On Mountain Paths

      A friend
 Returning from Bhutan
 Gave me a book
 On Emptiness…
      Shunyata — Nagarjuna’s four-fold
 Dialectic
 Philosophical nuance and explication
 Argued in monastery
 Courtyards on the roof 
      Of the world.
 
 Yes, fill me with that talk
 Of the emptiness of self - the Buddha way
      Or contrawise
 Of Christ’s fullness - his pleroma
      Declaimed by a Chrysostom
 Or Origin
      Against wine-dark waves
 Of an Ionian sea.
 
 …On mountain paths
 It is all the same, these word scarves
 We wear to keep
 Wind out, to helpfully
 Trip us up, so that
      Wordless
 We stumble 
 Into what saves us.
 
      Far 
 From Himalayan caves
 Or Mediterranean
 Churches
 I pick up one acorn cap
      On the trail
 Empty
 of its nut
 Even as a fragment
      Still full 
 Of tree and forest
 Rain, mountain lion 
 And sky
 
 Standing still
      Mountain rides me
 Into darkness
 And back
      To light. 
 

 22 November 2019
 Cedar Wings Cottage, 2680’
 Cold sky full of cloud

* Narajuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Root Verses on the Middle Way) c. 200 CE, first sets forth the four-fold dialectic that denies affirmation of both the existence and non-existence of things as a way to clear space for the Buddhist notion of emptiness. John Chrysostom and Origen of Alexandra were 3^rd-4^th century theologians both influential particularly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Greek pleroma finds its way into the canon as a technical term largely through Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians.