The Grass Flute Zen Master by Arthur Braverman

Author:Arthur Braverman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

The sunset of my hometown

is as beautiful as

the beauty of all phenomena.

—Sodo, from The Sun Mountain, Temple Under the Sky

13

The Poet of Leaves of Grass and the Grass Flute Zen Master

I’m riding with Mr. Iwazawa. He’s giving me a lift to the Saku Station, the closest Bullet Train station from Komoro. He helped Joko transform Sodo-san’s music into an electronic format. Joko wants to do whatever he can to spread his teacher’s work. I don’t think he can see how any instrument other than the leaf will destroy the spirit (and uniqueness) of his teacher’s music.

Mr. Iwazawa, who oversaw the publishing of a handsome book of Sodo-san’s photos, poems, and calligraphy, surprises me when he says he never met the man.

“We published the book a year after Yokoyama Roshi died.”

“How did you get involved?” I ask.

“My older sister is married to Yokoyama Roshi’s nephew.”

It’s interesting to me how many people who never met the man are influenced by Sodo-san, like many from the group that meets in Kaikoen Park every Sunday to play the leaf.

“What kind of music interests you?” I ask Iwazawa, having realized from our previous conversation that it wasn’t zazen that intrigued him about Sodo-san, and wondering if he was interested in the music. He must have thought I meant American music because he said, “Country-Western.”

When I met Sodo-san in the park he’d said to us that he liked Stephen Foster. As I mentioned earlier, he played “Old Folks at Home” when he saw three foreigners approaching. He told us on our visit that day that he also loved Walt Whitman. Neither Joko nor Mr. Iwazawa had any idea that Sodo-san was interested in the famous composer or the great American Bard.

I’d wanted to make the trip to Kaikoen Park in 1970 because I fantasized he would be someone like the Indian Saint Ramana Maharshi. The Maharshi sat in a cave on a mountainside absorbed in “god consciousness” for many years and lived on that mountain for the rest of his life. Before I was informed otherwise, I’d thought Sodo-san lived in the park. I was disappointed at first to learn that he lived in a boardinghouse and spent his days in the park.

Sodo-san was no Maharshi, but he satisfied my need to find a Japanese monk who lived the life of an ideal man of Zen. When Sodo-san told us he loved Walt Whitman, my favorite American man of letters, I knew he wouldn’t disappoint me.

There is nothing in Sodo-san’s writing about Whitman, so all I have is that one statement when we met in the park. Whitman’s writings are often mistaken (in my opinion) as those of an American nationalist, a spokesman for the American ideal of democracy. I believe they are really about the author’s personal experience of a oneness of nature. Something he must have experienced, and sprouted forth in him as a great American poem. The ‘I’ in his “Song of Myself” (a title that was attached to the poem long after his first edition) is not a personal I.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.