As I continue to insert translations of the poems collected as "THE TIP OF THE WRITING BRUSH" it might be a good time to talk about the contextual freedom that poetry, even poetry that is translated as prose, provides. By that I mean that though the poems are cast in the context of  worldly common events occurring in a family and village setting the vast majority of the poems were crafted in such a way that each key poem or poetic theme is a complete instruction in itself, regardless of the staging of the poems to suit the spiritual maturity of a particular person or persons as they grappled with their self centered concerns and expectations in a particular time and place.

Of course many of the poems are best understood as doublets or even triplets but their intended meaning is not dependent upon immersing oneself in the culture or the village lore of the times in which the poems were written. Every human being has a mind and though the content of each mind may differ, the origin of the human mind and the way to quickly reveal the original cause of all things as promised is without exception the same for all human minds in all times and in all places. 

Because of the intended universal application of the poems the actual context that the poems appear in is really rather simple. Indeed the context is always the same so that the instruction remains appropriate for all human minds in all times and all places. That simple universal context is the tireless effort - in every kind of way - of our original parental mind, the original cause of all things, to quickly reveal itself to the multitude of self centered imaginations that rise up within it. In contemporary terms this might best be understood as a voluntary product recall. We are asked to return our minds to their manufacturer so that an unintended design flaw that is stealing the intended joy from our existence can be repaired and put right. Once repaired our minds are free to return to their free play in the world.

If however one is concerned with the dramatic family context of the poems cast in a particular time and place it doesn't hurt to recall that "Waka" style poetry involves a dialogue or conversation between differing points of view.  In the poems collected as the seventeen books of "Ofudesaki", "The Tip Of The Writing Brush", those points of view are presented as an honest and candid family talk between the one universal mind of the original parent of all human beings equally and the self centered imaginations of all of the headstrong children of the world who naturally neither know nor are able to recognize the mind of our ever present original parent as it exists within us at the very core of our being.


The conversations in all seventeen books of collected Ofudesaki poems are cast with three assumptions:








For various understandable reasons, the poems show that our minds have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to follow, exactly as given, the directions that show the way to the quick realization of the knowledge and understanding of the ever present original cause of all things as is it hastened and  promised by the original parental mind that exists within us all.  The minds of the children as they appear in the poems then are representative of the default worldly common state of all of the minds of the world regardless of time or place.


In this regard the points of view of the children can be understood as the worldly common thinking that has accumulated, like dust or even mud, on our original parental heart. Poetically referred to as the regret of the parent, our worldly common thinking is called the regret of the parent because our worldly common thinking and our truths of the world have unintentionally and increasingly led to life paths of hardship, suffering and a lack of joy for large numbers of people. That condition being the opposite of the intended free and unlimited life of joy that we are capable of. Though the mind of our original parent teaches the way to quickly reveal the one true original core of the human mind and the joyous life that can flow from it. The minds of the children remain interested in all sorts of other worldly common truths and cannot settle down and ponder the original cause of all things as it exists eternally and which can be known and understood as the very conscious core of our own mind.


Both the point of view and intention of our original parent ( metaphorically Nihon) and the worldly common points of view and intentions of the minds of the children ( metaphorically Kara) are modeled in the poems. In our effort to intentionally know and understand the original cause of all things in detail our task is to employ all means for finding whatever ways to quickly remove the regret - dust, mud, self centered worldly common thinking - covering our parental mind just long enough to reveal the knowledge and understanding of the truth of origin, the parental mind of God, that remains. In so doing enjoying the joy that flows from knowing and understanding the truth of our origin. To intentionally do this it is important that we work to separate and distinguish the points of view of the children's worldly common self centered imaginings that are addressed in the poems from the point of view of the original cause, that is the point of view of our original parent. In the poem below "Kara" is a metaphor for the worldly common points of view of the children and "Nihon" is a metaphor for the point of view of God's mind, the truth of origin, the original cause of all things.