Read aloud in “Pamela Weiss Hosts Matty Weingast”
Norman
17. I wandered for alms, leaning on a stick, weak; with trembling limbs I fell to the ground in that very spot. Seeing peril in the body, then my mind was completely released.
Weingast
Another day
walking in circles
with an empty bowl.
Leaning on my staff
in the middle of the road,
my whole body shaking with hunger,
what little strength
I had left—
left me.
As I was
falling
to
the
ground,
I saw.
I was the spoonful of rice.
And this
whole world—
the bowl.
You can’t miss, even if you try.
Another theme throughout the book is the erasure of the bodily contemplations. This poem shows that especially clearly, as his rendition clearly tracks the original … until it doesn’t.
Instead of seeing “the peril in the body,” his poem instead switches to a neo-vedanta metaphor for “enlightenment” which could have come straight from the 19th century.
Here is Edwin Arnold’s description of nibbāna in The Light of Asia (1879):
He goes unto Nirvana.
He is one with Life
Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be.
OM, MANI PADME OM! The
Dewdrop slips
Into the shining sea!
(I was the spoonful of rice.
And this
whole world—
the bowl.)