on samsara's edge invited to sing

June 10th, 2025

Hamid’s talk:

Today I would like to talk about what came up in the presentation Carl gave about this notion of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa as two poles of our reality, and how traditionally, Buddhist teachings have been about the understanding that practice, the Dharma, and the insights we gain from them, help us to cross this river, this in-between river of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa. For the crossing a raft is needed– the metaphor comes from Buddha, so it's very ancient – and then we land on this place of peace, this shore of tranquility, where our suffering somehow is no longer accompanying us. The other shore has been traditionally called Nirvāṇa, for which there is no direct translation, there neither is for Saṃsāra – these are Sanskrit terms. But in Nirvāṇa, there is this notion of extinction, and more precisely, the blown away, like you blow out the flame of a candle. So it's extinguished, the flame being the flame of passions, desires, ignorance, and suffering.

So people revisit that, and this is also a metaphor for what, in other traditions, not directly related in any way to Buddhist teachings, but this notion of what is suffering, what is the absence of suffering, translates into the terms of heaven and hell. So what is heaven and what is hell? And I will ask, I mean, I will invite a few voices here, poets mostly, to give us their sense of how they see this Saṃsāra, Nirvāṇa, or Heaven and Hell.

I'd like to start with some quatrains or rubāʿī from Omar Khayyám, the great Persian poet, mathematician, and astrologist of the 11th century, who had a deep impact on Western culture notably through the translation of his poems around the middle of the 19th century by Edward FitzGerald. He was a person who saw beyond the doctrines of his religion, which was Islam, and probed into the deeper meanings of things and asked fundamental philosophical and existential questions. In these quatrains, or rubāʿīyāt, he also writes about heaven and hell and how he understands them. I will share three of these poems for you:

i sent my soul through the invisible,some letter of that after-life to spell:and by and by my soul return’d to me,and answer’d, “I myself am heaven and hell.”

And another one:

beyond the earth, beyond the farthest skies,i try to find heaven and hell.then I hear a sullen voice that says,“heaven and hell are inside.”

And the last two verses of another quatrain that I remember fondly in the original Farsi which is my mother tongue:

douzakh sharari ze ranjé bihoudeyé maast / ferdos dami ze bkhté asoudeyé maast

heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire,and Hell the shadow from a soul on fire.

Khayyám is basically saying there is no heaven or hell outside of us in some other realm, that they are internal states between which we navigate. So they have no objective reality, they have just a subjective one, which is our very personal life experience. Where we struggle with desires and wants, and once that desire and wants and obsessing over that ceases, we do find some measure of peace, which is not that far removed from the idea of Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa in Buddhist understanding. Because for the Buddha, it is our wanting, our craving, our desires, that bound us to the wheel of samara, under the ignorance that their fulfillment can make us satisfied, that sets us on the wheel of samsaric existence.

In the Zen tradition, there are a few stories about this notion of what is heaven and hell, samsara and nirvana. There is this story that comes from medieval Japan of an encounter between a master of the sword, a samurai, and an old Zen master. They were coming in opposite directions on a bridge, and the samurai, who was powerful and greatly feared, had heard about this teacher who was a frail and weak figure compared to him. He sees him coming from the other side, and as he approaches him, he stops him and he asks point blank, " What is heaven and what is hell?" The Zen master keeps silent. The samurai asks a second time and by now he is already getting irritated. The old master continues to not say anything. On which the samurai becomes infuriated as the master, this person, had simply ignored his quesrtion. He gets very angry, and on that he puts his hand on the handle of his sword, and says with rage, "I will kill you if you don't answer me," and the teacher continues to keep silent. And then he's about to withdraw the sword from the sheath, and as he is withdrawing the sword from the sheath, he hears the Master say, "This is the beginning of hell." And he is completely taken aback, and he pauses. So just a slight shift in his consciousness, and as he's now reflecting, and makes a slight movement of pushing the sword back into the sheath, at which point he hears the master say, "This is the beginning of heaven." So in just that moment, he had these direct teachings as to what is heaven and what is hell, as the manifestation of anger that leads to hell and the peace that is present when the anger subsides. Quite a profound instruction using just a few words but the words are coming from a place of meeting directly what is presenting itself in the moment. In the Buddhist cosmology of the six stages or states of samsaric existence, you have the pit of hell that is called Avīci; it's the state where we are completely consumed by anger. And on top, you have the realm of the devas, the realm of the gods, the realm of bliss. But they all belong to samsara, even the blissful state as they are all subject to impermanence. For a moment, the anger arises in him and he is showing it, the master points it to him and says, "This is hell." And when the anger has abated, he says, "This is the beginning of heaven." So I found that story, it was an old story that I read many years ago, was very illuminating in the way these Zen stories are, direct and to the point.

Now, leaving Omar Khayyám and ancient Persia behind, a couple of poems from Japan by the great haiku poet Issa Kobayashi, who had a very tragic, by all measure, existence. I won't go into his personal life, if you're interested, you can read about it. Anyway, he lost several of his children through disease, and his wife as well. So nothing in this life really worked for him, but somehow, he was very steeped in the practice of Zen. He maintained a certain equanimity in the face of all the sufferings that he endured. So there are two haikus from him that relate to our topic that I will share with you. One is:

in this world

we walk on the roof of hell

gazing at flowers.

This world, "we walk on the roof of hell," this samsaric exisence is a place of great suffering, " and yet we walk on it gazing at flowers." So the flowers are a metaphor for what is pure, what is peaceful, what is blissful. Buddha sits on the seat of lotus petals. They represent enlightenment, they represent Nirvāṇa. And it's such a relationship that Issa is also drawing to: that we walk on the roof of hell, we are steeped into this saṃsāric existence of suffering, and yet we gaze at the flowers.And another haiku of his is the following. So haikus are very short, right? They are only 17 syllables, just eight or nine words. Their force and their evocation is in what they make us imagine and leave a huge space for us to reflect on what is left unsaid.

on a branch

floating down river

a cricket singing.

These poems are a great source of influence, the poetry of Issa and haiku in general, to the American poet, who is also very much inspired by the practice of Zen, Jane Hirshfield. She who wrote at length about Japanese poetry, and haiku in particular and translated many of them. And here, she speaks about these two haikus I read to you. She talks about the impressions they've left on her. So about the cricket floating downstream on a leaf, she says, "This is our situation. We are probably in peril, in danger. We are on a branch in the middle of a river. This is not a good place for a cricket to be, especially if there are rapids ahead. And yet, what does the cricket do? It sings, because that is its nature, because that is what it has to offer. Because it delights in this moment, in the sun, because it is on a branch, and not yet drowned. And so I feel like our entire lives are in that haiku, 17 syllables in Japanese. And I have never forgotten that."And her comment on the other haiku that I said, "We walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers," she writes, "When I first encountered that haiku, I thought it was a portrayal of a kind of bitterness that, you know, here we are on the roof of hell, and what do we do? And my feeling about it has completely changed over the years because I now feel, you know, every inch of ground on this Earth has some unfathomable suffering, some of it human, some of it not human. But there is not an inch of earth that is not soaked in suffering. But there is also not an inch of earth which is not soaked in joy and in beauty and in radiance." So that's how she understands the presence of both heaven and hell, present to our everyday experiences, that the suffering and the relief from the suffering, or the joy as she calls it, are both at hand. They are concomitant. They are both present, and they come togethe, they are inseparable.

And that statement about the cricket floating downstream in peril, probably is going to drown very soon, but nonetheless continuing to sing makes me think of another poet or mystic or writer, in his own way, a very profound writer, Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer, who educated me a great deal when I was reading him about the ways of the world. And one of the last of the trilogy, which is a novel, if you want to call it a novel, it's really not a story, it's called "The Unnamable" (L'Innommable in French, because they were written in French and translated by him to English). You have this very celebrated saying, and he says, "When you are in the shit up to your neck, there's nothing left to do but sing." So that sounds like a very interesting parallel to the poem of Issa and the cricket who sings, and Beckett has been, "You're neck deep into shit. You can't move, you can't do anything." But the possibility of singing is not taken away from you. So that is the concomitance of suffering, but also the presence of joy, of delight.

And this takes us to a very old collection of Zen stories, one of the very first Zen books translated into English by Reps called "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones." And one of these stories is the following. It's quite known in Zen, and it's almost a koan. And I think reading all the poems of these poets and writers will give us a more direct insight into perhaps the meaning of this story.I'm reading from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones":

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little, started to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

So you can see, the strawberry is the gazing at the flowers, it's the heaven, and he is in the pit of hell, yet he takes the moment to pluck the strawberry and to taste it, as a moment of praise, as a moment of celebration, as a moment of nirvana in samsara. This echoes the words of the poet Jack Gilbert: " We must risk delight."

Now, further to this distinction of nirvana and samsara, Master Okumura, commenting on one of Master Dogen's wakas, Chinese-style poems, writes, "Actually, there is no such boundary, like a river, between samsara and nirvana. Each time we do even small things to help others, being free from self-centeredness, we experience nirvana, here and now."

So, this notion of samsāra and nirvana is fundamental, and our approach needs to be non-dualistic that is we meet everything as it is. In Zen this is realized through the Bodhisattva vows. This is a person who dedicates their life to the liberation of others. And historically, Bodhisattva is this person who's very advanced on the path but refrains from stepping into Nirvana, from releasing themselves from the world of samsaric suffering, because they respond wholeheartedly to the first of Bodhisattva vows: "As numberless as sentient beings are, I make the vow of saving them all." So it's a direction. It will never be realized, we will never liberate all living beings from suffering, but the vow to dedicate our lives to lessen their suffering is directional, its our compass through the chaos and wilderness of life. It gives us a sense of where we need to go and where we need to put our efforts into.

So, the great contemporary Dogen commentator, the Korean Hee-Jin Kim, in his book, "Dogen: Mystic Realist," evokes the figure of Avalokiteśvara, which is the Bodhisattva of compassion. And he says that on this side or on that side of that shore, we never leave the one indivisible thusness or suchness or tathātā. Both nirvana and samsara, in the strictest sense, are empty of self-nature. They have no permanent, abiding substance to them. So here we touch on the non-duality of compassion: giving to the other is giving to the self, helping the other is helping the self, freeing the other is self-liberating. For ultimately, through the non-duality of compassion, we realize the inseparability between oneself and others, which takes us back to Master Okumura's comment that each time we do even small things to help others, being free from self-centeredness, that is for us experiencing nirvana, here and now, in samsaric existence.

So for Dogen, spiritual practice and evolution was not something that was, in his understanding, moving in terms of a progression, something with a future development to it, something realizable in a dimension of time to come. It is all unfolding in the here and now. So we do not move in terms of a progression, and the raft does not leave the shore to reach the other shore. So samsāra and nirvana are just one moment, or as Khayyám puts it, "Heaven is but the vision of fulfilled desire, and Hell the shadow from a soul on fire."

And here, I would like to read to you a small passage by Master Dogen that elucidates this point. Pāramitā means in Sanskrit, and here Dogen is operating this linguistic twist that is his hallmark. Pāramitā does not mean, he's changing the sense of "reaching the other shore," which is traditionally the understanding of what pāramitā is. Pāramitā or paramitsu means "the other shore has arrived." Although the other shore in nirvana is not something that's conventionally associated with forms and traces, arrival is realized. Arrival is a koan. "Do not ever think that your practice will let you reach the other shore." So here he is completely negating this traditional understanding that the raft of practice will take us from here to there, from this shore to the other shore. "Do not ever think that your practice will let you reach the other shore, because there is practice in the other shore, in enlightenment. The other shore has arrived if you practice the Way, for this practice is unfailingly possessed of the ability to realize the entire universe." And here, in this quote, we get to an essential point of Master Dogen's understanding, that of the identity or non-duality of practice and enlightenment. They are inseparable. We do not practice in order to reach Nirvana, but Nirvāṇa is embedded in our practice, which strips away the traditional way of thinking of practice as some kind of a linear progression. And so when he says, "reaching the other shore" and turning it around, this is the paradox that he operates by saying "the other shore has already arrived."

And for Hee-Jin Kim, to conclude, "In short, the other shore was realized here and now in and through the practice of Bodhisattvahood. It was not a matter of the future, but a matter of the present."

So there were quite a few links and threads, but I hope somehow it made sense to you. Thank you for paying attention. If you have any comments or questions or remarks – it took us longer because we started later today, our time is a bit shorter today.

group discussion:

Carl: Thank you very much, Hamid, for this full talk. So many different stories pointing to the same point. Sometimes seeming different, but pointing to the same point. In fact, to be happy. Yes, there seems to be the reason of life, as the Buddha said. Two things came to me when you talked. One was this story with the man escaping from the tiger and hanging on the abyss, and the root is eaten, bitten off by two mice. I read once, I'm not sure if it’s real, I read that story that the strawberry was invented by Suzuki for Westerners, that the original koan was without a strawberry. And it made sense to me in a way, because even in the complete despair situation, the Western mind wants a solution, wants, yes, some consuming solution, maybe pleasure. While the Eastern ancient mind of the practitioners, they knew that there is no solution in the way that we look for pleasure. So that I wanted to say, I'm not sure that it's true, but it made sense to me. And another thing is something of The Doors, Jim Morrison, came up to me, the singing. "I have been so goddamn low that it seemed right up to me." This song came to me.

Hamid: Can you repeat that again, please?

Carl: "I felt so goddamn low that it seemed right up to me." So this moment of liberation, when we lose our interpretations, our mental commentaries. In real, yes, this is something, of course, the attitude is where, the attitude is. But it is an inner process. Because when I hear about the suffering and the theme of suffering, the theme of hell, when we see Gaza now, or when we see the concentration camps of the Nazis, there were people who were not losing their attitude of... it seemed difficult to say positive, or hope, or practice. Even in hell, they were practicing, taking care of others, taking care of values. This is an inner process. Like the beginning of your talk was, "It is in my hell and heaven, my mind," of this Persian poet. This is, in fact, paradoxical, this is the beginning to recognize this. So this is where my association to this huge export you read to choose things. Thank you so much.

Gerry: Thank you, Hamid, for all of your beautiful readings. I guess, like I try to simplify it all for myself. I think I hear that heaven and earth is always a choice. Heaven or hell is always a choice. So simple as that. If we're talking about mental heaven or hell, I guess, in terms of how we see the world or how we experience the world. And as an Irishman, thank you for quoting Samuel Beckett. I also have an old Irish saying that says, I'm just trying to think of it, "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows that you're dead." So just throw that in. But yeah, choice. We always have that choice in that moment, in this moment, to go north or south, or positive or negative. Even though they are part of our lives at the same time, we can always set ourselves in a direction of our choice. So that's what I got out of the beautiful readings today, so thank you very much, Hamid.

Hamid: Thank you. I think the nuance, I would put a nuance there, is like if we see ourselves in the cricket, if it has fallen on a leaf and on the branch going downstream, you can't avoid falling into saṃsāric existence. So is it like do you direct yourself, or is it like at that moment, as Beckett said, or as Issa is saying, that the choice is either you sit and you are terrified by where the river is taking you, or you pluck the strawberry and you taste it, and you sing. And the liberation is in that singing, in that just moment, which is how we ended the talk. It's not in the future, it's in the present. That...

Laura: (Sound is choppy and unclear) ...that's...

Hamid Ebadi: Laura, you're cutting. Sorry. You're cutting? Yeah, we can see you, but the sound was choppy.... Laura is sounding like a cricket that's gone underwater.

Carl: And you're here, Laura? Or is it me alone that doesn't hear her properly?

Gerry Rickard: She's cutting, yes, probably.

 .

Laura: (Sound continues to be difficult to understand) No, I just… For me, just… the thought came up sort of how often I want to sort of escape my inner reality and I'm running towards a destination that is ideally one of non-…

Carl: Well, that's a funny note. When you talk about when you are like, neck deep in shit, I didn't understand you so well. So I thought you said, "your neck deep, head, the only thing you can do is to sink." And I was like, "What advice is that?" But later on, you repeated it's "to sing."

Hamid: Oh, sink! S-I-N-K.

Carl: Yeah.

Hamid: No, no, no. That would... I don't think Beckett would write such a thing. No, it's to sing. You see, we got sing, we got think, and we got sink, and many other things.

Ahmed: I don't know which one of these Victor Frankl used, but when Carl was talking about the Nazi concentration camps and in parallel to the cricket, I thought of Victor Frankl and his writing during his experience in those camps and what he, and how was it even a choice, but holding on or choosing to exist in that situation and find that embedded Nirvāṇa or to continue. He says the words that he wrote were what he held on to, but that's an example to me of that kind of embedding and the ability to persevere. And then, of course, he went on to take it and make it into a science of psychology, an existential psychology. But the cricket with everything that's coming in the rapids, the concentration camp brought up Victor Frankl's story and much of the work that he expounded on and expressed in his psychology and in his books on the meaning of existence. So, yeah, that was what came to me.

Hamid: But you are right to have mentioned the concentration camps, Carl, and also to have just mentioned Gaza, because there is not one day that I do not think of what's going on in Gaza. And a few people I speak with, I have meetings with, they have Gaza entering their nightmares. So although it's limited to a very tiny territory, I think without us taking sides, the immensity of the suffering of the people who are living right there, I don't think it can leave us indifferent. I think it's very profound, extreme suffering that the people there are enduring. And talking about writing Victor Frankl and his testimonies and how it helped him, I don't recall his name, but there was a very promising Palestinian poet from Gaza who wrote poems about the situation in Gaza, but he died in one of the airstrikes, and he's just left some poems behind.

Ahmed: Yes, I'm aware of that, Hamid, and I think he wrote those poems after he'd lost his family and then he lost his own life thereafter. I forget his name as well. And I think, you know, we speak about Victor Frankl now. I am sure, and it's unfortunate that we are, in a sense, quiet about it now, but in a short time, we will be hearing a lot more of these people that have endured what is now happening in real time.

Hamid: Right. Well, thank you for being here and for contributing to this moment of sharing and practice. And, well, we'll reconvene next week, next Tuesday.