Zen Master Man Giac

Early in spring, in the courtyard of an old pagoda, a small child stands looking at the plum tree by the veranda. Its white blossoms have only just opened, fragile in a wind that is still cold. On the pagoda wall hangs a piece of calligraphy: a few lines of old verse. The child can spell out the last two lines: "Do not say that when spring is over, every flower has fallen. Last night, in the front yard, a branch of plum was in bloom."

The child looks up and quietly asks: spring has only just come, so why does the poem talk about spring being over?

Those lines are more than 900 years old. They were written by a Zen master named Mãn Giác. He lived under the Lý dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225.

He was born in 1052. His birth name was Nguyễn Trường. His father, Lý Hoài Tố, served as an official at court. As a boy, the future Zen master was already known for his quick mind. He listened widely and remembered well, and he mastered both the Confucian books and the Buddhist ones.

The Lý era was a golden age for Buddhism in Vietnam. The land of Kinh Bắc, now the area around Bắc Ninh, was one of the oldest cradles of Buddhism in the country. Pagodas rose everywhere, and their bells rang out through the early morning mist. Mãn Giác grew up in that devout age.

Admiring his talent, Emperor Lý Nhân Tông gave him the name Hoài Tín. This emperor was one of the great rulers of the Lý. Some time later, Hoài Tín sent the emperor a petition asking to become a monk. He studied under the Zen master Quảng Trí. Then he wandered far and wide to learn from other teachers. In the Vô Ngôn Thông line of Zen, he belongs to the eighth generation.

He became the leading teacher of Buddhism in his time. Out of deep respect, the emperor had a pagoda named Giáo Nguyên built just for him and invited him to be its abbot. A man the emperor cherished had become a spiritual refuge for the whole court.

Then, at the end of 1096, he fell gravely ill.

That day, he called his disciples to his sickbed. In the quiet room, the old Zen master began to recite a verse. It later came to be called Cáo tật thị chúng, which means words spoken to the assembly in time of illness.

He spoke it in Sino-Vietnamese. Put into plain words, it goes like this:

Spring goes, and a hundred flowers fall. Spring comes, and a hundred flowers smile. Before our eyes, the affairs of life pass on and on. Upon our heads, old age has come. Do not say that when spring is over, every flower has fallen. Last night, in the front yard, a branch of plum was in bloom.

The room fell silent for a moment.

When the verse was done, he sat up straight with his legs crossed. Then he passed away gently, as calmly as someone falling asleep. He was 45 years old that year. He added no explanation. The poem itself was the teaching.

The first four lines speak of the ordinary way of things. When spring goes, the flowers fall, and when spring comes, they open. The affairs of the world keep passing before our eyes, while old age settles quietly on our heads. This is impermanence, the change that no one can escape.

But he did not stop at that sadness. The last two lines are the heart of the poem. Do not be quick to say that once spring is over, every flower has fallen. Because there, last night, right in front of the pagoda, a branch of plum quietly burst into bloom. That white branch, flowering just when spring seemed over, is the answer. The flowers still bloom. Life still goes on. The core of things, the nature within, does not fade with the seasons.

The poem does not lament that life is sad. What it offers is a quiet, steady hope. The end of spring is not the end. Even when everything seems to have faded, new life is still waiting to wake, each at its proper time.

More than nine centuries have passed, and the verse has not faded. It is counted among the most famous Zen poems of its era. In Vietnamese literature, that era is the age of the Lý and Trần dynasties. It appears in almost every anthology of Vietnamese Buddhist literature. People still call it the poem of the plum branch. The name Mãn Giác is itself a posthumous title, a name granted to him after his death. Because of these few lines, he is regarded as a leading poet of a whole age.

In a land where Buddhism took root long ago, a teacher like Mãn Giác stood at the very heart of Vietnamese culture. He was a monk, a poet, and a teacher to an entire court.

The child in the pagoda courtyard may not understand it all yet. But the child looks up at the plum tree by the veranda and sees the thin white petals opening in the cold of early spring. And somewhere inside, the child begins to understand why, more than 900 years ago, a Zen master about to depart wanted to leave his students only the image of a single branch of plum.