Muso Soseki "Magnificent Peak"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Musō Soseki (夢窓疎石, 1275 – October 20, 1351), a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and teacher, and a calligraphist, poet and garden designer. The most famous monk of his time, he is also known as Musō Kokushi (夢窓国師, "national [Zen] teacher Musō"), an honorific conferred on him by Emperor Go-Daigo.[1] His mother was the daughter of Hōjō Masamura (1264–1268), seventh Shikken (regent) of the Kamakura shogunate.

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Heidi White, and today is Tuesday, June 20th, 2023.
0:11.4	Today's poem is by Muso Sosecchi, and it's called Magnificent Peak. I'll read it once and offer a few comments, then read it one more time.
0:22.2	Magnificent Peak
0:23.5	By its own nature, it towers above the tangle of rivers.
0:30.5	Don't say it's a lot of dirt piled high.
0:33.9	Without end, the mist of dawn, the evening cloud, draw their shadows across it.
0:40.7	From the four directions you can look up and see it, green and steep and wild.
0:50.8	Uso Soceki was a Japanese poet.
0:53.1	He lived from 1275 to 1350, so quite a long time ago. He was a Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, calligraphist, poet, and garden designer. He was the most renowned monk of his own time. He was so influential that he was made an advisor to the Shogun. He helped organize a network
1:12.9	of Zen monasteries called the Five Mountain System, which I bring up because this particular
1:18.1	poem is about a mountain, and we can see that was a huge part of his life. And the Five Mountain
1:24.1	System was a series of Five Mountains, obviously, which were centers of Zen
1:28.1	religious life, as well as repositories of learning, of Confucian philosophy, Chinese poetry,
1:34.5	calligraphy, ceramics, architecture, and perhaps most significant of all, the famous Zen
1:40.9	garden design, which remains perhaps his most important and enduring legacy. In fact,
1:47.5	even today you can travel to Japan and see gardens that were designed by Muso Sosecchi.
1:55.2	Like many Zen practitioners of his time, Muso Sosecchi also wrote poetry. The translation from the Japanese that I
2:03.0	read to you today was by W.S. Merwin, who's a wonderful American poet of whom David Kern is particularly
2:09.3	fond, and whose poetry has been featured frequently on the daily poem. I liked this simple and
2:16.8	elegant poem for a couple of reasons. I really love reading Asian
2:21.0	poetry, particularly in Japanese and Chinese poetry. I'm crazy about it. You'll probably hear quite a bit
2:25.5	from me because it tends to have a few characteristics that particularly appeal not only to me,
	...

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