivers Culture of Peace Lecture; Caring for Our Elders;
Day of Peace in Singapore; Culture of Peace Exhibition in
Dubai; Youth Take the Lead in Antinuclear Movement;
Sonja Davis Peace Award
On Vocation: ...........................................................................26
Growing with the Earth
The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra: ..............................................28
Making “Life” the Keyword of the Coming Age
The ocean is an unending source of inspiration (p. 16)
Old English Poetry by Paul Bibire .....................................14
Ocean Culture and the Poetry of China
by Shu Xiaoyun..................................................................16
People:
Heart-to-Heart by Nomsa Mdlalose, South Africa .............18
Shout It Out by NYCCA, Japan..........................................19
Special: ...................................................................................20
Salute to Poets by Daisaku Ikeda
The SGI Quarterly aims to highlight initiatives and perspectives on
peace, education and culture and to provide information about the
SGI’s activities around the world. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the SGI. The editorial team (see inside back cover)
welcomes ideas and comments from readers.
In Chinese culture, painting, poetry and calligraphy are known as the three
perfections (p. 29)
Justin Jin/Panos Pictures
What is poetry?
When we feel the
pangs of love or the
sweep of inspiration—
the soft chafing of our
exposed hearts against
the textures of the
world—why are we
more apt to express
ourselves in a poem
than in a paragraph?
The poetic heart
reaches out, seeking
expression and
connection. It is a heart
that tries to cast a
bridge between
ourselves and the
world; and that bridge
may be built by words,
movement, color or
music. These
expressions form the
core of all human
cultures and help define
our diversity and
uniqueness, as well as
showing us our
commonality.
The poetic heart, or
spirit, is synonymous
with the spirit of peace.
The loss of this spirit,
this sensitivity to life,
describes the pathology
of our ailing planet, the
apparent withering of
our humanity. To
nurture the poetic spirit
in our own lives is to
nurture hope for the
future.
This issue of the SGI
Quarterly celebrates the
poetic heart, as it
celebrates the 80th
birthday this month of
SGI President Daisaku
Ikeda, who has
frequently called for the
restoration of the poetic
sensitivity in us all.
SGI Quarterly January 2008
1
Poetry in the Air
Interview with Sarah Wider
Sarah Wider is professor of English and Women’s Studies at Colgate University in Madison County, New York, U.S.A. A founding
member, and current president, of the Emerson Society, she is the author of The Critical Reception of Emerson: Unsettling All
Things and Anna Tilden, Unitarian Culture and the Problem of Self-Representation.
2
traditions, students for whom
poetry matters greatly. There
are students, for example, for
whom hip-hop music is big,
or students who participate in
a poetry culture with their
friends. It’s in spoken word, in
the music they dance to. For
these young people, poetry is far from
a dead form: it’s the air they breathe.
A Communal Art
SGIQ: Can you talk more about
forms of poetry that isn’t words on a
page?
SW: So much poetry comes from oral
traditions. Here, poetry has never
been envisioned as something that
would be written down for just one
individual to read at a time. Poetry
was always understood as vibrant,
“Poetry is that which speaks to
our hearts, enabling us to see
more clearly what we each need
to do in any given moment and
what our responsibility is.”
immediate,
unending,
always meant to be shared
communally.
I already mentioned youth
culture. You have people
who are doing spoken word,
where people are using their
voices for social change, calling awareness to real inequities. This
is where there is a lot of the impetus
for poetry and where poetry always
has been the voice of the people.
The folk tradition in poetry goes
back—I think you could say “forever.” Because the power of the spoken
word is the power that has always
been available to everyone. It wasn’t
the privilege of the few, it has always
been the words that have been available to all people to create something
meaningful to share with everybody.
Any time people are protesting and
are calling out rhythmic or rhyming
chants, there is the impetus of poetry
behind it.
SGIQ: How have you encountered
poetry among the Pueblo people of
the Southwestern United
States, with whom you
have a deep association?
SW: Here there are also
songs that go back “forever.” There are songs
that people can’t put any
date on because they are
remembered over time
and have been kept within the community, passed
from generation to generation. People will just say,
“That is a very old song,”
and one of the ways they
know that is because
Very Quiet there are words in that
Paula Varjack CC BY-SA
SGI Quarterly: What is poetry?
Sarah Wider: My definition of poetry is broad and lively and open. I
think of poetry as a wonderfully
active presence in our lives. Of course
it comes in the form of words, but it
also means a way of perceiving the
world around us—our relationships,
our role in this world and in those
relationships. Poetry gives us the
opportunity to think about things
together.
Of course, poetry means words on
the page, but it also can be the words
that we speak or the words that we
have listened to over time. Poems
appear in songs, and they are given in
teachings from one generation to the
next. Poetry is that which speaks to
our hearts, enabling us to see more
clearly what we each need to do in
any given moment and what our
responsibility is.
SGIQ: How would you assess the
health of poetry in contemporary society? Is there enough poetry, too little
poetry, in people’s lives today?
SW: For certain sectors of
society, I would say there
is definitely not enough
poetry.
To give one example, I
had a student in a class I
was teaching last year
from a relatively privileged background. He
came right out and said:
“Poetry doesn’t matter, it’s
a dead form.” And while
some of the students
agreed with him, there
was a great deal of discomfort from students
who come from different
©Erich Schlegel/Dallas Morning News/Corbis
Tewa Dancers From the North perform the Eagle Dance
at a Pueblo arts and crafts show in New Mexico, U.S.A.
©Jason Florio/Corbis
song that aren’t in daily use any
SGIQ: Do you think there is a greater
“I also think of poetry as
longer.
need today for public poetry?
a quality in our lives, perhaps
When people are getting ready for a
SW: Whether fair to certain 20th-cena quality of relating
particular dance, for example, on a
tury poetry or not, there is certainly
to other people.”
feast day—I can only talk about those
the perception that the most “sophisbe more accurate to say that the
that are appropriate to be talked about
ticated” poetry of the century turned
impulses within poetry aspire to
beyond the community, where the rest
inward and adopted a detached voice
something close to what happens
of us are welcomed—people will gaththat observed, but did not involve
within the Pueblo song.
er together for weeks beforehand and
itself within, society. In a word, poetcreate the songs together.
ry privatized. In the UnitIt’s hard to explain, and
ed States there has been a
my understanding is
strong distrust of poetry
indeed small. The songs
that takes on public conare always connected to
cerns or speaks in an
songs from the past. There
overtly public voice. Such
are always the songs for
works have been castigatwhatever is being danced,
ed as “propaganda poetbut the songs are always
ry” or dismissed as ideocreated anew each time by
logical. We don’t seem to
those particular people
want the poet talking
coming together.
about public issues.
It reminds me of the
And there is something
transformative power in
very small-minded or
poetry—poetry’s ability to
shortsighted about the
place us within a larger A literary café in Baghdad, 2003, where poets, writers and journalists have met for over way that the judgments
understanding. It might
a hundred years for dialogue and debate have been made. OftenSGI Quarterly January 2008
3
4
©Kevin Fleming/Corbis
times those judgments
have come from within
an academy that protects certain kinds of
poetry. It also tends to
suggest that there is
only one audience for
poetry, too, a very educated audience, and
that this is the superior
audience. This has been
deeply troubling for me
wherever and whenever it occurs, because it
creates an elite audience for poetry. Which
is very bizarre in a
democratic society.
So when I look to the
public aspect of poetry, the public
voice within poetry, what becomes so
forceful is the role of poetry that [the
American philosopher Ralph Waldo]
Emerson (1803–82) spoke of and
which Walt Whitman (1819–92) took
up in his own work as a poet. Here,
the poet was the advocate of the people and the poet was a prophet, the
one who would say the hard, unpopular things that no one wanted to
hear. And certainly in today’s society,
and probably any society, that is precisely what a poet can do.
I certainly love prose, but poetry,
because of its ability to deliver images
differently from prose, has that capacity to speak to us that much more
directly and in many ways more intimately, to make us feel that we are
standing alone and perhaps more vulnerably. I think that capacity of language in poetry has the power to
deliver us our truths.
When I think about Daisaku Ikeda’s
poetry, he has always had that voice
that is very direct and very appealing
in two senses. Appealing to the reader first in the sense of being very
accessible. A person can just pick it
up, they don’t have to have a PhD in
English to read it. You can sit and read
it and think about it and use your own
mind to understand this poem.
The other sense of the word
I turn to poetry when
friends cannot be
reached, when judgment is the mode of
operation where I work,
when violence dominates. In the words of a
poem, the reader finds
revelation, reassurance,
insight, companionship.
“I have felt this, seen
this, done this.” It
makes one think “Here
is how I would say this
very thought, if only I
could speak so clearly.”
SGIQ: What does “the
poet” stand for, and is
Poetry at Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York
there a poet in all of us?
SW: I do believe that we can all be
“The poet was the advocate of
poets. I think that often people think
the people and the poet was a
that because they don’t have a particuprophet, the one who would say
lar way with words, that excludes them
the hard, unpopular things that
from being poets. Or, because they
no one wanted to hear.”
aren’t comfortable with written poetry,
“appealing” is that in his poems he is
that puts them at a distance. But I think
always asking us to do something, to
it is good to remember that the origins
take his words and understand what
of the English word “poetry” can be
our responsibility is. So in this sense,
traced back to the Greek poesis, meaning
he is appealing to us to understand
to create or put into action, and we are
that there is something to be done in
all capable of creating or putting somethis world right now. And again I
thing into action.
think that is the public aspect of poetI also think of poetry as a quality in
ry. I think that is very powerful and
our lives, perhaps a quality of relating
very necessary in our world right
to other people. A kind of attentivenow, or in fact in any time and any
ness that we are willing to pay to
world that I can imagine into the furanother person. A willingness to pay
thest foreseeable future. I do think
attention to what is going on around
Daisaku Ikeda stands in that tradition
us, to bring a certain clarity, to truly
of the individual who is willing to say
listen to what a person is saying to us
what is unpopular and what is the
beneath the language that they are
risky thing to say.
giving us: What is really troubling
them? What do they really want to be
The Poet in Us All
doing with their lives?
SGIQ: Can you describe, from a perSo I think poetry is about the qualisonal perspective, what you find the
ty of attention as much as anything
deepest, most satisfying experience of
else. Perhaps the quality of intention
poetry?
as well. So in that sense I think we can
SW: Quite simply, poetry has been the
all aspire to be poets, because each of
one constant in times of upheaval. It
us can bring that act of listening to
speaks solace, comfort, hope in times
each other. And also be looking for
of loss. When human communication
that quality of attention and intention
in real time fails—and it does all too
in our own lives and help others disoften—poetry succeeds.
cern that in themselves.첸
Restoring Our Connections
By Daisaku Ikeda
H
pain, those suffering from injustice and other wrongs or societal
ills.” Nelson Mandela read
Mtshali’s poems in prison, drawing from them energy to continue
his struggles.
The Brazilian poet Thiago de
Mello, lauded as the protector of
the Amazon, also endured oppression at the hands of the military
government. On the wall of the
cell in which he was imprisoned,
he found a poem inscribed by a
previous inmate: “It is dark, but I
sing because the dawn will come.”
They were words from one of his
own poems.
Amid the chaos and spiritual
void that followed Japan’s defeat
in World War II, like many young
people of my generation, I gained
untold encouragement from reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass. The overflowing freedom of
his soul struck me like a bolt of
empathetic lightning.
Now more than ever, we need
the thunderous, rousing voice of
poetry. We need the poet’s impassioned songs of peace, of the shared
and mutually supportive existence of
all things. We need to reawaken the
poetic spirit within us, the youthful,
vital energy and wisdom that enable
us to live to the fullest. We must all be
poets.
An ancient Japanese poet wrote,
“Poems arise as ten thousand leaves
of language from the seeds of people’s
hearts.”
Our planet is scarred and damaged,
its life systems threatened with collapse. We must shade and protect
Earth with “leaves of language” arising
from the depths of life. Modern civilization will be healthy only when the
poetic spirit regains its rightful place.첸
Daisaku Ikeda
uman beings are each a
microcosm. Living here
on Earth, we breathe the
rhythms of a universe that extends
infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this
vast outer cosmos and the inner
human cosmos, poetry is born.
At one time, perhaps, all people
were poets, in intimate dialogue
with nature. In Japan, the Man’yoshu collection comprised poems
written by people of all classes.
And almost half of the poems are
marked “poet unknown.”
These poems were not written
to leave behind a name. Poems
and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart
take on a life of their own. They
transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to
another.
The poetic spirit can be found
in any human endeavor. It may
be vibrantly active in the heart of
a scientist engaged in research in
the awed pursuit of truth. When the
spirit of poetry lives within us, even
objects do not appear as mere things;
our eyes are trained on an inner spiritual reality. A flower is not just a
flower. The moon is no mere clump of
matter floating in the skies. Our gaze
fixed on a flower or the moon, we
intuitively perceive the unfathomable
bonds that link us to the world.
In this sense, children are poets by
nature, by birth. Treasuring and nurturing their poetic hearts, enabling
them to grow, will also lead adults
into realms of fresh discovery. We do
not, after all, exist simply to fulfill
desires. Real happiness is not found in
more possessions, but through a deepening harmony with the world.
The poetic spirit has the power to
“retune” and reconnect a discordant,
divided world. True poets stand firm,
confronting life’s conflicts and complexities. Harm done to anyone, anywhere, causes agony in the poet’s heart.
A poet is one who offers people
“The cloud-seas of the heavens
are riled by waves.
The moon a ship rowed into
hiding behind a forest of stars.”
—A Japanese waka-style poem
written some 1,300 years ago,
in the Man’yo-shu
words of courage and hope, seeking
the perspective—one step deeper, one
step higher—that makes tangible the
enduring spiritual realities of our lives.
The apartheid system of racial segregation was a grave crime against
humanity. In resisting and combating
this evil, the keen sword of words
played an important role.
Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali is a
South African poet who fought
against the iniquities of apartheid
with poetry as his weapon. He writes:
“Poetry reawakens and reinforces our
real, innermost strength; our spirituality. It is the force that makes us
decent people, people who are filled
with empathy for those in need or
Daisaku Ikeda is the president of the
Soka Gakkai International. He is a
prolific and widely published poet.
This is a shortened version of an essay
published in The Japan Times on
October 12, 2006.
5
The Rose and the Nightingale:
The role of poetry in Persian culture
By Dr. Hossein Elahi Ghomshei
P
ersia has been admired as a
land where people walk on
silk carpets and talk the language of poetry.
Poetry in Persian culture is not
simply an art: rather it’s the very
image of life, terrestrial and celestial; the perennial philosophy, the
holy scripture, the minstrel, the
music and the song, the feast and
revelry, the garden, the Rose and
the Nightingale, and a detailed
agenda for daily life.
In the lyric poetry of Rumi, Sadi
and Hafiz you can hardly find a
sonnet that does not contain the
wine, the bard and the beloved. In
didactic and mystical poetry, commonly in rhyming couplets, the
same theme of Love runs throughout
like running brooks of milk and wine
and honey of Paradise as described in
the Koran.
The word saqi in Persian literature is
the counterpart of the muse in Western culture and fulfills exactly the
same service as the muse to inspire the
poet, to illuminate what is dark, to
raise what is low, that the poet may
assert the eternal providence and justify the ways of God to man.
In Persian poetry, as in all good
poetry of the world, Love is the greatest circle of attraction and affection,
with no one left out of the circle. The
story of David, the prophet of Love,
who had 99 wives and still yearned
after another one, according to religious traditions, is interpreted by
Rumi as a reference to the 100-percent
nature of Love: If there is a single person in the whole world whom you
hate, you are not a lover.
Sadi, in one of his famous sonnets
(ghazal), says:
6
ing in the words of Rumi is finally
returned to God, the substance; the
forms are but shadows. Let zealots
fight over shadows and names, but
the lover is after truth, which is the
reality, the named. Rumi recommends:
Seek the names no more
But be in pursuit of the named
Find the moon in the sky
Rather than in the ponds and
brooks.
Love is the common religion in
Persian poetry:
I’m in Love with the whole world,
for the whole world belongs to my
beloved.
Love is at peace with all religions,
all ethnic groups, and all colors, languages, races and tribes, as expressed
in hundreds of sublime poems in Persian poetry:
O my Christian beloved,
O my Armenian friend,
Either you come and be a Muslim
Or I will take the girdle and become
a Christian.
In the realm of Love, there is no difference between a mosque and a
monastery.
You can behold the light of the
eternal beloved wherever you turn
your face.
—Hafiz
Love celebrates the meaning rather
than the form and modes. The mean-
Religion and creed for us,
As all the wise do know,
Is an ardent Love for the
Vision of our beloved.
—Rumi
I cannot step out of the sanctuary of
my beloved
O my friends, excuse me,
This is my religion.
—Hafiz
The Essence of Love
The religion of Love, according to
Persian poets, is not a faith to acquire:
we are all born with it. It’s our divine
nature. We all are born in Love with
beauty, truth and the good; this is our
universal heritage.
The word nafs, which means soul
and self at the same time, has been
defined as a substance that loves, that
desires, that wishes.
If you are asked who you are, you
can reply: I am Love; I love, therefore
I am. Amo, ergo sum.
If we are born with such a good religion as Love with one commandment
sunriseOdyssey CC BY-SA
that comprehends all the good and
beauty and truth, what are those other
religions each with a different scripture and commandment?
The answer in Persian poetry is that
all the messengers and apostles of
God have come to reconfirm what we
already knew in our nature.
The prophets are but reminders of
the eternal truth written in the book of
our heart.
The essence of Love is selflessness,
which can be achieved by the spiritual wine of unity.
Love is when thou and I would be
merged into one. This unity that
comes from Love is the sure sign of
divine manifestation in us. Where
there is Love, there is God.
Rumi, in one of his most loving
invocations addressing God, says:
O my lord
Thou art the essence of the spirit in
us.
Thou art the essence of affection
Between man and woman.
When man and woman become one
In love making, that one is thou.
The differentiation between divine
Love and human love does not exist
in Persian poetry. Love, when refined
and purged of self, is holy and divine
wherever it appears.
Other such superficial differentiations between secular and celestial,
worldly and heavenly, earthly and
Godly, have no place among Persian
poets.
When a person is in Love, whatever
he does is a service to God. His heresy
is better than the faith of non lovers;
his doubt smells of certainty, his bitter
words are sweeter than honey
because his incentive in all is Love and
affection.
Rumi says, “Enter the circle of
lovers and find yourself in the midst
of paradise. Do not wait until the day
of judgment; sit happily in front of
each other now, look with Love and
affection at each other and say peace
be with you. This is paradise.”
The Bosom of Existence
Such is the religion of love that, like
a celestial alchemy, it can transmute
war into peace, credit into cash and
sin into salvation; and like the legendry panacea, it can cure all fatal diseases like avarice, hatred, hypocrisy
and envy; and like the long-soughtafter elixir of life, it can give eternal
life; and like the most desired love
potion, it can make a person beloved
by all.
Rumi, after thousands of poems in
praise and description of Love, says:
If I speak of love constantly until
resurrection, the blissful
Qualities of love shall not come to
an end;
And no matter how eloquently I
express the virtues of love,
When I gaze at the fair face of love, I
am ashamed of whatever I have said.
So I confine myself here only to a
very brief account of the seven valleys
or cities or stations of love, as narrated in detail in 5,000 couplets by Attar,
a forerunner of Rumi and of Shehrzad
in the tales of Persian Nights:
1. The Valley of Quest: The first valley
of love is called quest or seeking.
Quest is the first flame of love kindled in the heart of the pilgrim. It is
a vague remembrance of the realm
of union when we were united with
our beloved.
2. The Valley of Love: When the flame
of quest gradually consumes the
pilgrim’s thorns of selfish attachments and base secular relations, he
is set all aflame and enters the valley of love enveloped in fire. This is
the fire that devours hell.
3. The Valley of Gnosis: Gnosis is an
intuitive knowledge that is the illumination and enlightenment of the
durable fire of the previous valley.
In this divine light, the pilgrim
achieves the ability to know people, to hug them and to pardon
them. “The earth is crammed with
heaven, and every common bush is
afire with God.” Here all the
opposing elements kiss each other;
the day thanks the night for her
darkness, and the night pays her
tribute to day for his brightness.
4. The Valley of Independence and
7
When the Nightingale sees the
Rose,
It starts singing his joy;
But I am dazed and dumb in the
presence of Thy vision.
—Sadi
7. The Valley of Annihilation: This last
station of the pilgrim is when he
loses himself in the intensification of
that sense-dispelling amazement
and alights in the realm of nothingness. In this seeming nothingness he
regains whatever he has lost in the
8
So Much
to Say,
So Much
to Do
By Hector Verdugo
Persian School/Getty Images
Needlessness: In this valley the pilgrim comes to understand (with the
gnosis of the previous valley) that
God is free from all need to his creation; and reclining on the throne of
perfection, seemingly needs no
Nightingale to praise His Rose, no
angel to sing His transcendence.
This is of course like the coyness
and disdainfulness of a mistress
that enhances the thirst of her
lovers; this is the ice that melts not
by the fire of love but rather intensifies that fire.
Needlessness is the attribute of
God, but the pilgrim here acquires a
share, however meager, of that
divine quality, which makes him
the richest king of the world.
5. The Valley of Unity: When in the
tempest of needlessness, all creation
is gone with the wind, and there
remains no sun, no moon, no being,
no entity, the pilgrim has his first
vision with the One. The beings are
not annihilated but rather disappear like a shadow in the presence
of that eternal sun.
6. The Valley of Amazement: Beholding the One who is all, and all that
is One, is ever followed by deep
amazement and perplexity. This
amazement keeps the pilgrim silent
because the experience is beyond
word and expression. All Persian
poets who have attained this station
share the same deep silence, and if
they write poems, it is the expression of their inability to speak:
The Persian Prince Humay meeting the Chinese
Princess Humayun in a garden, c.1450
absolute existence of God and
achieves perfect peace and security.
In the bosom of existence there is
no room for death or dearth or
deprivation or limitation of chains
and fetters. Nezami, the creator of
the best Persian metric romances,
describing the night of his union
with the bride of the world, speaks
of a chamber where there is no room
for nonexistence. It was in this station that the great martyr of love,
Mansoor Hallaj, cried out: I am the
truth and was taken to the gallows.
In conclusion, I wish to reiterate that
Persian poetry is the most precious
national wealth of Persia and the most
intoxicating wine of Shiraz we can
offer mankind around the world.
And may peace be upon the
passionate pilgrims of the world.
November 2007, Tehran, Iran첸
Professor Hossein Elahi Ghomshei is a
specialist in Persian mystical literature, aesthetics, and English and
American literature. His weekly lectures on Persian literature on Iranian
national television have made him
Iran’s favorite television personality,
with a more than 86-percent popularity rating among viewers of all ages.
Hector Verdugo is a peer navigator for
Homeboy Industries, an organization in
southern California which helps rebuild the
lives of former gang members after prison.
He himself joined a gang when he was 14.
At the age of 24, he gave up his criminal
life. Hector started to write poetry as a
result of taking part in the Homeboy Industries writing class. He is also an outreach
speaker for Homeboy Industries and is currently raising money to launch a poetry
magazine Homeboy Press next year.
What is your experience of writing a
poem?
We have a healing circle right here
at Homeboy Industries. We start off
with prayer and poetry. We go into a
subject and talk about it, about how
the subject is related to your life. I
remember [the poet] reading something about “from grapes to wine,”
and I zoned out when I heard that.
Then I wrote something straight
away. It was cool, it was pretty rough.
I took it with me somewhere, to a
retreat in northern California. Then I
just made it a little fuller, and I read it
at the end of that retreat. I was very
satisfied with the way I wrote it—
everyone liked it.
How about other people’s reactions?
We are surrounded by people who
are just like us. We come from the
same world, and we say our story in
certain ways, and we present our frustrations and our joys. When you think
deep and put it in some kind of poetic form, it’s only 200 words long, but
in that short time, you make someone
feel what you felt, whether it be hurt,
Los Angeles Times photo by Annie Wells
joy, love or hate. When I hear my
friend reciting the poetry of his life, he
is giving me a glimpse of his soul. I
wouldn’t have known about that in
any other way. Nobody wants to open
up and express themselves, especially
not Chicanos. We are very private
people, but when we write poetry, it
is like an open book.
So does poetry get to the heart?
It is a tribute. There are people from
all over the world who are famous
poets. There are different perspectives
and totally different worlds. There are
people from Japan, South America
and Africa; expression is great,
whether it be music or poetry or whatever. I would say that poetry is thinking and trying to make sense of something. It’s not just off the top of your
head; it takes energy and deep thinking. Sometimes you are digging away,
writing something, and you feel pain
and anger. You want to express it, and
words start coming to your mind.
Sometimes I get a word and I think, “I
don’t really know that word.” Then I
doubt myself, pick up the dictionary
and say, “That was the word I was
looking for.”
Do you find it pushes you?
Not a lot of people want to expose
their souls. It takes courage to say, “I
am going to write this down, and I
might have to eventually read it to
somebody.” I want to take one word
and have it mean so much, which,
Hector Verdugo
with my limited vocabulary and education, is frustrating. Then I find
myself getting caught up in other
activities that don’t require deep
thinking.
When you first discover you have a
voice as a poet, what does that feel like?
It’s cool—there is so much to say. I
want to be able to scream at the top of
my lungs and express more than
words; I want to give more, write
some kind of drama. There’s so much
more to do.
Do you feel that you discovered poetry
at the right time in your life?
Helen Harrop CC BY-SA
I’ve prayed to God and asked for
understanding, and I feel he has
answered me in so many different
ways. I think about my
life and other people
and why we act the
way we do or perhaps
fail and sometimes
succeed. A big puzzle
has been put together
for me. I don’t know if
that’s a universal
thought; it is just life. It
inspires poetry. All the
different walks of life,
everyone’s different
experiences, the way
people see love and
emotions and circumstances and physical
stuff. Poems will come to you beautifully in your mind, but then it’s gone.
To get it down on paper is hard work,
and it takes discipline.
It sounded like you want to change
something there with your poems.
What we do right here at Homeboy
Industries, we change people’s lives.
It’s beautiful to be a part of. If someone could record this, this is poetry; it
feels like it.
What is your plan for the immediate
future?
Write more, lock myself in a
room. . . .첸
My Vine
I’m a grape yearning to be wine
Squash me
See my soul, my flesh
spills its juices.
Let it stand exposed
Rotting for all to see
I sit still marinating in ghetto air
I fill your glass, sip me.
Let me overwhelm your pallet with
My exotic flavor, taste my rage,
Mixed with honor and passion,
swish me in your mouth
And taste the hint of humility, love,
and hate.
Excerpt from “My Vine”
by Hector Verdugo
9
The Light of the Poetic Spirit
By Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali
10
of my anthology, the drum
becomes the symbol of the transmission of vital information and
important news, good or bad.
The “boom! boom! boom!”
sound was a wake-up call to the
complacent white minority to
heed the cries of the oppressed
black majority. The “boom!
boom!” sound was also a rallying cry for all the oppressed people to rise up and fight the evil
system of apartheid.
As in all fields of human
endeavor which involve emotive language through the use of
creative skills that invoke the
muse, poetry has a whole range
of presentation from the most
sublime to the most militant and
radical.
Consider this untitled meditation on the poet from James
Matthews, whose collection Cry
Rage stands as a balancing beam
of the imaginative mastery of
realism, presenting poetry as a
potent contrapuntal force—a weapon
of righteousness—against evil.
©Seikyo Shimbun
P
oetry is the language of emotions and a medium for articulating feelings, opinions,
ideas, thoughts and beliefs. Much
more than an artistic pastime, it is
the spiritual repository of human
dreams which originate from the
depths of the subconscious.
To understand these poetic verities and artistic functions is to master the whole essence of life. And
that means true liberation from the
shackles of convention which is
synonymous with oppression and
exploitation.
The poetic spirit enables us to rise
above the level of other living
organisms to use our mental, physical and spiritual endowments to
deal with the complexities of our
universe. The poetic spirit can
immure both the practitioner of
poetics and the acolyte from even
the most extreme of external pressures.
The poetic spirit equips us with
Dr. Mtshali meeting with SGI President Ikeda in Tokyo, 1991
vital skills to deal with all types of
ble-footed movements of the muse
conditions of life. A portrayal in
that infuses us with poetic spirit?
words, sustained by the faculties of
our five senses—as well as the sixth
The Oral Tradition
sense of balance and the seventh of
Long before the written word was
imagination—sets us on an even keel,
created, an oral tradition existed
enabling us to face the demands of life
which blended with song and dance
and cope with the struggles of existo convey meaning. This tradition
tence. Poetry brings us into unison
played a vital role in the black poetry
with our surroundings, helping create
movement against apartheid, the sysa rhythm with the cosmos, so that we
tem of brutal racial separation and
can live in harmony with other living
discrimination practiced in South
beings in an ideal environment. We
Africa until 1994.
invoke the help of the sun, the moon,
The influence of oral tradition has
the stars, mountains and rivers.
been supplanted by the vagaries of the
Since time immemorial we have
print media. I cannot stand at a street
burst into song and dance and sung
corner or subway and recite my
praises to the beauty of flowers and
poems. Although the first priority is
the abundance of fruits for our enjoyself-expression, the purpose is comment. All this fecundity is encapsulatmunication and sharing ideas, opined in the nutshell of the poetic spirit
ions. In my poem, “Sounds of a
like a pearl in the belly of an oyster.
Cowhide Drum,” which is also the title
How is it possible to capture the nim-
Freedom owns the poet’s soul
He shall not be garbed in
A cloak of ideology
His voice not laced by
Legislation
His voice, the voice of
Birds: a robin heralding hope
A nightingale lyrically lamenting
pain
An eagle emoting the people’s
Power
On a bird-wing he will streak
From freehold to the dungeon
His songs—freedom songs filled
With fire; the words flaring
Flames
Sounds of
a Cowhide Drum
The poet’s fervor fueled with
Strength gained from the draughts of
Intoxicating water drawn from an
Oasis of deep dank poisoned
Wells
By contrast, most of my poems are
satirical and humorous. This portrait
of “The Poet,” for instance:
Through the night
The typewriter sounded
Clatter-clatter-clatter
Like the sonorous ring of an
auctioneer’s bell
The heedful owl hooted hilariously
The birth of a new bard,
“Hail! A poet is born.”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
I am the drum on your
dormant soul,
cut from the black hide of a
sacrificial cow.
I am the spirit of your
ancestors,
habitant in hallowed huts,
eager to protect,
forever vigilant.
Let me tell you of your
precious heritage,
of your glorious past trampled
by the conqueror,
destroyed by the zeal of a
missionary.
I lay bare facts for scrutiny
by your searching mind, all
declarations and dogmas.
...
Boom! Boom! Boom!
That is the sound of a cowhide
drum—
The Voice of Mother Africa.
The mole stopped
To listen under the bedewed soil,
But the frumpy frog
Full of malice croaked a curse
Through the whispering of dreamers
The writer wrote and wrote
Deaf to the nocturnal chorus
Of pompous praises and raucous
curses
Matthews was born and raised in
the colorful District Six of the city of
Cape Town. I come from the tiny rural
town of Vryheid, from the village of
KwaBhanya, where life was still
steeped in custom and tradition, until
the missionaries came to proselytize
to the various indigenous peoples,
dividing us into different churches
and denominations.
Apartheid was the epitome of divisiveness. Its antithesis is the poetic
spirit, a spirit that transcends boundaries and crosses all the borders of
culture, ethnicity, race, color, creed,
gender. Even in the dark belly of the
system, the apartheid jail, I experienced how apartheid blurred the lines
between the jailor and the prisoner.
The former was imprisoned by fear
and insecurity of his own undoing.
The latter, though physically shackled and thrown in the dungeons of
despair, was spiritually still free to
rise above the pain of confinement
that was meant to destroy the
strength to fight for freedom.
As long as the flame kindled by the
poetic spirit remains alive, hope will
always spring eternal, enabling us to
triumph over the forces of darkness.첸
Excerpt from “Sounds of a Cowhide
Drum” by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali
©Otto Lang/Corbis
Dr. Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali’s
anthology Sounds of a Cowhide
Drum (1971) was one of the first books
of poems by a black South African poet
to gain wide distribution, offering a
rare view of the experiences of black
South Africans in the apartheid era.
After living and teaching in New York
for many years, Dr. Mtshali has recently returned to South Africa.
11
Poetry, Flame of Hope
By Thiago de Mello
Chuck Davis/Getty Images
Article XII
It is decreed that nothing
will be obligatory or banned.
Everything will be permitted,
even playing with rhinoceroses
and walking in the afternoons
with an immense begonia in the lapel.
Only one thing is prohibited:
to love without love.
©Seikyo Shimbun
L
ike any artform, poetic creation touches the soul through
its beauty. But beyond the aesthetic quality itself, poetry must have
some ethical purpose—to serve life
better, with the power of the word
that embraces the heart and the mind.
Poetry lays the truth bare. It plants
hope. It lights the way forward in the
fight against all that scorns the dignity of our human condition. In these
dark days of humankind, we need
poetry by our side.
Poetry helps me to preserve the
Amazon forest, to promote cultural
exchange in Latin America and to
defeat the fierce columns of social
injustice, causes to which I have
devoted my life for years and years.
Poetry and humanity—they can’t be
separated.
I learn. And I learn from the poets
that walk with me. They don’t allow
the flame to die away. When first I
Thiago de Mello and Daisaku Ikeda, 1997
read Songs from My Heart, by Daisaku
Ikeda, I learned perseverance. I also
learn from the life of my people; they
are all the people of the Earth. People
who read me, from all the corners of
the world, tell me that I am not
singing in vain. I don’t know them.
But I know that I share their hope.
When I was in prison, I read on the
wall of my cell my own lines, written
by someone who had need for them:
“It is dark, but I sing.”
It must be said: the word is not the
only source from which the light of
Article XIII
It is decreed that money
nevermore will be able to buy the sun
of future mornings.
Expelled from the great coffer of fear,
money will be transformed
into a fraternal sword
in order to defend the right to sing
and the feast of the day that dawned.
poetry comes. It comes from music,
painting, dance, images, the silence
of sculpture; it is in pop songs, it is
born from the symphonic concert
that engulfs reason to call forth
human compassion.
Strident voices fall silent. Guns rust.
Acts of generous rebellion wither. But
poetry endures, leaves the paper on
which it was first written, crosses
darkness, penetrates the tyrant’s walls
and lands, powerfully, in the painful
chest. Tyranny kills poets, burns
books. But the power of poetry persists in the poet’s song, warning that,
in the lines of the song, waiting is not
knowing. He who knows, builds his time,
doesn’t wait for it to happen.
Without poetry it is impossible to
raise a harmonious human society.
Poetry lies at the foundation of peace,
which humankind deserves.첸
—From the Amazon rain forest,
November 2007
Final Article
It is hereby forbidden
to use the word Freedom,
which will be excised from the
dictionaries
and the treacherous swamp of mouths.
From this moment on
freedom will be something alive and
transparent,
like fire or a river,
or like a seed of wheat
and its dwelling will forever be
the heart of man.
Excerpt from Thiago de Mello’s “Statutes of Man” (Os Estatutos do Homem), written in 1964 as a reaction to the military junta which had seized power in Brazil that same year, issuing a series of repressive extra-constitutional decrees.
Thiago de Mello’s poetry has been celebrated in his native Brazil
and around the world since the 1950s. During the years of military dictatorship he was arrested and imprisoned on more than
one occasion for his resistance, while publication of his works
was banned. Now in his 80s, he remains active in efforts to preserve the Amazon rain forest and win social justice for the people
of Amazonia. This article has been translated from Portuguese.
12
When I Walk
By Eleanor Margolies
I
t begins with a feeling of restlessness: I seem to have become
obsessed with something seen
out of the corner of the eye, something
not quite understood—a turn of
phrase, a gesture, an object on the
street. The making of a poem is an
attempt to see, to gather or to understand the meanings that float around
these peculiar objects of attention. It
might mean following a thread of language—a word, a pun, a mishearing—or a memory, a feeling. It means
being led somewhere unexpected.
For me, the experiences of poetry—
reading, writing, thinking about it—
are deeply connected with the city and
moving through it: mulling things over
on the bus, reading a few lines and
then looking out of the window. Daydreaming. The link with travel arises
partly because poetry has its existence
in between other parts of my life. It
accompanies the travel to work, or the
lunchtime sandwich, or the journey
home after meeting friends. It is as
everyday and as necessary. It is a sustaining secret.
But there is a more fundamental connection between
physical movement and the
movement of the poetic line,
between walking and writing.
“How many shoe soles, how
many oxhide soles, how many
sandals did Alighieri wear out
during the course of his poetic work, wandering the goat
paths of Italy,” the Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam wondered. Like Dante,
Mandelstam composed on the move.
He described the footstep as “linked
with breathing and saturated with
thought.” It is a kind of walking that
sometimes seems hard to rediscover in
a city—just automatic enough to let the
mind wander.
The shape of a familiar journey is
remembered by the feet and legs. You
don’t have to think about where to go.
The walk may seem to lack the excitement of exploration but there are constant small discoveries—a change in
the color of the leaves from one day to
the next, new scaffolding, posters on
the wall, foxes following their own
paths. A softer kind of attention takes over. And, sometimes, the wool-gathering
takes on a rhythm—a rhythm
imposed variously by the
weather, the kind of shoes
you’re wearing, how tired
you are—a rhythm that has
words to it.
Once that first walking
phrase is found, the rest might be written at a desk, at home or in a library,
sitting in an armchair or in bed. It’s like
the note from a tuning fork, or the
drummer’s first beats with crossed
drumsticks—it defines the key, or the
rhythm, of the poem but might itself
disappear from the final piece.
Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how
to walk. Instead, I carry bags, run for
buses and look out for wildly-driven
cars. But perhaps one evening, walking
home, the streets are still enough that
you can hear your footsteps ring out on
the paving stones. You long to be home
in order to write down the line; you
long for the walk to continue so that
the next line might come.첸
Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?
For hours on end we practiced dying:
an imagined blow sinking into the belly,
knees softening, the shoulder rolling into
the ground. We exaggerated gravity,
persuading muscles to believe our story.
The last he taught called themselves angels
because they weren’t like other people.
He could watch them all day, moving
around him wordlessly, like messages
that go directly to the spine.
Seven years later, our teacher told Death
he needed more time for folk tales,
mystery plays, shysters and fools.
He brought forty years of training—
all he knew about the body—
to the hospital bed, to village yoga,
to a rehabilitation he devised himself,
persuading his muscles to remember.
It is January and muscles are cold.
The work is slow. I remember falling,
and falling for hours, softly.
First published in Poetry Folio 61 by the Kent & Sussex
Poetry Society
Eleanor Margolies lives in Camberwell, London, and is a poet,
theater designer and editor. She has published poems in several magazines and won an Eric Gregory Prize from the Society
of Authors for The Foot and Its Covering (unpublished).
13
Old English Poetry
By Paul Bibire
O
14
Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” often
paired and often translated. They give
an intense sense of weary longing in
the midst of transience, desolation
and darkness, transmuted into a hungry quest for enlightenment.
Inherited Tradition
Old English poetry certainly grew
out of an inherited tradition: all the
ancient Germanic languages in which
“This awareness of transience,
the passing of human
achievement and of life itself
constitutes the most acute
cumulative expression of a
philosophical grief at the passing
of things that I have encountered
in any literary work.”
©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Vitellius A.XV f.132
ld English (Anglo-Saxon) was
the earliest form of English to
be written, and so the language of the oldest surviving English
texts. These date from roughly
between 700 and 1100 CE. Much poetry composed in Old English survives,
about 30,000 lines in total. It was
mostly collected and preserved in
four manuscripts, handwritten books,
written just before 1000 CE, though
some poems are probably much
older. So our perceptions of the poetry are mostly determined by the
(largely unknown) purposes, interests and taste of the compilers of these
manuscripts.
All this poetry was composed in
effectively the same meter. The metrical unit is the rhythmic phrase (halfline), usually of two stresses, linked
into pairs by alliteration. End-rhyme is
hardly ever used, and the meter is not
syllable-counting. Although it is theoretically very different from most later
poetry, it feels in most respects natural and immediate to a modern ear
when spoken aloud.
Some poems recount or refer to
inherited heroic legend. Much else is
religious. Some of this is “public”
poetry, fairly obviously intended to
edify its audience; other religious
poems seem rather to be private and
personal meditations on the human
condition. A few poems deal with
events of recent history, whether as
propaganda or memorial. Some, such
as the Riddles, seem to be primarily
intended for entertainment, although
they come from a learned, Latin tradition. Not all surviving Old English
poetry is particularly good. Some
poems, versified saints’ lives or versified translations of books of the Bible,
have little or no present-day interest
other than for specialists. But some
poems still speak very directly to
modern readers, for instance, “The
The only surviving manuscript of “Beowulf”
poetry is recorded (Old English, Old
Saxon, Old High German and Old
Norse) use more or less the same
meter and the same diction, and in
some instances very similar subject
matter. This poetic tradition must
have been brought by the English
invaders in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, when they conquered and
settled the former Roman province of
Britannia. Although there certainly
was close later contact between these
cultures, they must have inherited this
poetic tradition from their common
past. Such traditions, of meter, diction
and content, must go back far beyond
the conversion of the English to Christianity in the seventh century, and
long before they learned to write in
the Roman alphabet.
The poems themselves report oral
performance of oral poetry, recited or
improvised, “sung” to the harp at celebratory feasting and drinking, and
never read aloud from books. However, most or all of the surviving
poems seem to have been composed
and transmitted in writing, in some
instances for several centuries. For
instance, the poems of Cynewulf, who
may have been ninth-century, are
“signed” by their poet with runic
acrostics. The runes are only visible on
the page; a hearer would merely hear
the rune-names, which make reasonable sense as words within the verse.
Cynewulf is one of only two named
poets known from the Old English
period. The other is Cædmon, a
cowherd, a farmworker attached to
the Abbey of Whitby in the mid-seventh century. At communal drinking
he would leave the company as he
saw the harp being passed toward
him, because he could not perform
poetry. And one time when this happened, he went to the cowshed to
look after the cows, and fell asleep.
And in his sleep, he dreamed, and in
© Ted Spiegel/Corbis
his dream he saw someone come to
him and say, “Cædmon, sing me
something!” And he answered, “I
don’t know how to sing, and that is
why I left the company and came
here.” But the other said, “Yet you
have something to sing to me.” “What
must I sing?” said he. “Sing me Creation,” said the other. And with that
he began to sing words that he had
never heard before. And when he
woke up, he could remember all that
he had sung. The monks took him to
the abbess, and she recognized God’s
gift in him, and those that had taught
him now became his pupils, taking
A carved stone grave marker outside the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory depicts Viking raiders who devastated
the Anglo-Saxon monastery in 793 CE
© DK Images
The Seafarer
Not for him is the sound of the
harp
nor the giving of rings
nor pleasure in woman
nor worldly glory—
nor anything at all
unless the tossing of waves;
but he always has a longing,
he who strives on the waves.
Groves take on blossoms,
the cities grow fair,
the fields are comely,
the world seems new:
all these things urge on
the eager of spirit,
the mind to travel,
in one who so thinks
to travel far
down in writing those sweet words
from his mouth.
This gives a clear statement of the
relationship between divinely
inspired, orally performed poetry
composed by an illiterate poet, and
the written text. The poem that Bede
then quotes, “Cædmon’s Hymn” as it
is known, may be the beginning of
English poetry. Cædmon is depicted
as coming from the lowest stratum of
society, even though the heroic poems
deal solely with a warrior aristocracy
and its own poetic traditions, and the
Christian religious poetry otherwise
mostly seems to show learned, probably monastic composition.
Beowulf
The two poems that stand out
beyond all others, and that compare
well with anything in European literature of any period, are “The Dream
of the Rood” and “Beowulf.” They are
on the paths of the sea. . . .
And now my spirit twists
out of my breast,
my spirit
out in the waterways,
over the whale’s path
it soars widely
through all the corners of the
world—
very different from each other. “The
Dream of the Rood” is short, a dreamvision unlike Cædmon’s, for the
dream is experienced within the
poem. The vision has an anguished,
ecstatic intensity, but is based upon
intellectual, even philosophical,
understanding of daring originality.
It is one of the finest religious poems
in English.
“Beowulf,” in contrast, is an epic. As
epics go it is short (3,182 lines), but
this physical length is misleading: the
poetry mostly moves slowly, massively, and with huge momentum. Its
experience is that of an entire lifetime, from youth to age: it is lifechanging. Its content is set against a
background of Scandinavian heroic
legend of the sixth century, but the
primary narratives are far older yet,
and go back to myths of immemorial
antiquity, functioning as archetypes.
The hero’s fatal dragon-fight is cog-
it comes back to me
eager and unsated;
the lone-flier screams,
urges on the whale-road
the unresisting heart
across the waves of the sea.
Excerpt from translation
by Sean Miller
nate with legends of the Greek divine
hero Heracles, and with the Hindu
myth of the contest between the god
Indra and the demon Vritra. But
although the poem seems to show
awareness of the mythic antiquity of
its stories, it views them from a
melancholy distance of time. That
was then, not now; the glory of men
was won, and is lost. This awareness
of transience, the passing of human
achievement and of life itself, is not
despairing—the poem is certainly
Christian, and is aware of hope
unavailable to its characters—but it
constitutes the most acute cumulative
expression of a philosophical grief at
the passing of things that I have
encountered in any literary work.첸
Paul Bibire is a former lecturer at the
universities of St. Andrews and
Cambridge, U.K., who has published
on Old English and Norse.
15
Ocean Culture and the Poetry of China
By Shu Xiaoyun
P
A breath of airy
being
Floating in the
universe,
In which, since
ancient times,
16
©Daryl Benson/Getty Images
oetry is the bright jewel glittering brilliantly in the tapestry of
Chinese literature. Chinese
poetry embodies China’s rich ocean
culture. There are poems depicting the
ocean or using it as the poetic backdrop; other poems portray maritime
activities and seascapes.
As one saying has it, “Poems should
be filled with grandeur, their expressions enticing.” The sea is a theme
uniquely suited to the expansive and
valiant spirit of poetry. In the words
of another saying: “The magnanimous
ocean accepts and encompasses all the
world’s peoples.” China’s oldest geographical account, the Commentary on
the Waterways Classic, describes the
enormous virtue of water.
Poets desiring to pay tribute to
nature’s beauty and loftiness have
found in the ocean ample subject matter. The boundless vastness of the sea
dwarfs all other beings.
At times the power of the ocean
remains soundless and silent. With
the touch of the poet’s pen the ocean
becomes a divine spirit; its unfathomable energies fill people’s hearts
with awe.
The ocean arouses in poets philosophical thoughts.
The mist-shrouded
waters of the ocean
surface surpass all
conceptions of time
and space. Zhang
Zhao’s (1691–1745)
poem “Gazing at
the Sea” depicts the
sea thus:
The spheres of the sun and moon
Have been immersed.
This poem celebrates the sea as a
masterpiece existing since the beginning of time and holding even the sun
and moon in its embrace. What is
truly immense is the human spirit.
The ocean brings us the tastes and
flavors of life in all its variety. The
following poem by Meng Haoran
(c. 689–740), for example, describes a
traveler’s swelling excitement:
Raising the sail and gazing
Into the obscure distance,
The water-route that lies ahead is
long.
The traveler eagerly departs
On this auspicious day,
Catching the wind and
Riding the waves.
For the T’ang (618–907) period poet
Cao Song, the seaside offers sights
that excite a yearning for home:
The moon rises to meet
The pathetic pools left behind
By the receding tide.
Zhang Jiuling’s (679–740) “Looking
at the Moon and Thinking of One Far
Away” depicts a splendid landscape:
A bright moon rises above the sea.
In a distant place,
One dear to me
Is watching this same sight.
Wang Bo’s (c. 649–c. 676) “Farewell
to Vice-Prefect Du Setting Out for His
Official Post in Shu” reminds us of the
universal nature of his sentiments:
While I have friends in places
Throughout the world,
However vast the distance
They are as neighbors.
Even those born and raised on dry
land find themselves gasping in awe
and astonishment at the sight of the
sea. Our predecessors created a history of maritime trade and exchange,
raising their sails to the fair wind,
their wisdom at the helm, their
unbreakable will their oars; they
drank in the winds and tasted the
waves, plowing and tilling the roiling
surface of the sea.
The desire to surmount obstacles in a
shared vessel beaten
by rains and wind at
times exacted a harsh
price. When Li Bai
(701–762) heard that
his good friend, Chao
Heng (Abe no Nakamaro) (698–770), had
been shipwrecked
returning to Japan
after decades of living in China, he presumed the worst,
voicing his grief in his
“Lament for Chao
Heng”:
Leaving behind the imperial capital
My Japanese friend Chao Heng’s
Boat receded from view
To become a wave-tossed leaf.
He passed many islands
On his way home.
The brilliant moon has sunk
Into the deep blue sea,
Never to return.
The very skies now grieve
At Chao Heng’s tragic fate.
In this sense, the seas may seem to
hinder our progress; this was the case
for Si Ma Guang (1019–86) who
bemoaned the lack of means to cross
the oceans in pursuit of learning.
The legend of Jing Wei provides
insight into yet another aspect of the
relationship between human beings
and the ocean, sparking imagination
in many works of literature. The
youngest daughter of Emperor Yan
drowned in the Eastern Sea and
became the mythical Jing Wei bird.
Her hatred of the ocean was such that
she decided to fill it up, carrying twigs
and pebbles from nearby mountains
and dropping them in the sea. Thus,
“Jing Wei trying to fill the ocean” is a
metaphor for dogged determination.
Han Yu (768–824) was among those
who used this story in his work.
The state of the ocean is a psychological projection of people’s relationship with it. Poets construct, from the
perspective of visionary fiction, the
human-ocean relations that constitute
an ocean culture.
The ocean is home to the human
spirit. Its waves and winds stir people’s imagination and fantasy. Li Bai’s
“The Difficult Path” offers a glimpse
of the poet’s valiant spirit:
I will ride the winds and
Surmount endless waves.
Setting sail on the vast ocean,
I will one day reach
The distant shores.
Liang Qichao (1873–1929) is one of
China’s modern thinkers and political
activists; among his important contributions was a revolutionizing of the
study of history. In the depths of the
night on which the 19th century
turned to the 20th, drinking heavily
aboard a steamer traveling from Japan
to the United States, he penned “The
Pacific Ocean in the 20th Century.”
In this lengthy poem, he commits
his ideals to the ocean’s depths, allows
his sorrows to drift across its surface.
The poem comes to its conclusion on
an optimistic note; the poet’s spirit
remains unbroken by his years in
exile:
I’ve finished drinking
I’m quitting poetry.
And yet a bird sings
As it flies across
The morning sky
Toward a newly rising sun.
In 1917, Zhou Enlai (1898–1976)
expressed his determination and
resolve to realize his goals for studying in Japan, whatever difficulties
might lie ahead:
Even if his efforts are not rewarded,
One who sets out upon the ocean
Is still a hero.
Poets are a nation’s representatives,
poetry a culture’s laurel crown. Poets’
observation and insight into the
events surrounding them reflect a
process of conscious choice stressing
aesthetic sensibility, inner reflection
and spiritual experience. Poetry evoking images of the ocean expresses
poets’ grasp of human society’s interactions with the sea, the psychology of
ocean cultures.
The ocean’s capacity to create richly
diverse cultures comes into play only
with the involvement and participation
of different human actors. The poetics
of maritime culture offer us a unique
perspective, a frame of reference and a
spiritual instrument for gauging the
relations between people and the sea.첸
Shu Xiaoyun is an associate professor
of the Faculty of History at Nanjing
University in China. His specialty is
maritime history. This article was
translated from Chinese. The translations of the poems are tentative.
©Jon Shireman/Getty Images
17
SGI members
experiences in faith
Heart-to-Heart
By Nomsa Mdlalose, South Africa
I
first became interested in storytelling through drama, which I
loved, but it left little time for
me to pursue other activities. Storytelling, as a solitary and occasional
performance art, allowed for more
flexibility.
There are many storytellers in
South Africa, but they mostly operate in a traditional context, as
opposed to performing professionally. It’s a tradition in African
culture to pass on culture and
information through storytelling,
educating people about themselves and the world around
them. People think of storytelling
as a form of entertainment for
children, but I think it’s more necessary for adults. I see the form as
a way of passing on morals and
values, and it’s my belief that
children have more of those than
adults.
In my work, I draw on African
folktales and history, and many of
my stories are about preserving
the environment. I also incorporate traditional songs and chants,
as well as some of the body movements from the dances I did when
I was growing up. Although I
wouldn’t describe myself as a
poet, I incorporate poetry in my
performances. Sometimes I use
praise poems from our family—
Southern African families have
izithakazelo, praise poems connected
with our family names that are
passed on from generation to generation.
An Uncertain Path
Being an artist involves lots of
challenges and sacrifices, and after
embarking on my path as a storyteller, I felt like I was in a constant
dilemma, having to decide which
18
direction to go. By the time a friend
told me about Buddhism, in 2001, I
was faced with a choice between
full-time employment, which meant
forgetting all about performance, or
continuing with storytelling, the
love of my life, and living on an
unreliable income.
After starting to practice Buddhism, I realized I didn’t have to
accept what was for me an impossible choice. After this change in my
attitude, I was able to find a full-time
job that left me enough time to do
storytelling on the side. Then, in
2005, I was offered an opportunity to
study for a master’s degree in storytelling in the U.S.
On my return to South Africa with
my master’s qualification, and now
married, I was once again faced with
a seemingly irresolvable choice
between looking for a stable life in
academia or continuing to pursue
my passion. There were no academic institutions in South Africa that
offered courses in storytelling,
where I could lecture and maybe
perform during my spare time. But
once again, unforeseen opportunities opened up.
I was offered a position as a
scholar-in-residence at one of
South Africa’s most prestigious
universities, where my task is to
introduce storytelling as a pedagogical tool and a means to promote dialogue within the institution. For example, as far as I’m
concerned, medical students need
to be taught to connect with people, as well as to treat disease.
Through storytelling they can
learn how to listen to their
patients, and, for many people,
simply being listened to properly
is a major part of their healing
process.
With the help of my Buddhist
practice, I have been able to combine my experience, interests and
knowledge together to shape a
dream career.
I also feel that my Buddhist practice and storytelling connect perfectly. Buddhism talks about the
importance of creating heart-toheart connections between people.
I think storytelling is about just that.
Stories are spiritual, they deal
with our emotions, and a good story
contains the spirit of what we in
South Africa call ubuntu, a concept
which includes love, generosity,
respect, sharing—all the things that
are the values of Buddhism. That’s
why a good ending is important,
because it has to touch your soul in
a positive way.첸
Shout It Out
By NYCCA, Japan
I
was born in Hong Kong in 1980.
My father is Chinese and my
mother half-Japanese.
We came to live in Japan when I
was 10 years old. It was my interest
in skateboarding that got me into
street culture, and I started rapping
while messing about as a dancer
and DJ.
At first I didn’t have the slightest
interest in rapping in Japanese,
but when I was 15, I met a rapper
called RINO and was inspired to
try to express my opinions about
the world in Japanese.
I went to Soka High School and
then to New York State University in 1999, but I got into drinking
and taking drugs every day to the
point where I started hallucinating. After three failed suicide
attempts I was admitted into a
psychiatric hospital.
Suffering from depression and
debilitating apathy, I came back to
Japan to rehabilitate. It was at this
time that I started practicing Buddhism seriously. When I chanted,
I felt an energy welling up from
my inner self; and this energy
became a conviction. The doctors
told me it would be at least three
years before I was cured and that
I would likely experience serious
trauma in the years ahead. In fact,
to everyone’s surprise, I was
cured within a half year.
I spent the next year working in
a factory, and started to visualize
what would become the O’LIONZ
PROJECT (“Only Life In Our NecessitieZ”), as well as starting to perform
again in small events. I started mixing Japanese, Cantonese and English,
trying to produce trilingual work.
There are many kinds of rap, but
the way I understand it is that rap
began as prisoners calling out to
each other, without any musical
instruments: so rap is a tool to call on
people to speak the truth. In that
sense, I feel rap is a way of fighting
with words, the most human way
for people to approach things and
deal with difficult situations with
hope. It’s also interesting to me that
rap rhythms and chanting Buddhist
sutras sound alike.
In hip-hop, people often say,
“Keep it real.” When I create a song,
I try to put my experience, truth and
Buddhist philosophy into my music.
The name, O’LIONZ, is trying to
express the idea of keeping it real,
that the truth inevitably lies within
your own life. Whatever the topic, it
is related to the core and essence of
life and all phenomena. Whatever
we experience leads us to seek out
the truth of life. For me, Buddhism
is about reason and the underlying
principles of the universe.
In February 2003 I put together a
group called O’LIONZ 11, consisting of friends and acquaintances.
Our first gig was in front of 1,000
people. In March 2005 we released
an indie CD, and that July we were
the Japanese winners of the urban
section of Diesel-U-Music, a competition held across five countries
(Belgium, Italy, Japan, the U.K.
and the U.S.).
In August 2005, the O’LIONZ
PROJECT performed at the Hug
the World with Music event in
Indonesia, a charity concert raising funds for the victims of the
March 2005 Sumatra earthquake,
which was broadcast throughout
Indonesia. I then was able to quit
my day job and become a fulltime artist at the beginning of
2006.
In August that year I took part
in a 200-member Soka Gakkai
youth exchange visit to China,
and was able to perform during
our exchanges in Shanghai and
Beijing.
In 2007, Universal Records
offered O’LIONZ PROJECT our
major-label debut, then our single, “Daijobu,” was taken up as
the theme song for a TV show,
and in June we released our first
full album. I’m currently trying to
write a song for the 2008 Olympics
in Beijing.
I have found that by putting Buddhist philosophy into action, the
positive effects come back to me in
my daily life. I feel now that it’s just
impossible to predict how great this
driving force in my life will become
in the future.첸
19
Salute to Poets
By Daisaku Ikeda
There is a power in words,
an infinite power
to revive, restore
and make life blaze anew.
Poets!
Poets whose fine hearts
feel the full torment
of people’s pain!
There is a life in poetry,
a limitless, eternal life
that can stir and arouse
a society to new vibrancy.
War, nuclear weapons,
environmental destruction,
discrimination,
the trampling of people’s rights—
all these problems
are caused and created
by human beings.
Thus there is
no misery or cruelty
beyond our power
as humans
to resolve.
Poets!
Reflected in
your clear eyes
—like the still waters
of a lake—
we can see:
Clusters of people
fleeing in confusion
through a field of battle.
A wailing mother
tenderly cradling
a tiny corpse.
An infant,
starving, emaciated,
weakened and awaiting death.
The trembling fist
of a young boy,
who writhes beneath
the crushing weights of
discrimination and hate.
Poets!
Through your keen ears
we can hear,
as in an echoing valley:
The self-mocking sighs
of young people
filled with mistrust and isolation,
who sense no future
as they wander aimlessly
through thronging crowds.
The painful cry of Earth herself,
oceans and atmosphere polluted,
stripped and denuded of green,
bound by atomic burdens,
crying in distress
as she continues to revolve
on her grinding axis.
20
All people, everyone,
crave and thirst
for peace,
everyone seeks and pursues
the goal of happiness.
All people
hold within themselves,
in their hearts,
a golden sun
that can brightly light their own lives
and shed far and wide
warm and brilliant beams
of friendship and fraternity.
This inner luster
of life itself
is the ultimate
font and source
of new creation.
Poets!
Now is the time
to raise your voices,
to call forth and awaken
the sun sleeping
in the hearts of people
the world over.
Society is awash
with false discourse;
with propaganda
that incites
xenophobic rejection;
with low and ugly rumor
whose sole purpose is
to degrade and demean;
with shrieked abuse
that destroys dignity,
tearing into the heart
like a lethal blade.
This flood
of deceptive, vacuous
and violent language
has caused people
to treat all words and language
as suspect.
Words are
the human heart
and this doubt
has driven people
into the dark and rampant isolation
of cynicism and fear,
distrusting everything
including society
and humanity itself.
Ah, poets!
Now is the time
to use the words
of compassion and truth,
the words of universal justice
that roil and seethe within your heart,
to use these words to dispel
the dark and heavy clouds
of language laden with
false and evil intent,
to stir new winds
of hope and courage,
to bring about a
new and golden dawn!
Mahatma Gandhi declared:
“A poet is one who can call forth
the good latent in the human breast.”
Ah! The innumerable
cruel fissures that split
and divide our
blue planet.
j_arlecchino CC BY-NC
Divisions based
on differences
of ideology,
of state,
of national and
ethnic identity,
of religion,
of class.
The absurd, horrific
and repeated reality
of people
turned against people,
viciously discriminating,
resenting, wrangling
and hating each other.
The deepest evil,
the ultimate source
of all conflict and tragedy,
is the dividing heart.
Preoccupied with difference,
it drives people
to reject and exclude
others.
But this very Earth,
this lovely planet,
is a garden rich
with the full and gorgeous
blossoming
of diversity.
It is difference
above all
that makes each
flowering tree
—cherry, plum, peach and damson—
uniquely valuable.
Difference is
the quality that
enables us
to learn from each other,
to complement and fulfill each other,
to respect and honor each other.
Poets!
Let us throw new bridges
across the gulfs dividing
people’s hearts!
With the cries that issue
from your soul
turn the gears of history:
away from suspicion and toward trust,
from divisiveness to harmony,
from war to peace.
We are all human beings.
The poetic spirit
beats and throbs
in our veins!
All people are in fact
sisters and brothers
capable of mutual love,
of coming together
in harmonious unity.
All people
have the right
to live out their lives
in happiness and dignity.
Poets, arise!
Wait for no one,
but stand up resolute
and alone!
With our words
and with our actions,
let us till and turn
the sprawling expanse,
the desert aridity
of people’s hearts.
The voice of the poet
who has chosen to stand alone
calls out to and resounds with
the voice of another
self-sufficient poet.
A single ripple
elicits ten thousand waves.
When our cries of justice
swell to a symphony
extolling humanity and life
and when its resonant tones
reach all corners of the Earth,
wrapping and cradling it . . .
Then the deep red glory,
the dawning sun
of peace for all people everywhere,
will rise and lift
into the sky.
Dedicated to the members of the World
Congress of Poets, September 2007.
21
SGI’s global activities for peace,
education and culture
Poetry Awards
Photos from BSG
The World Poetry Society
across national borders and
Intercontinental
has
achieving world peace and
awarded SGI President
mutual understanding
Daisaku Ikeda the title of
through poetry. The official
World People’s Poet in
languages of the congress
recognition of the inspiraare Arabic, Chinese, English,
tion his poetry has brought
French, German, Greek,
to people all over the world.
Hebrew and Spanish.
Society President Dr.
In a message to the 27th
Krishna Srinivas and Vice
Congress, Mr. Ikeda
President A. Padmanaban
referred to maitri, a Sanskrit
presented the accolade at
word expressing compasthe Poetry for World Peace,
sion and friendship, which
Harmony and Humanism
he said is ultimately “the act
Symposium held on Octoof rising above attachment
ber 5 in Chennai, India.
to difference, bringing clearThis was the first occasion Dr. Srinivas and Dr. Padmanaban (holding certificate, center and right) entrust the World
ly into sight the worth and
the award had been made. People’s Poet award to Institute of Oriental Philosophy Director Yoichi Kawada (3rd from left) dignity . . . that exist equally
The World Poetry Society
within all people.” He
Intercontinental is headexpressed his belief that this
quartered in Chennai and
attitude and insight is inherhas members in 50 counent in the heart of the poet,
tries. In 1995, the society
whose “lofty mission,” he
conferred its World Poet
affirmed, is “exalting the
Laureate Award upon Mr.
nobility of the human spirit,
Ikeda. The SGI president
and rebuking the forces that
was also declared a poet
would undermine and
laureate by the World
destroy that nobility.”
Academy of Arts and CulThe International Society
ture in 1981.
of Greek Writers and Arts
In his remarks at the
has also recognized Mr.
symposium, Dr. Srinivas
Ikeda for his literary
quoted Mr. Ikeda’s poetry
achievements and contriand recalled their meeting
butions to peace. Society
in 1979. He stated he has Students perform a song at the award ceremony
President
Chrissoula
During the congress, Akash Ouchi of
never forgotten Mr. Ikeda’s words on
Varveri-Varra announced the GreekBSG (Bharat Soka Gakkai) presented
that occasion: “In a society mired in
Chinese Culture Award during the First
the SGI Peace and Culture Award to Dr.
strife, poetry opens the window of the
Qinghai Lake International Poetry FesKalam in recognition of his lifetime
soul. Through that window, the refreshtival held in Qinghai Province, China,
achievements. In his address, Dr. Kalam
ing breeze of life can blow. Poetry is the
from August 7–10, and attended by 160
lauded Dr. Krishna Srinivas, 95, for his
proof of society’s humanity, the noble
poets and literary figures from 30 coundedicated efforts in publishing the
song of the human spirit.”
tries. The festival was organized by the
monthly journal Poet for the past 48
On September 1, 820 poets and scholGreek writers society together with the
years. The journal has readers in 50
ars from across the globe had converged
Cultural Agency of Qinghai Province
countries.
in Chennai for the 27th World Congress
and the Poetry Institute of China.
The first World Congress of Poets was
of Poets. Former Indian President Dr.
The SGI Quarterly was sad to hear
formed in 1969 by Amado Yuzon, TinA.P.J. Abdul Kalam opened the conof the passing of Dr. Krishna Srinivas
wen Chung, Krishna Srinivas and Lou
gress, which was sponsored by the
on December 14, 2007.
LuTour with the aim of uniting people
World Academy of Arts and Culture.
22
Photos from SGI-SA
“My Revolution” in South Africa
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of second Soka Gakkai president
Josei Toda’s antinuclear declaration,
SGI-South Africa hosted “My Revolution—Revealing the Jewel Within,” a
tribute to Steve Biko in dance, music,
song, storytelling and poetry, in Johannesburg on September 8. The event
included a performance by poet Khosi
Xaba, and a keynote speech from
Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, a poet for
human rights who shared his perspective of Steve Biko and one of his poems.
Some 200 people joined the event.
The year 2007 marked the 30th
anniversary of the death of Steve Biko,
an iconic figure in South African history
who created a new pride and a new con-
sciousness among the peoples of South
Africa in some of its darkest hours. He
died at age 30 on September 12, 1977,
after being beaten and tortured by police.
SGI-South Africa determined to create a joyous celebration of his life, drawing inspiration from the text of a dialogue between Dr. Mtshali and SGI
President Daisaku Ikeda in 1991, as well
as a speech by Mr. Ikeda in the same
year in which he described the Black
Consciousness Movement, of which
Biko was a youthful leader, as follows:
“The focus of this Black Consciousness
Movement was a self-revolution, a kind
of ‘human revolution’ movement.”
Inspired by these words, SGI-South
Africa set out to create a commemoration of the life of Steve Biko that would
celebrate the parallels between the principles of Buddhism and Biko’s ideals.
Several poets performed original poetry, including one talented young poet of
15. A director of the Steve Biko Foundation spoke, and the chairperson of the
Steve Biko Remembrance Group shared
anecdotes of his life. Musical performances had people dancing in their seats.
Min-On
China-Japan Normalization Commemorated
The China National Acrobatic Troupe
On September 27, the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with
Foreign Countries, the China-Japan
Friendship Association and the China
Council for the Promotion of International Trade in Beijing cohosted a grand
reception commemorating the
35th anniversary of the normalization of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations at the Great Hall
of the People in Beijing.
A Soka Gakkai delegation led
by Toshiyuki Mitsugi, senior
adviser, attended the festivities,
together with some 600 representatives from the two countries. Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao, President of the ChinaJapan Friendship Association
Song Jian, and former Japanese
Prime Ministers Yoshiro Mori and Tomiichi Murayama were among the attendees. Prior to the reception, Mr. Mitsugi
conveyed a congratulatory message to
Premier Wen Jiabao from SGI President
Daisaku Ikeda.
At the reception, various Chinese officials greeted the Soka Gakkai delegates
and expressed their appreciation for Mr.
Ikeda’s longstanding contributions to
friendship between the two countries.
To mark the anniversary, the Soka
Gakkai-affiliated Min-On Concert Association sponsored a tour of Japan by 51
members of the China National Acrobatic Troupe with 114 performances in
61 cities throughout the country from
September to December.
On September 22, one week prior to
the anniversary reception, a public
recitation of Mr. Ikeda’s poems and
writings was held at Peking University
Hall as a gesture of bilateral friendship.
Students from Peking University and
Soka University presented a total of 19
poems and essays.
23
Betty Williams Delivers Culture of Peace Lecture
Eric Mitsu Kimura
“Violence is a choice: Reject it. Nonviolence is the weapon of the strong, not
the weak.”
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty
Williams stressed these words during a
lecture at SGI-USA’s World Culture
Center in Santa Monica, California, on
September 23. More than 900 people
attended the lecture, one in the ongoing
Culture of Peace Distinguished Speaker
Series that SGI-USA’s Culture of Peace
Resource Center is sponsoring to help
build an awareness of and sustain a cul-
ture of peace in families, schools, workplaces and local communities.
Caring for Our Elders
Day of Peace
in Singapore
SSA
24
On September 21, the Singapore Soka Association (SSA)
cosponsored an event titled
“May Peace Prevail on Earth” to
commemorate the International
Day of Peace, together with
Mercy Relief, Jamiyah Singapore, the Young Sikh Association and the Inter-Religious
Organization. The United
More than 500 youth participated in the SGI-USA West
Nations designated September
Territory Youth Culture Festival, “Unstoppable—A Life of
21 as the International Day of
Victory,” at the Vic Lopez Theater in Whittier, California,
Peace in 2001, with the aim of
on October 14. The festival—an original production
“strengthening the ideals of
presented twice before audiences of 4,000—celebrated
peace and alleviating tensions
the lives of five peace heroes whose efforts have
illuminated the dignity and power of ordinary people:
and causes of conflicts.”
Nelson Mandela, Betty Williams, César Chávez, Wangari
Some 200 people from various
Maathai and Daisaku Ikeda.
religious and civic organizations
gathered at the SSA Friendship
participants, stating they had come
Hall for an interfaith exchange. Mercy
together from a broad cross section of
Relief Chair T. K. Udairam welcomed the
cultures, religions and ethnicities “to say
in unison that we have chosen peace.”
Professor Tham Seong Chee, president
of the United Nations Association of Singapore, reminded the participants that
“Ensuring peace and preserving it is
everyone’s concern.”
An eight-minute video, “Peace One
Day,” recounted British filmmaker Jeremy Gilley’s efforts to establish the International Day of Peace.
Bhangra dancers
Photos courtesy of Eric Fisher
Lloyd Carlson
On September 23, SGI-USA members
in San Francisco, California, met for a
forum on “Caring for Our Elders” at the
SGI-USA San Francisco Culture Center.
This was the seventh of a series on elderly care that began in January, sponsored
by SGI-USA women in San Francisco.
At the September 23 forum, six panelists from a variety of disciplines
involved in elder health care professions
provided insight into the various
resources available to those caring for
elders. The panelists spoke about diet
and nutrition, hospice care and advance
directives, communicating with the
elderly, communicating with health care
professionals, health care options and
resources for the elderly, and taking care
of the caregivers themselves. Following
presentations, the panelists participated
in small group discussions with the
audience.
Ms. Williams spoke frankly about her
past efforts for peace in Northern Ireland. Over the past 30 years, she has
devoted her life to fighting against
injustices perpetrated on children
throughout the world. She has traveled
extensively, advocating for legislation to
protect children and calling, in particular, for the creation of “Cities of Compassion” in every country—safety zones
that would be off-limits to any form of
military attack that could threaten children’s lives.
Culture of Peace Exhibition in Dubai
Guests of honor
included Dr. Abdulla
Al Karam, chairman of
the board of directors
and director general of
the Dubai Knowledge
and Human Development Authority, and
Dr. Ayoub Kazim,
executive director of
Dubai Knowledge Village and Dubai International Academy City,
who commented in his
speech, “In line with
the mission of Dubai
Knowledge Village to
provide the environment for a variety of
organizations to create and disseminate
knowledge, we are happy to associate
with SGI-Gulf, an organization that is
committed to promoting human values
through education and culture.”
Following the translation of the environmental education film “A Quiet Revolution” into Arabic by SGI-Gulf, a new
eight-language DVD version has been
produced, including Arabic and German
as well as English, Japanese, Chinese
(traditional), Korean, Spanish and
French. Copies are available for educational purposes at a nominal cost from
<classix@cox.net>.
Photos from SGI- Gulf
The musical show staged
by Dubai Modern High School
Dr. Ayoub Kazim (left) and Dr. Abdulla Al Karam (right) viewing the exhibition
The SGI exhibition “Building a Culture
of Peace for the Children of the World”
was held at the Dubai Knowledge Village between November 2 and 10. The
exhibition was held under the patronage
of Her Royal Highness Princess Haya
Bint Al Hussein, UN Messenger of Peace
and wife of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin
Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and
prime minister of United Arab Emirates
and ruler of Dubai. It will subsequently
be shown in other educational institutions in Dubai.
On November 1, over 350 invited
guests attended the opening ceremony
which featured a musical on the theme
of a culture of peace performed by 75
middle school students from Dubai
Modern High School, a co-host of the
exhibition along with SGI-Gulf, the
UNICEF Gulf Office, Dubai Knowledge
Village, Dubai International Academic
City and GEMS schools. The musical
tells the story of a troupe of young
clowns who are learning their trade and
the secrets of life itself.
In a message read out at the opening,
SGI President Daisaku Ikeda stressed
that education is the necessary foundation for building a culture of peace.
Youth Take the Lead in
Antinuclear Movement
©Seikyo Shimbun
From September 8–16, SGI-UK hosted an antinuclear exhibition produced
by its youth members at its South London culture center, which was visited by
some 2,000 people. Dr. Robert Hinde,
Chair of the British Pugwash Group and
professor of zoology at Cambridge University, gave a keynote speech. Dr.
Hinde spoke about the cruelty of war
through his own wartime experiences,
as well as his feelings on visiting the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
“In order to eliminate human suffering,
war itself must be eliminated,” he
stressed.
renowned astronomer, Prof. Chandra
Wickramasinghe, whose dialogue with
SGI President Daisaku Ikeda has been
published as Space and Eternal Life, also
visited the exhibit.
Celebrating the opening of the exhibition
The first Pugwash Conference was
held in 1957, the same year second Soka
Gakkai president Josei Toda made his
antinuclear declaration, entrusting the
task of achieving the abolition of nuclear
weapons to young people. The
Sonja Davis Peace
Award
The SGI-New Zealand young women’s
division won the Sonja Davis Peace
Award on September 4 for its members’
efforts to spread peace in their local
communities through the Victory Over
Violence initiative. The award commemorates the life and work of peace
activist Sonja Davis and is administered
with the support of the New Horizons
for Women Trust.
25
On Vocation
A series in which SGI members discuss
their approach to their profession
©Ed Young/Corbis
Growing with the Earth
Andrew Chin/Dreamstime.com
26
rich, sweet and juicy taste. I
pour my love and affection
onto each tree, each leaf and
each fruit.
Also, to experience the
changes of the four seasons
in my body as I work makes
me feel as though my own
life is growing. It gives me a
sense of joy and appreciation,
a sense of fulfillment.
What are the greatest
challenges you face as a
farmer?
Yasumi: The greatest
challenge is when the crops,
which we have poured so
much effort and care into, are
destroyed or damaged by bad weather
or other kinds of incidents. It’s also very
challenging when our products don’t
get a fair evaluation at market.
Mauro: There are many
difficulties. The financial
rewards do not compare
well with other
economic sectors. In
recent years, however,
climate change is the
greatest problem
confronting us. I worry about this
because, despite all the farmer’s efforts,
the risk of crop failure is very high.
Also, we have to fight against this
pervasive vision of agriculture being the
preserve of the big multinational
companies with their agrochemicals
and genetic modifications.
How do you see the mission of farmers
in society?
Mauro: Agriculture has always been
about supplying food for humanity.
Today it must provide for a remarkable
©Seikyo Shimbun
Yasumi Nishi is a
mandarin farmer in
Wakayama Prefecture,
Japan. After taking over the
family farm, he spent more
than 10 years in painstaking
experimentation with soil
improvement. This has
enabled him to produce
mandarins with a
consistently high sugar
content that are now prized
throughout Japan.
Mauro Traini has an
organic farm in Tuscany,
Italy, where he produces
Yasumi Nishi (right)
wine, olive oil and grappa.
agriculture the most useful and noble
He also cultivates ancient fruits,
of all professions. I agree with this, and
saffron and legumes. Out of
it has inspired me to continue in this
concern for the environment, he no
job in spite of the many difficulties.
longer transports his produce to
Another pleasant aspect of this job is
other parts of Italy but only sells it
one’s relationships with
locally.
other farmers, especially
the older ones, who
What aspect of the farming lifestyle
have a lot of wisdom,
gives you the most joy?
not only about
Mauro: There are so many joys to
agriculture but about life
being a farmer. Besides working in the
in general.
open air and sharing the rhythms of
Yasumi: What gives me
nature, the greatest pleasure is being
the most joy is bringing the fruits that I
conscious of doing something that
grew with such care to the market and
benefits both oneself and others—
seeing people there
producing
really appreciating
healthy food that
them. It is also very
is not
satisfying that my
contaminated
livelihood is sustained
with pesticides
by people who are
and attempting
happy to buy our
to maintain a
products. Over the past
healthy
20 years, I’ve studied
environment.
how to produce a
Jean-Jacques
special orange with a
Rousseau called
Mauro Traini
farming practices.
I’ve also begun to conserve and
reproduce endangered varieties of
cereals, legumes, vines and fruits.
When I learn about a strain which is in
danger of becoming extinct, I feel very
emotional at the thought of being able
to protect it and
pass it on to my
children and
future
generations.
Many people live
in cities and have
little contact with
nature. Does this
concern you?
Yasumi: I think
this is the result
of excessive
emphasis placed on the pursuit of
profit. One thing that concerns me is
that if people lose contact with nature,
they are likely to lose their gentleness.
Mauro: I always find it is strange that
there are people who do not
produce at least some of
what they consume. It
would be great if, in the
future, many buildings in
cities, instead of having
only parking lots, would
also have
vegetable gardens.
What do you feel you have
learned about the rhythms and laws of
nature from your work?
Mauro: I think farmers develop a
natural grasp of the Buddhist outlook
on life. You find that the simple
Paulpaladin/Dreamstime.com
number of people; the difficulty is to
fulfill this mission without excessive
exploitation and chemical pollution of
the land.
We have to produce food that is full
of the vital energy that supports the
lives of human beings. More often,
modern agricultural produce is full of
residual chemicals and deprived of the
subtle and more vital nutritional
elements that deeply nourish the
human body. If human beings are
what they eat, given humanity’s
present situation, agriculture bears a
great responsibility.
Yasumi: SGI President Ikeda has
encouraged farmers to become
beacons within our
communities. I
completely agree
with him. I believe
we have a role to
play in creating
harmony within
society, and I have
been exerting
myself toward that
end.
How does your
Buddhist practice
influence your approach to your work?
Yasumi: I have changed a lot through
my Buddhist practice and through the
influence of the writings of President
Ikeda; I have a deeper appreciation of
the value of life. I have also been able
to develop a challenging spirit not to
be defeated by difficulties and to
squarely confront each problem I face. I
feel grateful that I can continue to
improve myself.
Mauro: Through the process of my
own personal development inspired by
my Buddhist practice, I’ve come to
understand the necessity of making
improvements in my work. I’ve stopped
using chemical products and begun to
farm organically, and I’ve also
discovered the importance of
maintaining and recovering traditional
wisdom that farmers possess is the
same as what Buddhism expresses in
more detailed terms—wisdom about
life and death, impermanence, the
interdependence of all phenomena,
and the inseparability of self and the
environment.
Farmers know that our lives are
closely linked with plants and the land,
and studies are now demonstrating
they can influence each other. This link
between plants, the soil and human
beings can influence the quality of the
harvest. I believe in the positive effect
on plants of dialogue, and I would like
to experiment with other ideas, such as
the effect of music in cultivation.
From this perspective, I feel hopeful.
A positive change in human beings will
be reflected in the environment. We
will be able to stop our destruction of
the natural environment.
Yasumi: Although the crops we grow
cannot speak, I think they probably
know their mission.
What I mean is, seeds know
when to sprout, and they
endure numerous
hardships to bloom and
bear fruit, progressing
with all their might
toward the flourishing of
their own progeny. We see
how plants are able to
soothe a person’s heart, bringing
enjoyment and courage to others
through their own existence. If we give
them our attentive care, they never fail
to respond. I think this is precisely what
is taught in Buddhism.첸
27
The Wisdom
of the Lotus Sutra
©Yali Shi/Dreamstime.com
The Lotus Sutra is a Mahayana Buddhist text whose teachings form the foundation of
Nichiren Buddhism. The following is excerpted from SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s
six-volume work, The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, which explores the significance
of this ancient text to our contemporary lives.
© Seikyo Shimbun
Making “Life” the Keyword
of the Coming Age
and energy and information. Yet while open, it maintains
its autonomy. Life is characterized by this harmonious
freedom and an openness to the entire universe. The infinite and unbounded state of Buddhahood can be
described as a state in which the freedom, openness and
harmony of life are realized to the maximum extent.
Mr. Toda once described his feelings after having
attained his realization in prison as follows:
It is like lying on your back in a wide open space
looking up at the sky with arms and legs outstretched. All that you wish for immediately
appears. No matter how much you may give away,
The Lotus Sutra teaches that all human beings can
there is always more. It is never exhausted. Try and
attain Buddhahood. What, then, is a Buddha? What does
see if you can attain this state of life.
it mean to attain Buddhahood? These are questions vital
With the word Buddha, the image of a supreme being
to all Buddhist teachings. To
tends to dominate people’s
“The infinite and unbounded state
merely say that the entity of
impression. It evokes a feelthe Buddha transcends the of Buddhahood can be described as a state ing of the Buddha being
power of language, that it is in which the freedom, openness and harmony somehow distant and sepaunfathomable, does not help
rate from us. The word Law,
of life are realized to the maximum extent.”
our understanding in the
in the sense that it implies a
least. Mr. Toda deeply contemplated these questions and
rule or phenomenon, suggests the impersonal. Alone, it
sought to resolve them.
does not convey much warmth. Essentially, the Buddha
It was then that the word life suddenly flashed
and the Law are not two different, separate things—the
through his mind. He perceived that the Buddha is life
word life encompasses both.
itself:
All people are endowed with life, and life is immeaLife is neither existing nor not existing, neither
surably precious. The declaration that “the Buddha is life
caused nor conditioned, neither self nor other, neiitself” reveals that the very essence of Buddhism—the
ther square nor round, neither short nor long, . . .
Buddha and the Law—is in our own life.
neither crimson nor purple nor any other sort of
Mr. Toda once said:
color.
We use the word self [to refer to ourselves], but
Life is a straightforward, familiar word we use every
this word actually refers to the universe. When we
day. But at the same time it can express the most proask how the life of the universe is different from the
found essence of the Buddhist Law, a single word that
life of each one of you, the only differences we find
expresses infinite meaning. All human beings are
are those of your bodies and minds. Your life and
endowed with life, so this word has practical, concrete
that of the universe are the same.
meaning for everyone. In this way, Mr. Toda’s realizaI believe that “life” and “life force” will be the keytion made Buddhism comprehensible to all.
words for the 21st century. Mr. Toda’s enlightenment
Life also has enormous diversity. It is rich and full of
that the Buddha is life itself is a declaration that life is
energy. At the same time, it operates according to certhe absolute and supreme reality. It was an opening voltain laws and has a defined rhythm. Life is also free and
ley to all warped and twisted points of view which would
unfettered. It is an open entity in constant communicadestroy the dignity of human life. And indeed this is
tion with the external world, always exchanging matter
Buddhism’s fundamental challenge.첸
H
ere, SGI President Ikeda discusses the enlightenment of second Soka Gakkai president Josei Toda
during his imprisonment by Japan’s militarist government in World War II. In prison, Toda avidly studied the
Lotus Sutra and its introductory Sutra of Immeasurable
Meanings. While struggling to understand a passage in the
latter sutra describing the “entity of the Buddha,” Toda had
a realization that completely transformed his perspective on
Buddhism. The passage is a list of 34 negations, beginning
“His body neither existing nor not existing, neither caused
nor conditioned, neither self nor other. . . .”
28
The Paintings and Calligraphy of Jao Tsung-I
An exhibition of 200 paintings and calligraphy works by
China’s Jao Tsung-I was held at the Soka Gakkai’s Kansai
International Culture Center in Kobe, Japan, from October
2–28, 2007, commemorating the 35th anniversary of the
normalization of Sino-Japanese relations. Jao Tsung-I, who
has won renown as a scholar, a painter and a calligrapher,
has been described as the Leonardo da Vinci of the Orient.
Some 70,000 people visited the exhibition.
Left to right: Lotus flowers with text from the Lotus Sutra; tree peonies: the text exhorts human beings to
display the same nobility as these flowers; stylized Chinese characters: mountain, water, sacredness and
sound; Chinese characters in ancient oracle bone script.
Editorial team:
Joan Anderson, Anthony George, Kumiko Ichikawa, Elizabeth Ingrams, Kimiaki Kawai,
Motoki Kawamorita, Yoshinori Miyagawa, Nobue Nakaura, Satoko Suzuki, Richard Walker
Published by Soka Gakkai International
©2008 Soka Gakkai International. All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.
Printed on recycled paper.
The Soka Gakkai International (SGI) is a worldwide
association of 82 constituent organizations with
membership in 190 countries and territories. In the
service of its members and of society at large, the SGI
centers its activities on developing positive human
potentialities for hope, courage and altruistic action.
Rooted in the life-affirming philosophy of Nichiren
Buddhism, members of the SGI share a commitment to
the promotion of peace, culture and education. The
scope and nature of the activities conducted in each
country vary in accordance with the culture and
characteristics of that society. They all grow, however,
from a shared understanding of the inseparable linkages
that exist between individual happiness and the peace
and development of all humanity.
As a nongovernmental organization (NGO) with
formal ties to the United Nations, the SGI is active in
the fields of humanitarian relief and public education,
with a focus on peace, sustainable development and
human rights.
©Natural Selection Craig Tuttle/Design Pics/Corbis
Cape Kiwanda, Oregon, U.S.A.
SOKA GAKKAI INTERNATIONAL
15-3 Samoncho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0017, Japan
Telephone: +81-3-5360-9830
Facsimile: +81-3-5360-9885
Website: www.sgi.org

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