INTRODUCTION TO BAMBOO LEAVES

                                                                                        Floating market, Bangkok

There is poetry in Thai, Pali and Chinese names, in their meanings and the music of their sounds.The people and incidents are recorded as they were.The perspective and tone varies.

BAMBOO LEAVES (opening poem)

From the sun’s fierce heat,

the bamboo grove offers much relief.

Each leaf is uniquely made

and all are quite the same.

The whole provides a living shade;

why give each leaf

its individual name?

The mind is such

a lonely, fragile thing,

so easily afraid

of what it can’t believe in.

Yet every time we make-believe,

belief is truly made.

Brian Taylor

BAMBOO LEAVES (closing poem)

Their leaves of grass* emerge and fade;

with windblown rustling tongues converse.

The grove has grown throughout the universe,

spreads everywhere its pleasant living shade;

creating north south east and west

(the fierce, unending struggle to be best);

relentlessly growing.

The variety is unimaginable,

the sameness unknowing

and unknowable.

The grove is all its roots and culms and leaves,

yet every leaf contains the whole,

every living thing that breathes

and all its universes, as well.

All things are perfect

in their subatomic details

and reach out blindly to direct

networks of rhyzomes and roots 

carrying new, all different, identical shoots

to every part of infinite space

until the chain of being fails.

And every leaf has a human face,

and every culm is a human heart.

At the end of a kalpa,

the grove gathers its energy

in an explosion of mass flowering;

an outward showering

of fruit and seed.

The clones wither and die,

the culms dry

and disintegrate

and crumble into food

to fulfill the eternal need

as a new regeneration germinates

and the whole grove reincarnates.

* Bamboos are part of the Poaceae, The Grass Family.

Brian Taylor

MALINEE

A monk's compasson.

  Malinee’s father took her to China.

  There was a reception in their honour.

  A monkey was brought in

  and put on the table.

  It was alive.

  Its body filled the cage;

  the head stuck out of the top.

  Everyone watched.

  The monkey’s head

  was carefully shaved.

  The top of its skull was chopped off.

  Wine was poured

  into the exposed brain.

  It was still alive.

  The guests used their chopsticks

  to select pieces of brain.

  They put them in their mouths

  sucking out the taste of the wine.

  Eventually, the monkey died.

  Malinee was horrified.

  Then Malinee’s father

   took her to Singapore.

  There was a reception in their honour.

A large bowl was brought in

with giant prawns.

They were alive.

The chef poured alcohol onto the prawns.

They jumped up and down drunkenly.

Then he lit a match

and the bowl filled with flame.

The prawns died

and were cooked

in the same instant.

Malinee was horrified.

Malinee’s servant brings

fish (and prawns)

from the market.

Malinee eats these.

They are already dead.

That makes all the difference.

To whom?

                  (Bamboo Leaves   Page 172)

BIG SNAKE

Venerable Father of Seven Kings

The Venerable Luang Pu Soh
is a famous teacher of meditation.
He is eighty-seven years old.

In the second year after his ordination,
while he was sitting in his kuti,
a large golden snake, six metres long
and as thick as a house post,
entered the hut, slithered straight towards him
and lifted him up so that he was seated on its coils.
It pushed its head into his body, but he felt no pain,
and seemed to push it out again
between his shoulder blades.
When he reached up carefully with his left hand,
he could feel its head above his own,
just as it is shown
in images of the Buddha.
After a while it crawled out and away
and he could feel his bottom touch the floor again.

In his sixth year, while walking in the Temple grounds,
he heard a loud voice inside him,
“In your eighth year
your symbol will appear
through the air,
on the ninth waxing day
of the ninth lunar month.
He who has it now will come.”

When this day came,
he sat meditating as usual
in the early morning.
There was the loud rushing and roaring sound
of a great wind
which caused the branches of the trees around
to sway and beat against the ground
and a helicopter landed in front of the hut.
The pilot got out.
His clothes were green,
as was the cloth across his shoulders.
He had green armlets.
He had green skin
and carried a three-stringed violin.
The monk recognised him as Indra
and the violin as the instrument he had played
before the Buddha.
(Though he was not as beautifully arrayed
as in Temple paintings.)

Indra walked towards the kuti
and went straight underneath.

Twenty minutes later,
the monk climbed down
to look under the hut
but Indra was gone
and, when he looked, the helicopter had gone too.

After breakfast,
he was reflecting on this,
when a voice said, “It’s coming!”

At eight o’clock, a white van arrived
and a couple got out, carrying something
wrapped in a white cloth
which they presented to the monk.
It was an image fifteen inches high
of Buddha seated on the coils of seven nāgas,
their seven heads arching protectively over his.
He named it Venerable Father of Seven Kings.

The image is famous and venerated throughout the country.
Copies of it and tear-drop amulets are widely sold.
From this image the monk has received
Dhamma instruction and practical advice
by means of an inner voice.
According to the voice, the image is eight hundred years old
and the voice entered it at its casting.

When asked, “Who are you?”
The voice will not particularise.


From Bamboo Leaves by Brian Taylor

THE DYING RACES OF MANKIND

Ah Kah Tribal Women

When the rich see the very poor

they know it is time

to buy their valuables.
Cheaply.

This ancient people
were driven out of Tibet
by the Tibetans,
out of China by the Chinese
and out of Burma
by the Burmese.

Ah Kah people are very poor
and cannot offer much resistance
to economic assistance.
They make exquisite silver jewellery
and headdresses.
Treasure hunters
have been buying them.
Cheaply.

Ah Kah people have bright shining souls.
Christian missionaries
have been buying them.
Cheaply.

Although the missionaries,
have been taught
that moth and rust doth corrupt
and thieves break in and steal,
they courageously bite the moral bullet
and seek treasures on earth as well.

Ah Kah are animists
and see all around them spirits
and the ghosts of their ancestors.
Their villages are small,
their houses bamboo
and on stilts.
They are accustomed
to having to abandon them
and move on.

Outside each village
is a ceremonial swing
on three poles.
Smaller than the Giant Brahmin Swing,
it serves the same purpose;
to gently dislodge the jiva
from the physical manipura
and reawaken the old self-knowledge.

The Headman reawakens
the old tribal-knowledge.
He can recite the names of the ancestors
back to the Beginning.

Carefully carrying
this self-knowledge
and this tribal-knowledge,
carefully preserving
this family identity,
they have wandered on
like Bronze Age tribes.

Like the Israelites,
who recited their ancestral names
in the Generation of Adam;And Adam begat Seth
and Seth begat Enos
and Enos begat Cainan
and Cainan begat Mahalaleel
and Cainan lived eight hundred and forty years
after he begat Mahalaleel…

Like the Ashokhs in Transcaucasia,
reciting the story of Gilgamesh.

All these are Inheritors.

The missionaries are bookworms
and teach the Ah Kah
not to believe in spirits
but to become Christians
and go to heaven after they are dead
(which the missionaries
do not seriously believe in
and to which they are unlikely
to be going after they are dead).

The missionaries have already bought
twenty five percent of the Ah Kah souls
in these rolling green hills.
The Spiritual Inheritance of Ah Kah
is bought with running water,
fertilizers and televisions,
radios and motorbikes,
pharmaceutical drugs and jobs
and education for the next generation.

In this village there are two brick buildings,
the priest’s house and a Church.
Despite this, the recitations still go on,
as does haruspication
from the entrails of black pigs.

Further down the valley to the east,
that large white building
is where the children eat and sleep;
and are schooled in virtues

of the neverland of western industrial society

and its sanitized philosophies.

*

From Bamboo Leaves by Brian Taylor

BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

THAI YAI
try to make their women beautiful
by putting brass rings
around their necks
to lengthen them.
The weight
bears down and displaces
their collar bones,
so their necks appear to elevate.

It is a branch of creative aesthetics
which has its equivalent
among the Benin in Africa
and in the mutilated women’s feet
of Imperial China.

It does not make the women
more beautiful
but it does draw tourists
(as do Tracey Emin’s knickers).

ULTRA MORES 
Among the Meo,
an unmarried mother
is more desirable as a wife
than a virgin.
She has proved her fertility;
her children will be welcome workers
in the family’s fields.

NONGLAK (BEAUTIFUL WOMAN) 
She teaches English thirteen hours a week.
Who do you live with, Nonglak?
“I live with mother.”
When Nonglak was a baby,
her aunt said to her mother,
“I have no children.
Give me your baby.”
So, Nonglak’s mother gave her the baby.
She has always called her aunt “mother”.
Now her aunt is dead.

For four years,
the coffin has rested in the house
waiting for cremation.

Who do you live with, Nonglak?
“I live with mother.
I live with mother!”

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE 
Super-talented children
play on the eternal beach,
building castles and cities
and civilisations and worlds,
anything, everything they want;
and try to keep all and each
out of everyone else’s reach.

Dancing around hand in hand,
they themselves are powdered sand.

The sun shines down
burning them brown.
The sea rolls in
ironing everything
smooth and flat and thin.

From Bamboo Leaves by Brian Taylor

TIGER CAVE TEMPLE

By the Temple Gate
macaques lie in wait.
They squabble and fight,
like chickens, for the bananas
offered by northern Europeans.
They snatch
bags and cameras
and are happy to scratch
and bite
the hands that feed them.

An enormous limestone hill
three hundred metres high
towers above the temple.

A small staircase leads
up and over the rocks,
then down into the Khiriwong valley,
lush ancient lowland forest
with giant dicterocarps and fig trees,
their flared buttressed roots
offering comfortable back rests.
It is encircled on all sides
by steep overhanging cliffs.

The mountain is riddled with caves
which penetrate to its heart.
These are used by meditating monks.
There are also small wooden kutis
clinging to the rock face,
some of them too small to lie down in,
and cleared walkways.

Thirty years ago the Venerable Chamnean
came here to meditate.
A tiger walked into the cave,
but did not interfere with him.

Because of this, a temple was erected here
and Chamnean became its Abbot.
Now there are over three hundred monks
and nuns and also lay people collected here.
Chamnean is a famous Meditation Teacher
and his present cave
is a large modern building
in its own compound
with air-conditioning
and stainless steel decorative metal work.

The dell is unchanged, quiet and listening.
The macaques do not come here.
Outside one of the caves
someone has painted
in red letters Snake Cave;
and on an inside wall,
in faded white Thai script,
I am Buddha, in Pali.

We asked Chamnean whether
the story of the Tiger was true.
He said it was.

There is a Guardian Deva.

There are also washing machines in the dell.
And overhead lamps on the walkways as well.

*

SURVIVORS AND INHERITORS

Caves, like palaces,
hotels, churches
(and shoes),
outlive their tenants.
Tigers came and filled the caves
with snarling and roaring.

After the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima,
more than a hundred Japanese soldiers retreated here.
Most fell on their swords in accordance with custom,
grasping the hilts with both hands,
pulling and falling into an exploding sphere of pain.
The rest cut open their stomachs
and died more slowly, but just as surely.
Their flesh was eaten by tigers and dogs,
their bones mingled with those of prehistoric men
and the residue of earlier tiger feasts.
Thirty five years later, Buddhist monks came,
Japanese, Thai and Chinese,
and chanted mantras
for the salvation and reorientation
of the Japanese spirits,
who returned to Japan.
The earthly elements they left behind
were collected by the Japanese Embassy
(who also took the swords).
The caves were cleaned.
The tigers stopped coming.

Like deserted Indian Temples,
the caves were left to monkeys,
who jabbered and squabbled
with the sounds of enraged chickens.
Dun, as a boy, came here with his friends,
when they were bored with fishing,
to fight the monkeys for their territory.

Now the worn limestone caverns
are empty, silent, echoing,
teeming with images in parallel worlds,
waiting for the next arrivals.

Tonight one old monkey
sits motionless.

From Bamboo Leaves by Brian Taylor

FLOWERS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Bangkok Royal Temple Guard

A woman looks up
from her place
among the dirt and pollution
of Silom Road and joins
her palms together in salutation.

Someone has put two one-baht coins
in her plastic cup
(without looking at her face).

One hundred yards away,
The British Club is going to cool
their swimming pool
with ice for a Polar Swim
at 11.00 a.m. on New Year’s Day.
“Free of Charge. Free hot mulled wine.”
(There is a double crash barrier
with uniformed security guards
to protect would-be polar swimmers.)

At the Bangkok Motor Show,
an as-white-as-snow
Bugatti Veyron is à la carte,
escorted by swirling girls
in white satin evening gowns.
253 mph top speed,
turbocharged, all souped-up.
To squeeze out
all its growling sounds,
you will need
to take 165 million baht

out of your plastic cup.



From Bamboo Leaves by Brian Taylor