Awakened Cosmos Quotes

“There’s an ancient legend that infuses China’s Yangtze and Yellow Rivers with cosmological dimensions. After flowing east and out to sea, the rivers ascend and rarify, becoming the Star River (Milky Way), crosses the heavens westward and descends into western mountains to form the headwaters of the rivers, a return to earth and the cycle. China’s rivers were an extension of the Milky Way, creating a cosmological cocoon and nestles humans into the ten thousand things, and prefigures the idea that the stars as embryonic origins of chi.”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Tu Fu’s wandering through the thousands of miles of ancestor peaks was always the Tao/Cosmos open to itself- ancestor wandering itself and gazing into itself; thinking itself and feeling itself, lamenting itself, and celebrating itself, writing poems about itself.”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Gazing at the Sacred Peak

What is this ancestor Exalt Mountain like?
Endless greens of north and south meeting

Where Changemaker distills divine beauty,
Where yin and yang cleave dusk and dawn.

Chest heaving breathes out cloud, and eyes
Open dusk bird-flight home. One day soon,

On the summit, peaks ranging away will be
small enough to hold, all in a single glance.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Returning Late

Past midnight, eluding tigers on the road, I return
Home in mountain darkness. Family asleep inside.

I watch the Northern Dipper drift low to the river,
And Venus lofting huge into empty space, radiant.

Holding a candle in the courtyard, I call for more
Light. A gibbon in the gorge, startled, shrieks once.

Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out:
Rickety cane, no sleep… Catch me if you can!

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Dawn Landscape

The last watch has sounded in the Amble-Awe.
Radiant color spreads above Solar-Terrace

Mountain, then cold sun clears high peaks.
Mist and cloud linger across layered ridges,

And earth split-open hides river sails deep.
Leaves clatter at heaven’s clarity. I listen,

And face deer at my bramble gate-so close
Here, we touch our own kind in each other.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“8th Moon, 17th Night: Facing the Moon

The autumn moon is still round tonight.
In this river village, isolate old wanderer

Hoisting blinds, I return to its brilliance,
And propped on a cane, follow it further:

Radiance rousing hidden dragons, bright
Scatters of birds aflutter. Thatched study

Incandescent, I trust to this orange grove
Ablaze: clear dew aching with fresh light.


Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Facing Snow

Thin slice of ascending light, radiant arc
Tipped aside bellied dark- the first moon

Appears, and barely risen beyond ancient
Frontier passes, edges into clouds. Silver,

Changeless, the Star River spreads across
Mountains empty in their own cold. Lucent

Frost dusts the courtyard, chrysanthemum
Blossoms clotted there with solemn dark.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Amid spring mountains, alone, I set out to find you.
Axe strokes crack-crack, and quit. Quiet mystery

Deepens. I follow a stream up into last snow and ice
And beyond, dusk light aslant, to Stone Gate forests.

Deer roam all morning here, for you harm nothing.
Wanting nothing, you know chi gold and silver all

Night. Facing you on a whim in such dark, the way
Home lost- I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Standing Alone

Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk.
Between river banks, two white gulls

Laze, wind-drifted. Fit for an easy kill,
To and fro, they follow contentment.

Grasses all frost-singed. Spiderwebs
Still hung. Heaven’s loom of origins

Tangling our human ways too, I stand
Facing sorrow’s ten thousand sources.

Tu Fu”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry

“Exalt Mountain was one of China’s five sacred peaks, and in its popular sense, Exalt-Mountain Ancestor refers to the mountain as a deity. But given the cosmological ways Tu Fu describes Exalt Mountain, it’s clear he sees something quite different. That mountain cosmology begins here in this poem with Changemaker, which also sounds like a kind of deity. But it is in fact Tao, that generative existence-tissue that is the maker of change. In gazing at the mountain, Tu Fu is gazing at a dramatic manifestation of the wild Taoist Cosmos; he sees Exalt Mountain as a center-point where space stretches endlessly away north and south, where the divine beauty of all existence is condensed into a single dramatic sight by Changemaker Tao. But changemaker, the Tao, is not separate from the mountains. Instead the mountain is an intensification or distillation of Tao.”
― David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry