“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, January 4, 2016

He Had a Way with Words

It's #4 that really, really gets to me. He wrote really abbreviated versions, and he understood English, so these pack a wallop. #2 is awesomely straightforward. I kinda don't like how the new translation committee seem to have made these into four-line stanzas--it's a bit cute. I prefer my version, how it is almost prose...

Joyful to have such a human birth,
Difficult to find, free and well-favored.

But death is real, comes without warning.
This body will be a corpse.

Unalterable are the laws of karma;
Cause and effect cannot be escaped.

Samsara is an ocean of suffering,
Unendurable, unbearably intense.

--Chögyam Trungpa, The Four Reminders (1974)

1 comment:

D. E.M. said...

I did some research (aka googling) & apparently in Jainism, you can be reborn as a rock.