"I gravitated towards the ideas of Zen and Buddhism long before I knew that’s what they were. The first book I chose to buy for myself as a child was a collection of Japanese haiku—at eight or nine years old, the attraction was already there. In the poetry of Horace, which I read at sixteen, the spirit of carpe diem, the appreciation for what now is, and the recognition of transience are deeply resonant with a Zen understanding. When I began to read Japanese and Chinese classical literature in college and learned about Zen as Zen, it was more a continuation and a clearer vocabulary than a new discovery; the preexisting disposition, after all, was why I was interested in taking those classes. Recognition of interconnection, the problems of death, suffering, attachment and ego-narrowness—these are universal human concerns. So I would say that a hybrid Buddhism appears in Ecclesiastes, in the Nahuatl poems of Mesoamerica, in certain lines of Shakespeare, Whitman, and Keats. Zen is only a particular path of investigation into fundamentally human understandings. This is one reason why whatever of Zen is present in my poems is almost never there in any explicit language of Buddhism. It isn’t about anything exotic or special, only what’s there to be tasted on your own tongue."
Jane Hirshfield
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