Our Own Agile Flow: Compassion and the Poetic Imagination¹

Michael Carlo C. Villas

¹ This was originally delivered as a lecture at the Gathering Minds Series, 27 October 2018, Fo Guang Shan Mabuhay Temple. Gathering Minds is a series of provocations where invited speakers talk about Humanistic Buddhism from the point of view of their craft and professions. I was introduced to this group by Dr. Marjorie Evasco. It began as sutra reading sessions, and it had as its members writers such as the late Jose Victor Peñaranda, Susan Lara, Connie Jan Maraan, and Raj and Seann Mansukhani.

The title of this essay comes from a poem by Edith L. Tiempo entitled “Between Living.” I find it fitting for this occasion because it captures the “human” and the “humanistic” in Humanistic Buddhism and every other humanistic endeavor there is. “The Buddha taught ‘Buddhism’ to human beings,” writes Venerable Master Hsing Yun, “That is why the discussion of Humanistic Buddhism should begin with his ‘humanistic’ qualities.” This runs counter to the practice of immediately endowing the Buddha with qualities of deity instead of beginning with the fact that he was born Siddharta, a human being. In Meditation and Wisdom, Venerable Hsin Ting shows us the only qualification to enter enlightenment: “… only those born in the human realm can succeed on the Buddhist path.” The excuse, tao lang (I’m only a human being), is ruled out in the Humanistic Buddhist order of things. Let us get into the middle of the poem then. It reads:

We boast of a green thumb
And coax the stems to bloom:
Hibiscus, santan, the wholesome
Cabbage rose; and make ambitious room
For gardenias, irises, and orchids
(Taking time to scour the aphids),
And maybe, soon or late
The flowers show;
But always we do know
Whereof we wait:
The nectar and the odors,
And the windblown blazing colors.

So it’s the space between
The wishing and the end
That is the true unknown;
The massive world’s timekeeping
And our own agile flow
Never to blend.

The certainty of “But always we do know/ Whereof we wait” is challenged by the indeterminacy of “… the space between/ The wishing and the end.” Many things can happen in the liminal phase between “coax[ing] the stems to bloom” and “the nectar and the odors”: depression, a newborn, drought, and a storm. But the persona goes through this period of waiting, which could both be a period of hope and despair, with the knowledge that “The massive world’s timekeeping/ And our own agile flow/ Never to blend.” So how did our gardener-persona manage this interim? With this wisdom:

And thus we care,
And thus we live
Not for the end
(Since that is not unknown),
It is the wait, creative
Life and love in full;
Unfinished, uncertain, unknown,
That comes sooner,
Later, or not at all.

Against the possibilities that what one waits for may come “… sooner,/ Later, or not at all,” the persona chose to “care… live/ Not for the end…/ It is the wait, creative/ Life and love in full;/ Unfinished, uncertain, unknown.” I want to put pressure on three words here: care, live, and love. In the face of wavering, in the face of the “unfinished, uncertain, unknown,” the persona resolves to care, live, and love. This defines “between living” and “our own agile flow,” “between living” as “our own agile flow.” I would also like to think the “human” and “humanistic” in Humanistic Buddhism are precisely constituted by love for the wanderer who leaves too soon and care for the plant that never blooms.

In this essay, I wish to bring my practice as a poet, literary critic, and translator to my own understanding of Humanistic Buddhism. I begin with a discussion of Toni Morrison’s Ingersoll lecture at the Harvard Divinity School entitled “Altruism: Goodness and the Literary Imagination,” whose reflections on goodness and literature will serve as the jump-off point to my thoughts on compassion and the poetic imagination using examples from Philippine poetry in English. I will, then, propose the necessity of learning languages, translation as an inevitable encounter with the Other, and the ethics of alterity that impinges upon the act of translating. Translation will be the method with which I will bring out the commitments and compromises in the encounter between languages. The overarching question I wish to confront here is: “What do poetry, translation, and learning languages have to do with compassion?”

Goodness and/in Literature

At this juncture, I wish to say that I use goodness and compassion here interchangeably. I will stick with the word ‘compassion’ a little later when I present the poems I chose for this essay which I approached from the purview of Humanistic Buddhism. In her Ingersoll lecture at the Harvard Divinity School, the word ‘goodness’ is used here as deployed by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Goodness was the site from which she launched her reflections on a trend in World Literature before and after World War I: more and more, men and women of letters seemed more inclined to give “evil” the center stage and relegate goodness to the background.

In “Altruism: Goodness and the Literary Imagination,” Morrison reveals her dissatisfaction over what to her is a loose definition of goodness: “selfless compassion to the other.” Her frustration led her to scholarship that uncovered at least three types of goodness: goodness that is “taught and learned,” goodness that is akin to “narcissism, ego enhancement, and a mental disorder,” and goodness that is the result of an “embedded gene” that makes some predisposed to give their lives for others. Later, she yielded an exciting reading of her novels using these same categories.

Keeping in mind that one cannot deal with goodness without touching on its opposite, she continues: “I have to tell you I have never been interested in or impressed by evil, but I have been confounded by how attractive it is to others. I am stunned by the attention given to its every whisper, its every shout, which is not to deny its existence and ravage nor to suggest that evil does not demand confrontation but simply to wonder why it is so worshipped, especially in literature.” Then, she asks: “Is it its theatricality, its costume, its blood spray, the emotional satisfaction that comes with its investigation more than its collapse?…. Perhaps it’s how it dances, and the music it inspires, its clothing, its nakedness, its sexual disguise, its passionate howl, and its danger. “

She follows this with an acute observation of how goodness and/in literature is often “equated with weakness, as pitiful, sort of like a little, running, frightened, and helpless through the woods while the pursuing villain gets more of our attention than her savior.” Goodness is almost granted no voice except that of characters robbed of speech like Benjamin in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or the eponymous Billy Budd in Herman Melville’s novel. On the other hand, evil is given the platform. “Grief, melancholy, missed chances for personal happiness often seemed to be contemporary literature’s concept of evil. It hogs the stage. Goodness sits in the audience and watches, assuming it even has a ticket to the show.”

As “contemporary literature is not interested in goodness on a larger, even limited scale,” as goodness in today’s literature “always appears with a note of apology on its hand… and has trouble speaking its name,” Morrison resolves:

Over time, these last forty years, I’ve become more and more invested in making sure acts of goodness, however casual or deliberate or misapplied or… blessed, produce language…. Expressions of goodness are never trivial in my work, and never incidental in my writing. In fact, I want them to have lifechanging properties and to illuminate decisively the moral questions embedded in the narrative. It was important to me that none of these expressions of goodness be handled as comedy or irony, and they are seldom mute. Allowing goodness its own speech does not annihilate evil, but it does allow me to signify my own understanding of goodness: the acquisition of self-knowledge.

She explains what she meant by “self-knowledge” through an example from her fiction: “A satisfactory or good ending for me is when the protagonist learns something vital or morally insightful and mature that he or she did not know at the beginning.”

In contrast with examples from her fiction, the language of goodness Toni Morrison speaks of reminds me of real-life men and women who gave goodness a voice in their thoughts, words, and deeds. Take, for instance, Sis. Patricia Fox, who refused to speak evil of the regime that rejected the entry of her ministry to the poor south of the country; or the newly canonized Catholic saint, Salvadoran Archbishop San Oscar Romero who, in the last sermon he delivered just before the assassin’s bullet hit his heart, emphasized the fraternity that binds humanity together and the life of another as important as one’s own; or Pope Francis, in his homily on 24 December 2017, Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord, who casts today’s migration and refugee crises in the light of the gospel. “So many other footsteps,” he says, “are hidden in the footsteps of Joseph and Mary. We see the tracks of families forced to set out in our day. We see the tracks of millions of persons who do not choose to go away but, driven from their land, leave behind their dear ones…. Surviving the Herods of today, who, to impose their power and increase their wealth, see no problem in shedding innocent blood.”

These thinkers and leaders belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition with which many of us identify. Yet my readings on Humanistic Buddhism tell me there is common ground between the former and our cherished religious traditions: the call for social justice in a increasingly inhumane world. Writes Venerable Master Hsing Yun: “Humanistic Buddhism holds true to the Buddha’s spirit by advocating an altruistic faith. In one of the Buddha’s previous lives, he fed his flesh to an eagle to protect a rabbit, and in another, fed himself to a tiger as a rabbit.” The Venerable Master says that “Humanistic Buddhism must embody the characteristics of altruism and universality. It is based on the bodhi mind and bodhisattva path, namely reaching upwards for Buddhahood while delivering sentient beings below. To aspire for the bodhi mind is to practice the Buddha’s teachings and to emulate his life of sacrifice and giving.” The bodhi mind, says another shifu, Venerable Hsin Ting, is “the intention to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.” It is noteworthy that the bodhi mind is not the attainment of enlightenment but the intention to attain enlightenment as lived in one’s daily life. To care for all sentient beings, or in ethical philosophy, what is called the Other, is by necessity an act of compassion. The bodhi mind defines and concretizes compassion.

Compassion and Philippine Poetry in English

This brings me to how goodness and compassion are embodied in Philippine poetry in English. I am particularly fascinated by how the poetry of Edith L. Tiempo, Marjorie M. Evasco, and Jose Victor Peñaranda gives a voice and visibility to goodness and compassion that is consistent throughout their body of work. I can ramble on many of these characteristics, but I find three strands of Humanistic Buddhist thought in their poetic oeuvre:

1. There is that seamless “harmonization of ‘this-wordly’ and ‘other-worldly’ thoughts,’” as when Edith Tiempo would zoom out to the cosmic, even invoking God and the universe and zoom in to the minutiae of fruit and cell, as when Marjorie Evasco would speak of rootedness in an island of blueness only to take flight with the kingfisher’s wings; as when Jose Victor Peñaranda turns what seems to be an ordinary hike in the Cordilleras into a learning and teaching moment, with the “unseen unfolding our being.”

2. This perception of the non-duality of things, I think, arises from what the Vinaya in Four Divisions names as the fruits of mindful living: “tranquil contemplation,” “meditative concentration.” Details, its arrangement, and the manner of articulation in the three poems from the three poets which I am about to share with you embody the urgencies and rewards of vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. How does the corn connect with the child flying his kite in Edith L. Tiempo’s “Belief”? What affinities do the sea and the soul of the persona have in Marjorie M. Evasco’s “Is It the Kingfisher?” What relationship exists between the rippling ricefields and the persona’s prayer of gratitude in Jose Victor Peñaranda’s “Learning in Darkness”?

3. Finally, such an awareness of the connectedness of all things can only be achieved through a compassionate openness to the world. “What Siddhartha awakened to were the truths of Dependent Origination and emptiness,” says Venerable Master Hsing Yun. “That all phenomena arise due to causes and conditions, and all phenomena are erased due to causes and conditions.” I’ve concluded that it is impossible to write poetry without compassion, without inclination to the good at least, sensitive to the “sweet season of the heart,” aware of the “hairbreadth boundary between us,” stirred by “our breath touching breath of mossy trees.”

I consciously did away with the critical idiom I am familiar with to get to the heart of the poems themselves. All I wish is that you savor the language of compassion in these poems not as a weak accessory to sound off good lines here and there but as a force with, as Morrison puts it, “life-changing properties.”

The above insights I mentioned are also what I wanted to hear in my mother tongue, Waray. So I risked translating them with surprising turns of phrase. As I have already said earlier, translation is the inevitable encounter with the Other because it entails the ethical task of learning the languages of the Other, without intending to convert or coerce. Only then will “life together” (to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words) be realized in our own time. I think that embodies the bodhi mind. I believe that is compassion. As for me, I learned Hiligaynon and Spanish to pass my language exams. I am learning the literary use of my mother tongue, Waray. I can read, write, and speak in Filipino and English. But there are two more languages that I constantly engage with (and I did not arrive at this by myself but with the help of Marjorie Evasco in the most unlikely of places, a funeral service): the language of poetry and the language of silence.

Translation, for me, precisely exemplifies the “between living” Edith Tiempo writes about in her poem of the same title, which I shared with you earlier. And what a marvelous thing: this shuttling, which is “our own agile flow,” between the “thisworldly” and the “other-worldly” in the act of poetry and the act of translation, until, as the dharma intones, “all sentient beings reach enlightenment.”

Here are the poems then and my translations in Waray:

BELIEF
(For A.F., guru at End House)
Edith L. Tiempo

The sweet season of the heart
Is the world believed,
When truth is simply what is seen:
The dew brings in the dawn and dusk,
And not the other way around;
The boy hoeing establishes the drought
Or rainy spell with the soil he opens;
Life-force does not beget the fruits; rather,
Fruits contrive the mysterious tremors
Called living: called pain, peace, pity,
Awareness, dread, passion, delight,
And all the greed, stealth, and evasions
Plotted and bedded in the busy cell.
Creation creates, and is not something
That was done into being once and for all;
Butterflies and sparrows flutter the day
Into glare and heat, and tuck
The long night under their wings;
The eyes spill over, makers of grief,
Inventors of love, and even stones produce
Death in their fall.

O for the soft corn making dreams
In the sun, secretly, violently scheming
The furious and blissful trance
Called youth. Call for the boy
Whistling to boil up wind,
Raising a gale to free his kite,
His kite where God sits, flying,
Sweeping, possessing the skies….

Truth is the world believed:
Only what the eye sees,
And the heart approves.

PAGTUO
(Kan A.F., magturutdo ha End House)
Edith L. Tiempo (Translated by Michael Carlo C. Villas)

Matam-is nga panahon han kasingkasing
An pagtuo ha kalibutan,
Kun diin an kamatuoran aada ha nakikit-an;
Gindadara han hamog an pagsirang ngan
Pagtunod han adlaw, ngan diri an kabaligtaran;
Ginpapamatud-an han batan-on nga nagrurudos
Kun kathuraw ug may maiha nga pag-inuran
Tungod han nabungkag nga tuna;
Diri ha gahum han kinabuhi natikang an prutas;
Kundi natubod ha prutas an mga matingalahon
Nga pagbay-og han kinabuhi: gin-ngaranan
Gihap’ ini nga kasakit, kamurayaw, kaluoy,
Kabut-an, kahadlok, kadasig, kalipay,
Ug tanan nga kalamot, pangawat, pangiwas
Nga gintul-id, ginsuksok ha makiwa nga selyula.
Naglalarang an Ginlarang, ngan diri ini butang
Nga nahimo ha usa ka higayon ngan nahuman;
Ginsusuroy han maya ngan alibangbang
An kapintas han sirak, ngan ginhihipos
An madugay nga kagab-ihon ha ilarom
Han ira mga pako; daw nahuhuwad
An mata, paraghablon han kasubo, panday
Han gugma, ngan bisan bato, ginlalarang
An kamatayon ha pagkahulog hini.

Agi daw, an mais nga nag-iinop ha adlaw,
Mamingaw la kundi naghuhunahuna
Kun tiunan-o masusubay an kaisog
Ngan karasa han pangulitawo. Gintatawag
An bata nga nataghoy agud humuyop
An hangin, ginbubuhian ha kusog hini
An iya manogbanog kun diin nalingkod
Hi Bathala, nalupad, ngan malaksi
An pag-angkon han kalangitan.

An pagtuo ha kalibutan ‘say kamatuoran:
An nakikit-an la han mata,
Ug naruruyagan han dughan.

Is It the Kingfisher?
Marjorie M. Evasco

This is how I desire god on this island
With you today: basic and blue
As the sea that softens our feet with salt
And brings the living wave to our mouths
Playing with the sounds of a primary language.
“God is blue,” sang the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez.
Drunk with desiring, his hair, eyebrows,
Eyelashes turned blue as the kingfisher’s wings.
It is this bird that greets us as we come
Round the eastern bend of this island;
Tells us the hairbreadth boundary between us
Is transient in the air, permeable to the blue
Of tropic skies and mountain gentian.
Where we sit on this rock covered with seaweeds,
I suddenly feel the blueness embrace us,
This rock, this island, this changed air;
The distance between us and the Self
We have longed to be. A bolt of burning blue
Lights in my brain, gives the answer
We’ve pursued this whole day:
Seawaves sing it, the kingfisher flies in it,
This island is rooted in it. Desiring
God is transparent blue—the color
Which makes our souls visible.

An Takray ba Adto?
Marjorie M. Evasco (Translated by Michael Carlo C. Villas)

Sugad hini an ak’ pag-iliw kan Bathala
kaupod mo dinhi hini nga poro: yano ngan asul
alagidagid han mapag-ad nga dagat, napahumok
han at’ tiil, nagdadara’n buhi nga balud
ha aton mga imim, nagmumulay
han tunog han sukad nga pinulongan.
“Pughaw hi Bathala,” awit han magsiriday
Juan Ramon Jimenez. Hubog ha pagliot,
an iya buhok, mga kiray, mga pirok
nag-aarasul sugad han pako han takray.
Amo ini an tamsi nga natapo ha aton pag-abot
ha sidlangan nga likoan hini nga poro;
nagsusumat nga nalabay la an hangin,
nga mapuok an utlanan ha aton butnga,
an aton mga panit, masilhag sugad han dagat,
nahuhunoban han maalindanga nga langit
ngan biyuos han bukid. Kun diin kita nalingkod
hini nga lusayon nga bato, tigda ko naabat
an hangkop han panganod, ini nga bato,
ini nga poro, ini nga nagbag-o nga hangin
an at’ kahirayo ha Kalugaringon
nga gin-uungara. May linti nga nagdarangga,
naglamrag ha ak’ buot, ginhatag an baton
han kolor nga aton ginlinanat bug-os
nga adlaw: ginsisiday ini han balud,
aada ini han pagpanoy han takray,
nakagamut ini nga poro ha iya.
Matin-aw nga asul an pangandoy
kan Bathala—an kolor
nga hayag ha aton kalag.

LEARNING IN DARKNESS
Jose Victor Peñaranda

Last night, we spent hours
Watching fireflies glow
The sound of river below
Kept rushing, unseen and unceasing,
Teaching us to listen
To the echo of perpetual flow;
Our bodies throbbing, laced
At the meridians of this valley.
Then a storm surprised our curious minds…
We heard the roll of thunder, falling rain;
Every now and then a vein
Of lightning seized the sky before us:
Quick silhouette of mountains brooding,
A glimpse of stark magnificence
Swelling from sources unfathomed;
The earth charged with seamless energy
Made indelible by restless creation.
Cool breeze soothed the raw gravity
Of our journey across the Cordillera range.
We learned to speak in low voices,
To be aware of lamps
Flickering from distant homes.
The terraced ricefields rippled through us.
We heard the wilderness whisper;
Felt birds dreaming among towering ferns,
Our breath touching breath of mossy trees,
The perfume of wounded flowers.
The unseen kept unfolding our being.
We woke up blinded by morning light,
Brimming with the silence of thanksgiving.

PAGTUÓN HA DULOM
Jose Victor Peñaranda (Translated by Michael Carlo C. Villas)

Kagab-i, pira ka oras naton ginkinitaan
An mga bukatkat nga naglurulamrag
Nahaganas an sálog ha ubos,
Diri nakikit-an, waray katatapos;
Gintututdoan kita pamati
Han aningal han iya agas;
Namamanhod na an aton kalawasan
Ha kabutngaan hini nga walog.
Ngan nakalasan an at’ mapakianhon
Nga hunahuna hin tigda nga madlos…
Aton nahibatian an dalugdog, uran,
Kagihot-gihot, kagis hin linti ha dampog,
Ginbubugkot an langit ha at’ atubangan:
Madagmit mawara lambong han kabubkiran,
Nasusubo, ladawan hin kagamhanan,
Naawas ha diri matugkad nga tinikangan.
Nakurog an tuna ha pitik han lilinti
Nahimutang hin di’ mahimuroy nga larang.
May mahagkot nga hangin an hinmapuhap,
Nagpahilom han kapoy han at’ pagbinaktas
Ha Kordilyeras. Nahibaro kita pakig-istorya
Hin gudtiay nga tingog, nga masayod
Ha mga nagkukurap-kurap nga mga kinke
Ha higrayo nga kabablayan.
Nabalud ha aton an hinagdan-hagdan
Nga kahagnaan. Binmati kita han huring
Han kagurangan, inmabat han katamsihan
Nga nagdadamgo ha gihihitaasi nga mga lukdo
An aton ginhawa gintapo han ginhawa
Han mga lumuton nga kakahoyan,
Alimyon han nagkapipilas nga bukad.
Gindadayag han mga apoy an aton pagkatawo.
Nagkamagta kita nga harapit mabuta han sirak,
Nag-aawak ha kamingaw han pagpasalamat.