Impermanence

In demonstrating the technique "breathing while not breathing,"

the abbot found himself confusing his students about

a small point concerning impermanence, a point

having to do with a letting go of the breath which otherwise

might have gone unnoticed. Falling into a trance

a few of his students mistook for the climax of his lecture,

he realized there was nothing he could do to rescue them

from the folly he, himself, had created. He sat frozen

in samadhi, legs crossed, eyes downcast, while

outside the pagoda the street swarmed with refugees from

a nearby province. The clatter of hooves, the smoke of

their campfires & the odor of their spices filled the courtyard.

The temple bell rang. His students trotted off to

join the older monks, and the abbot, following his breath

and seated in full lotus, fought each fleeting thought

as though it were his last: category one had to do with suffering;

the second concerned itself with forgiveness;

while categories three and four covered personal

and administrative matters.

                           He noticed his mind lit on category two.

Whom would he like to forgive? At mid-afternoon

he awoke the students from their torpor and watched

the disheveled crowd mill before the temple gates.

The cypress wept, the hills rose into a fleece of cloud:

as his gaze lit on a family huddled around glowing embers

above which sizzled a cat's scrawny carcass,

the abbot's stomach churned. He returned to his students

playing a word game based on the dialectics of the Diamond Sutra:

" all these molecules are not really such,"

one of the students—a middle-aged eunuch—

said, and the others grinned behind their scrolls.

Late afternoon. He listened to the hub-bub of fresh refugees

while above the tea-garden—where the prayer flags rippled—

vultures circled. Peering out the gate, he again surveyed the crowd

whose smudged faces & barbarian ornaments

appeared to him both exotic and familiar,

a shimmering projection of the mind's chaos

that in moments would be swept away.