From Nothingness into a massive Being
Huge Mountains build their bulk into the sky.
From Being back into mere Nothingness
Blue lightning flashes in a lightning-flash
Both are illusions: mountains, however huge,
Are never born and lightnings never die
All is illusion: nothing at all is real
But the world prefers its babble of balderdash.

Encroaching on the emptiness, riot of color,
I love this uniquely, my own middle peak.
No cares at all, I lean on light staff,
I walk on calmly, following hidden tracks
On all the mountains falling of leaves is over.
And cold, azure mists form, layer upon layer.

Like the ice which melts
When spring begins
Not leaving a trace behind,
May your heart melt towards me!

The men of valour
Have gone to the honourable hunt:
The ladies
Are trailing their red petticoats
Over the clean sea-beach.

As orchard apples, so should friendship yield:
Simply,—first bud, then blossom; after which
Long trusting, while slow suns mature the rich
And perfect clusters. Late, while path-crossed field,
And streams, and all the orchard ways are sealed
With Winter's signet, and up-chimney pitch
The fire's great arms,—then is, in ingle-niche,
The gathered fruit, wine-ripe and sound, revealed!

A bell in the mountain-temple sounds the coming of night.
I hear people at the fishing-town stumble aboard the ferry,
While others follow the sand-bank to their homes along the river,
… I also take a boat and am bound for Lu-mên Mountain—
And soon the Lu-mên moonlight is piercing misty trees.
I have come, before I know it, upon an ancient hermitage,
The thatch door, the piney path, the solitude, the quiet,
Where a hermit lives and moves, never needing a companion.

A tortoise I see on a lotus-flower resting;
A bird 'mid the reeds and the rushes is nesting;
A light skiff propelled by some boatman's fair daughter,
Whose song dies away o'er the fast-flowing water.

White plum blossoms—
who from long ago stands
outside the brushwood fence?

The Korean ship
not stopping, passing back
into the mist.

Sleeping on
the mother's back—
the pinwheel spins
even in the baby's
unconscious hand.