“Man is not worried in the middle – Man in the Middle/Is not Worried/He knows his Karma/Is not buried/ But his Karma,/ Unknown to him,/May end – / Which is Nirvana/ Wild men/Who kill/Have Karma/Of ill/ Good men/Who love/Have Karma/ Of dove/ Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell/Have come surreptitioning/Through the tall grass/To face the pool of clear frogs”
That’s a cool image. Snakey people, or snakes, or evil, (they) think they’re really evil and they’re “Poor Denizens of Hell” and they come surreptitiously up through the grass and what do they find, there’s a nice clear pool of frogs.
And “the pool of clear frogs” refers to the famous Buddhist haiku by Basho, “An old pond/A frog jumps in/The sound of water splashing.” Everybody know that? Of that? (A) Basho haiku. It’s a famous haiku. Three-line, seventeen-syllable poem, Japanese, by the most famous haiku writer, named Basho, and the most famous haiku by Basho is the one about the old frog, which is about the mind. That is, the mind is the pool, and somebody’s sitting meditating by an old pond in a little temple, (a little dis-used, rusted, nobody’s been there for a long time), the man’s mind is quiet, and then he has a thought, perhaps, which is like a frog jumping into the water. Like empty mind, and all of a sudden the frog jumps in the (water).
“Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell” – (All worried and anxious) – “Have come surreptitioning” – (like (President) Richard Nixon) – ” Through the tall grass”
To face what? – Rather than hell, a “pool of clear frogs”. That’s a funny way of how he twisted it around – “To face the pool of clear frogs”, instead of “an old pond, a frog jumps in, a sound of water splashing”. At least that’s the subconscious reference behind that, of which might otherwise be a little bit obscure. But it doesn’t matter if it’s obscure – I recollect a lot of the associations he had in this.
But I like that line without even knowing what he’s talking about – “Snakes are Poor Denizens of Hell” – (He’s sympathetic to the snake. Poor Denizen – “Denizen” means someone who inhabits, who lives down there).
Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately twenty-eight-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately thirty-and-three-quarter minutes in