Prostrations | Buddhist Poem

Prostrations 

by Go Hyeong-ryeol

Today my heart 

Goes to a temple and offers prostrations

While leaves open their buds one by one

Kneeling down on an aged wooden floor

Cold, without any trace of warmth

I who is joyful, clean and existing perpetually

Stand up and look again

In the forest where last spring disappeared

In the last hours of autumn

Only transience is perpetual and beautiful.

Wishing my return to this path

Wishing my return to the pain of new buds

Wishing I can offer prostrations to all things

Even while leaves fall one by one

Today my heart

Walks in fervent prostrations.

This poem by the poet Ko Hyeong-ryeol is from his poetry collection titled Frost Flower, Snow Buddha, published in 1998. In his epilogue he said, “Whenever I can make time, I empty whatever is in my heart. When I let go of my heart like this, those things I let go can return to me as though I was encountering them for the first time. It is said that there is ancient and modern in man but no distant and near in law.” I think the “law” he speaks of refers to the truth, and the act of “emptying” makes him feel meditative bliss from seeing his true nature. 

Frost Flower, Snow Buddha has several poems related to Buddhism such as: “Amitabha Fish,” “Passing the Cheongnyangsa Temple Ruins,” “Before My Nirvana Feast,” “Frost Flower, Snow Buddha,” “Bongjeongam Hermitage at the End of Mt. Seoraksan,” and “Seonamsa Temple.”   

A passage from “Bongjeongam Hermitage at the End of Mt. Seoraksan” reads: “Complete sacredness / A sacred house of dry bones standing in a blizzard / To guard like an old pine standing at the edge of a protruding cliff, its needles shivering / Bongjeongam Hermitage like a pure child, and within it a fully complete body.” In this way the poet understood the space within a temple to be sacred and complete, free from desire and wanting nothing. 

In the poem “Prostrations” he confesses that while he was offering prostrations at the temple, he realized “transience” to be perpetual and beautiful. “Transience” means that nothing is permanent. To experience the change of seasons, the budding and shedding of leaves, and the changing of warm to cold energy is to experience impermanence. The poet also thinks he should respect all living beings while he prostrates himself. In his poem titled “Commotion,” he writes: “How much commotion is my physical body creating? / At present this physical body has much commotion.” Perhaps even in the midst of his prostrations, he must have sensed his physical body to be in commotion and then arrived at a state of mental absorption. 

Explanation by Mun Tae-jun (Poet)