Zen - with Henry Shukman

Tales of multiple awakenings

UK launch of the Dawn of Mind

Come along to Burley Fisher Books in London on the 21st of February for the UK launch of the Dawn of Mind! On the 26th I’ll be in conversation with Shamil Chandaria in an event organised by the UK psychedelic society, also in London. Hope to meet some of you there.

Zen

I first became aware of Zen through reading the beat poets as a teenager. Jack Kerouac led me to the poet Gary Snyder, via the book The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac renders Gary Synder as the lightly fictionalised Japhy Ryder. Synder’s translations of the 9th century poet Han Shan came to have a special place in my heart. I requested a collection of these poems at my local library and used their photocopier to copy every page. I then used a pencil to make holes in the “spine” and abound my little tome with string. I still have this book to this day at my homestead in the mountains of Portugal, where my teenage dream of becoming a mountain-dwelling dharma bum has become a reality.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain Path,
The Cold Mountain Trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide cree, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain.
The pine sings, but there’s no wind.
Who can leap the world’s ties
and sit with me among the white clouds?

- From Cold Mountain poems

Henry Shukman is a poet and Zen master who was also influenced by these poems, Syder, and the beats. Henry is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, part of the Sanbo Zen lineage. He is the author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir, and, most recently, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. We discussed Zen and our own paths of awakening on this week’s episode of the Living Mirrors podcast.