On the Number 29 (Part 2)

On the Number 29: Part 2

29 in Philosophy & Religion

261)

Hymn 29 in Book 4 of the Rig Veda is an invocation to the fire god Agni:
1. COME, lauded, unto us with powers and succours, O Indra, with thy Tawny Steeds; exulting,
Past even the foeman's manifold libations, glorified with our hymns, true Wealth-bestower.
2 Man's Friend, to this our sacrifice he cometh marking how he is called by Soma-pressers.
Fearless, and conscious that his Steeds are noble, he joyeth with the Soma-pouring heroes.
3 Make his cars hear, that he may show his vigour and may be joyful in the way he loveth.
May mighty Indra pouring forth in bounty bestow on us good roads and perfect safety;
4 He who with succour comes to his implorer, the singer here who with his song invites him;
He who himself sets to the pole swift Coursers, he who hath hundreds, thousands, Thunder-wielder.
5 O Indra Maghavan, by thee protected may we be thine, princes and priests and singers,
Sharing the riches sent from lofty heaven which yields much food, and all desire its bounty.
Rig Veda Book 4, 29.1-5 (circa 1500 B.C.)

262)

Chapter 29B in The Papyrus of Ani, Egyptian Book of the Dead:
Chapter for a heart-amulet of Seheret-stone—
I am the Benu-bird, the soul of Re,
who guides the gods to the Duat when they go forth.
The souls on earth will do what they desire, and
the soul of Ani will go forth at his desire.
Egyptian Book of the Dead: Book of Going Forth by Day
Complete Papyrus of Ani, Chapter 29B (circa 1250 B.C.)
(translated by Raymond Faulkner),
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1994
Chapter 29A: The Theban Recension
(which do not appear in the Papyrus of Ani)
Chapter for not taking away the heart of one whose
conduct has been vindicated in the God's Domain—
My heart is with me and it shall not be taken away, for I am a possessor
of hearts who unites hearts. I live by truth, in which I exist; I am Horus
who is in hearts, he who is in the middle of what is in the body. I live by
saying what is in my heart, and it shall not be taken away; my heart is
mine, and none shall be aggressive against it, no terror shall subdue me.
I take it that I may be in the body of my father Geb and of my mother Nut,
for I have committed no sin against the gods, and nothing shall be deducted
in that respect from my vindication. (page 103)

263)

Hexagram 29 of the I Ching (circa 1000 B.C.)
K'an / The Abysmal (Water)

THE JUDGMENT:
The Abysmal repeated.
If you are sincere,
you have success in your heart,
And whatever you do succeeds.

THE IMAGE:
Water flows on uninterruptedly and reaches its foal:
The image of the Abysmal repeated.
Thus the superior man walks in lasting virtue
And carries on the business of teaching.

264)

Lao Tzu (604-517 BC), Tao Te Ching, Verse 29:

Trying to govern the world with force
I see this not succeeding
the world is a spiritual thing
it can't be forced
to force it is to harm it
to control it is to lose it
sometimes things lead
sometimes they follow
sometimes blow hot
sometimes blow cold
sometimes expand
sometimes collapse
therefore the sage avoids extremes
avoids extravagance
avoids excess
(translated by Red Pine, Taoteching,
Mercury House, San Francisco, 1996, p. 58)

265)

Lao Tzu (604-517 BC), Hua Hu Ching, Verse 29:
Don't think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without
proper discipline and practice. This is egomania. Appropriate rituals channel
your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice
them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness. Here is the great secret:
Just as high awareness of the subtle truth is gained through virtuous conduct
and sustaining disciplines, so also is it maintained through these things.
Highly evolved beings know and respect the truth of this.
(translated by Brian Walker,
Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu,
Harper SanFrancisco 1992)

266)

Verse 29 of Pythagoras's Golden Verses:
But do thou act so that thou shalt not be troubled by the result.
Pythagoras (580-500 B.C.), Golden Verses, Verse 29
(translated by A.E.A., Collectanea Hermetica, Vol. V, 1894)
reprinted in Percy Bullock, The Dream of Scipio, Aquarian Press,
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, UK, 1983, p. 54

267)

Chapter 29 of Symbols of Pythagoras:
Acetarium vas abs te removeto.
Keep the vinegar cruet far from you. — Dacier.
This is a wise maxim as to diet, and in a moral sense sourness of
temper, malice and bitterness of expression ought to be avoided.
Pythagoras (580-500 B.C.), Symbols of Pythagoras
(translated by Sapere Aude, Collectanea Hermetica, Vol. V, 1894)
reprinted in Percy Bullock, The Dream of Scipio, Aquarian Press,
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, UK, 1983, p. 74

268)

Section 29 of Plato's Apology— Socrates' Defense before an Athenian court:
For let me tell you, gentlemen, tht to be afraid of death is only another form
of thinking that one is wise when when is not; it is to think that one knows
what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really
the greatest blessing that can happen to a man, but people dread it as though they
were certain that it is the greatest evil, and this ignorance most culpable...
Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater
obedience to God than to you, and so long as I draw breath and have my faculties,
I shall never stop practicing philosophy and exhorting you and elucidating
the truth for everyone that I meet. I shall go on saying, in my usual way,
My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city which is the
greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you
not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible,
similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to
truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?
Plato (428-348 BC), Philebus 29a-29e (360 BC)
(trans. R. Hackforth), Edited by Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns,
Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series LXXI,
Princeton University Press, 1961, pp. 15-16

269)

Section 29 of Plato's Philebus— Socrates to Protarchus on the ordered universe:
We can discern certain constituents of the corporeal nature of all animals,
namely, fire, water, breath, and earth; these are all present in their composition...
In each case it is only an inconsiderable fragment that is in us, and that too
very far from being pure in quality or possessing a power befitting its real nature.
Let me explain to you in one instance, which you must regard as applying to them all.
There is fire, is there not, belonging to ourselves, and again fire in the universe?
And isn't the fire that belongs to ourselves small in quantity and weak and
inconsiderable, whereas the fire in the universe is wonderful in respect of its mass,
its beauty, and all the powers that belong to fire?... If we regard all these elements
that I have been speaking of as a collective unity we give them, do we not, the name
of the body? Well, let me point out that the same holds good of what we call the
ordered universe; on the same showing it will be a body, will it not, since it is
composed of the same elements? Then, to put it generally, is the body that belongs
to us sustained by this body of the universe, has it derived and obtained therefrom
all that I referred to just now, or is the converse true?"
Plato (428-348 BC), Philebus 29a-29e (360 BC)
(trans. R. Hackforth), Edited by Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns,
Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series LXXI,
Princeton University Press, 1961, pp. 1106-1107

270)

Section 29 of Plato's Timaeus— Timaeus to Socrates on creation:
If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must
have looked to that which is eternal, but if what cannot be said without blasphemy
is true, then to the created patter. Everyone will see that he must have looked to
the eternal, for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes.
And having been created in this way, the world has been framed in likeness of that
which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of
necessity, if this is amitted, be a copy of something... As being is to becoming,
so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, amidst the many opinions about the gods
and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are
altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be
surprised. Enough if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others, for we must
remember that I who am the speaker and you who are the judges are only mortal men,
and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and inquire no further.
Plato (428-348 BC), Timaeus 29a-29d (360 BC)
(trans. Benjamin Jowett), Edited by Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns,
Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series LXXI,
Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 1162

271)

Verse 29 in Chapter 7 of Analects of Confucius:
Confucius said, "Is virtue a thing remote? I wish
to be virtuous, and lo! virtue is at hand."
Verse 29 in Chapter 14 of Analects of Confucius:
Confucius said, "The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his action."
Verse 29 in Chapter 15 of Analects of Confucius:
Confucius said, "To have faults and not to reform them—
this, indeed should be pronounced having faults."
Confucius (551-479 B.C.),
Analects, VII.29, XIV.29, XV.29, (circa 500 B.C.),
Translated by James Legge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1893

272)

Tsze-sze, Doctrine of the Mean or Chung Yun, Verse 29:
1. He who attains to the sovereignty of the kingdom, having those three important things,
shall be able to effect that there shall be few errors under his government.
2. However excellent may have been the regulations of those of former times,
they cannot be attested. Not being attested, they cannot command credence,
and not being credited, the people would not follow them...
3. Therefore the institutions of the Ruler are rooted in his own character and conduct,
and sufficient attestation of them is given by the masses of the people.
He examines them by comparison with those of the three kings, and finds them
without mistake. He sets them up before Heaven and Earth, and finds nothing
in them contrary to their mode of operation. He presents himself with them
before spiritual beings, and no doubts about them arise. He is prepared to
wait for the rise of a sage a hundred ages after, and has no misgivings.
4. His presenting himself with his institutions before spiritual beings, without any doubts
arising about them, shows that he knows Heaven. His being prepared, without any
misgivings, to wait for the rise of a sage 100 ages after, shows that he knows men.
5. Such being the case, the movements of such a ruler, illustrating his institutions, constitute
an example to the world for ages. His acts are for ages a law to the kingdom.
His words are for ages a lesson to the kingdom. Those who are far from him, look
longingly for him; and those who are near him, are never wearied with him.
6. It is said in the Book of Poetry— "Not disliked there, not tired of here, from day to day and
night to night, will they perpetuate their praise." Never has there been a ruler, who
did not realize this description, that obtained an early renown throughout the kingdom.
Tsze-sze (492-431 B.C.), Doctrine of the Mean, 29.1-6, (circa 400 B.C.),
Translated by James Legge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1893, pp. 36-37

273)

Section 29 of Works of Mencius, Book VII, Part 1:
Mencius said, "A man with definite aims to be accomplished may be compared
to one digging a well. To dig the well to a depth of seventy-two cubits,
and stop without reaching the spring, is after all throwing away the well."
Mencius (371-289 B.C.), Works of Mencius, VII.i.29
(circa 300 B.C.),
Translated by James Legge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1893, p. 317

274)

Verse 29 of Buddha's Diamond Sutra:
"Furthermore, Subhuti, if anyone should claim that the Tathagata goes or comes or stands
or sits or lies on a bed, Subhuti, they do not understand the meaning of my words. And
why not? Subhuti, those who are called 'tathagatas' do not go anywhere, nor do they
come from anywhere. Thus are they called 'tathagatas, arhans, fully-enlightened ones'."
Buddha, Diamond Sutra Verse 29 (400 B.C.)
(translated by Red Pine, Counterpoint, Washington DC, 2001, p. 401);
(Another translation: A. F. Price, 1947). Commentary:
The Buddha uses two parsings of the word tathagata here. Reading tatha-agata,
we have "thus come", where "thus" refers to what Buddhists call "suchness" and "come" refers
to the Buddha's apparition body and his appearance among mankind. Since the Chinese prefer to
emphasize the Buddha's compassion, they invariably translate tatha-agata as ju-lai
(thus come). Here, however, such a translation would be a mistake. The Buddha does not come.
Reading tatha-gata, the word also means "thus go" and emphasizes the Buddha's transcendence
of his physical body and full realization of his reward body. But neither does the Buddha go.
For if all dharmas are selfless and birthless, can anything be said to truly come or go? As the
sutra nears its end, the Buddha finally tells Subhuti he was mistaken to think he could follow
in the Buddha's footsteps, when, in fact, there are no footsteps." (Red Pine translation, pp. 402-403)

275)

Verse 29 of Buddha's Dhammapada: Mindfulness
Mindful among the unmindful, wide awake among the sleeping, the man of good
understanding forges ahead like a swift horse outdistancing a feeble hack..
Buddha, Dhammapada Verse 29 (240 B.C.)
(translated by Sangharakshita, Dhammapada: The Way of Truth 2001, p. 20)

276)

Chapter 29 of Chuang Tzu is titled "Robber Chê":
Wu Yoh said: 'Wherefore it has been said, "Be not a mean man. Revert to
your natural self. Be not a superior man. Abide by the laws of heaven."
As to the straight and the crooked, view them from the standpoint of
the infinite. Gaze around you on all sides, until time withdraws you
from the scene. As to the right and the wrong, hold fast to your
magic circle, and with independent mind walk ever in the way of Tao.
Chuang Tzu (369 BC-286 BC)
Chuang Tzu: Taoist Philosopher and Chinese Mystic,
Chapter XXIX: Robber Chê, p. 289
Translated by Herbert A. Giles (2nd Edition, 1926)
George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1961.

277)

Verse 29 in Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita
(Krishna's lecture to Arjuna on karma yoga):
One sees him in a vision of wonder, and another gives us words of his wonder.
There is one who hears of his wonder; but he hears and knows him not.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, Verse 29
(Translated by Juan Mascaro, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 51)

278)

Verse 29 in Chapter 6 of the Bhagavad Gita
(Krishna's lecture to Arjuna on yogic practice):
He sees himself in the heart of all beings and he sees all beings in his heart.
This is the vision of the Yogi of harmony, a vision which is ever one.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 6, Verse 29
(Translated by Juan Mascaro, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 71)

279)

Verse 29 in Chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gita
(Krishna's lecture to Arjuna on faith and worship):
I am the same to all beings, and my love is ever the same; but those
who worship me with devotion, they are in me and I am in them.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 9, Verse 29
(Translated by Juan Mascaro, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 82)

280)

Verse 29 in Chapter 13 of the Bhagavad Gita
(Krishna lectures to Arjuna on the knower of the field):
He who sees that all work, everywhere, is only the work of nature;
and that the Spirit watches this work— he sees the truth.
then he goes indeed to the highest Path.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 18, Verse 29
(Translated by Juan Mascaro, Penguin Books, 1962, p. 101)

281)

Verse 29 in Chapter 18 of Astavakra Gita
(Sage Astavakra's dialogue with King Janaka):
One who has egoism in his mind acts even though he is inactive.
The wise man, free from egoism, does not commit any wrong deed.
Astavakra Gita, Chapter 18, Verse 29 (circa 400 B.C.)
translated by Radhakamal Mukerjee, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi, 1971, p. 143

282)

Aphroism 29 of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra:
Meditation on God with the repetition of aum removes
obstacles to the mastery of the inner self.
Vyasa Commentary: The Vedic teachers hold that the relation of word and meaning
is eternal, inasmuch as one coexists with the other. The Yogi who has come to know
well the relation between word and meaning must constantly repeat it, and habituate
the mind to the manifestation therein of its meaning. The constant repetition is to
be of the Pranava (AUM) and the habitual mental manifestation is to be of what it
signifies, Iswara. The mind of the Yogi who constantly repeats the Pranava and
habituates the mind to the constant manifestation of the idea it carries, becomes
one-pointed. And so it has been said: 'Let the Yoga be practised through study, and
let study be effected through Yoga. By Yoga and study together the Highest Self shines'
Patanjali (circa 200 B.C.), Yoga Sutra I.29: Aphroism 29 (circa 200 B.C.)
translated by B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Aquarian Press, London, 1993, p. 77

283)

Tetragram 29 of the T'ai Hsüan Ching: Tuan / Decisiveness
April 27-May 1 (am):

Correlates with Earth's Mystery;
Yang; the phase Fire; and the Yi Ching
Hexagram #43, Breaking Through [and so Resolution];
the sun enters the Net constellation, 3rd degree.
Head: Yang ch'i is strong within and firm without
so that in acting there can be a decisive breakthrough...
With yang in full command of its powers, it also works
"to strengthen what is within and firm the outside" of
the myriad things, spurring on their development...
As the Changes tells us, inner integrity,
strength, and steadfastness are preconditions
for growth in the direction of brilliance.
Yang Hsiung (53 BC-18 AD),
Canon of Supreme Mystery ( T'ai Hsüan Ching)
(translated by Michael Nylan, 1993, pp. 218-219)

284)

Section 29 of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD):
Discard your misperceptions. Stop being jerked like a puppet.
Limit yourself to the present. Understand what happens— to you, to others
Analyze what exists, break it all down: material and cause. Anticipate
your final hours. Other people's mistakes? Leave them to their makers. (VII.29)
To erase false perceptions, tell yourself: I have it in me to keep
my soul from evil, lust and all confusion. To see things as they are
and treat them as they deserve. Don't overlook this innate ability. (VIII.29)
Salvation: to see each thing for what it is— its nature and its purpose.
To do only what is right, say only what is true, without holding back.
What else could it be but to live life fully— to pay out goodness
like the rings of a chain, without the slightest gap. (XII.29)
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD): Meditations,
translated by Gregory Hays, Modern Library, New York, 2002, pp. 90, 106, 168

285)

The 7th Tractate of Plotinus's The Enneads (301 A.D.) is titled
"How the multiplicity of the ideal-forms came into being: and on the good"
Section 29 discusses the knowing principle & intellectual-principle:
Besides, one attaining or approaching the good, but not recognising it,
may assure himself in the light of its contraries; otherwise he will not even
hold ignorance an evil though everyone prefers to know and is proud of knowing
so that our very sensations seek to ripen into knowledge.
If the knowing principle— and specially primal intellectual-principle—
is valuable and beautiful, what must be present to those of power to see the author
and father of intellect? anyone thinking slightingly of this principle of life and
being brings evidence against himself and all his state: Of course, distaste for
the life that is mingled with death does not touch that life authentic.
Plotinus (204-270 AD), The Enneads, VI.7.29
(translated by Stephen MacKenna,
4th Ed., Faber & Faber, London, 1969, pp. 614-625)

286)

Trigraph 29 of the Ling Ch'i Ching: Shuai Wei / Decline to Minuteness
The image of resurgence
Weak yang arises from below
Chen (Thunder) * True east
Oracle:
Sages and Worthies successively continue their teachings.
The minute again resurges like melon vines stretching
and estending, gradually arising and ascending.
Verse:
I dreamt I entered the path to Mount T'ien-t'ai,
Ascending the mountain, the moonlight so clear and bright!
How extraordinary, the distinctive spring colors.
Again I see the glory of old flowers.
Tung-fang Shuo,
Ling Ch'i Ching (circa 222-419)
(trans. Ralph D. Sawyer & Mei-Chün Lee Sawyer, 1995, p. 86

287)

Text 29 of On Prayer: 153 Texts
of Evagrios the Solitary (345-399 AD)
Sometimes as soon as you start to pray, you pray well; at other times, in spite
of great exertion, you do not reach your goal. This is to make you exert yourself
still more, so that, having gained the gift of prayer, you keep it safe.
The Philokalia (4th-15th century AD),
translated by F.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, & Kallistos Ware,
Faber & Faber, London, 1979, p. 59)

288)

Saint Mark the Ascetic (early 5th century AD)
Text 29 of On the Spiritual Law: 200 Texts
Thus a merciful heart will receive mercy,
while a merciless heart will receive the opposite.
Text 29 of On Those who Think that They are Made Righteous by Works: 226 Texts
He who wants to cross the spiritual sea is long-suffering, humble,
vigilant and self-controlled. If he impetuously embarks on it without
these four virtues, he agitates his heart, but cannot cross.
The Philokalia (4th-15th century AD),
translated by F.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, & Kallistos Ware,
Faber & Faber, London, 1979, pp. 112, 128)

289)

Text 29 of On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: 100 Texts
of Saint Diadochos of Photiki (400-486 AD)
The loving and Holy Spirit of God teaches us, as we have said,
that the perceptive faculty natural to our soul is single; indeed,
even the five bodily senses differ from each other only because of the
body's varying needs. but this single faculty of perception is split
because of the dislocation which, as a result of Adam's disobedience,
takes place in the intellect through the modes in which the soul now
operates. Thus one side of the soul is carried away by the passionate
part in man, and we are then captivated by the good things of this life;
but the other side of the soul frequently delights in the activity of the
intellect and, as a result, when we practise self-restraint, the intellect
longs to pursue heavenly beauty. If, therefore, we learn persistently to be
detached from the good things of this world, we shall be able to unite the
earthly appetite of the soul to its spiritual and intellectual aspiration,
through the communion of the Holy Spirit who brings this about within us.
For unless His divinity actively illumines the inner shrine of our heart,
we shall not be able to taste God's goodness with the perceptive faculty
undivided, that is, with unified aspiration.
The Philokalia (4th-15th century AD),
translated by F.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, & Kallistos Ware,
Faber & Faber, London, 1979, pp. 260-261)

290)

Text 29 of For the Encouragement of the Monks in India who had Written to Him: 100 Texts
of Saint John of Karpathos (circa 680 AD)
When someone is defeated after offering stiff resistance,
he should not give up in despair; let him take heart, encouraged
by the words of Isaiah: 'In spite of all your strength, you will be
defeated, wicked demons; and if you should again gather your strength
together, again you will be defeated. Whatever plans you devise, the Lord
will bring them to nothing: for God is with us' (Isaiah 8.9-10).
God 'raises up all who are bowed down' (Psalms 145.14) and produce
grief and consternation among our enemies, as soon as we repent.
The Philokalia (4th-15th century AD),
translated by F.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, & Kallistos Ware,
Faber & Faber, London, 1979, pp. 304-305)

291)

Section 29 of Chapter 2 in Lankavatara Sutra:
At that moment then the Blessed One recited this verse:
The personal soul, continuity, the Skandhas, causation,
atoms, the supreme spirit, the ruler, the creator,—
they are discriminations in the Mind-only.
The Lankavatara Sutra, II.29 (before 443 AD)
(translated from the Sanskrit by D. T. Suzuki, 1932, p. 70)

292)

29th Verse of Sagathakam: Lankavatara Sutra:
Though multitudinousness of things has no real existence as such,
they appear to the intoxicated as like fire-flies because of their
constitutional disturbance; likewise is the world essentially appearance.
The Lankavatara Sutra (before 443 AD)
(translated from the Sanskrit by D. T. Suzuki, 1932, p. 228)

293)

Chapter 29 of Mohammed's Holy Koran is titled "The Spider"
29.9 And (as for) those who believe and do good, We will
most surely cause them to enter among the good.
be rewarded for aught except what they did.
29.15 So We delivered him [Nuh] and the inmates of the ark,
and made it a sign to the nations.
29.19 What! do they not consider how Allah originates the creation,
then reproduces it? Surely that is easy to Allah.
29.35 And certainly We have left a clear sign of it for a people who understand.
29.41 The parable of those who take guardians besides Allah is as the parable
of the spider that makes for itself a house; and most surely the
frailest of the houses is the spider's house did they but know.
29.42 Surely Allah knows whatever thing they call upon besides Him;
and He is the Mighty, the Wise.
29.44 Allah created the heavens and the earth with truth;
most surely there is a sign in this for the believers.
29.64 And this life of the world is nothing but a sport and a play;
and as for the next abode, that most surely is the life— did they but know!
29.69 And (as for) those who strive hard for Us, We will most certainly guide them
in Our ways; and Allah is most surely with the doers of good.
Mohammed, Holy Koran, 29.9, 15, 19, 35, 41-42, 44, 64, 69 (7th century AD)
(translated by M. H. Shakir, Holy Koran, 1983)

294)

In the 99 Names of Allah, the 29th Name is Al-Hakam:
The Judge, He is the Ruler and His Judgment is His Word.
["Ar-Rahman, The Merciful, the most merciful of those who show mercy."
is listed as the 29th Name of Allah in Arthur Jeffrey,
Islam: Muhammad and His Religion (1958), pp. 93-98].

295)

Section 29 of Hui-Neng's Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (714)
When people of shallow capacity hear the Sudden Doctrine being preached they are
like the naturally shallow-rooted plants on this earth, which after a deluge of rain,
are all beaten down and cannot continue their growth. People of shallow capacity
are like such plants. Although these people have prajna wisdom and are not
different from men of great knowledge, why is it that even though they hear the
Dharma they are not awakened? It is because the obstruction of their heterodox views
are heavey and the passions deep-rooted. It is like the times when great clouds cover
the sun; unless the wind blows, the sun will will not appear. There is no large or
small in prajna wisdom. Because all sentient beings have of themselves deluded
minds, they seek the Buddha by external practice, and are unable to awaken to
their own natures. But even these people of shallow capacity, if they hear the
Sudden Doctrine, and do not place their trust in external practices, but only in
their own minds always raise correct views in regard to their own original
natures; even these sentient beings, filled with passions and troubles, will at once
gain awakening. It is like the great sea which gathers all the streams, and merges
together the small waters and the large waters into one. This is seeing into
your own nature. Such a person does not abide either inside or outside; he is
free to come or go. Readily he casts aside the mind that clings to things, and
there is no obstructin to his passage. If in the mind this practice is carried
out, then your own nature is no different from the Prajna-paramita
Hui-Neng (638-713), Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Section 29
(translated by Philip B. Yampolsky, Columbia University Press, NY, 1967, p. 150)

296)

Verse 29 of Sankara's Vivekachudamani (circa 700 AD):
Even though this longing for liberation may be present in only a slight or moderate degree,
through detachment, self-surrender, and so on, and by the grace of a Master it will bear fruit.
Sankara (686-718), Vivekacudamani (Crest Jewel of Discernment), I.29
(translated by John Grimes, Vivekacudamani of Sankaracarya Bhagavatpada
Ashgate Burlington, VT, 2004, p. 155)

297)

Verse 29 of Chapter 3 in Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara:
It [Thought of Enlightenment] is the uttermost medicine, the abatement of the world's
disease. It is a tree of rest for the wearied world journeying on the road of being.
Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara: Entering the Path of Enlightenment
III.29 (Grasping the Thought of Enlightenment: Bodhicittaparigraha) (circa 700 AD)
(translated by Marion L. Matics, Macmillan, London, 1970, p. 155)

298)

Verse 29 of Chapter 6 in Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara:
And if the Absolute (atman) is like the sky, eternal and unconscious,
it is clearly inactive. If it is in a state of nonattachment amongst causes
(pratyaya), how can the changeless act?
Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara: Entering the Path of Enlightenment
VI.29 (Perfection of Patience: Ksanti-paramita) (circa 700 AD)
(translated by Marion L. Matics, Macmillan, London, 1970, p. 175)

299)

Verse 29 of Chapter 7 in Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara:
By the power of the Thought of Enlightenment (bodhicitta), one destroys
former sins, receives oceans of merit, and is swifter than the disciples
(sravaka) [of the Hinayana].
Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara: Entering the Path of Enlightenment
VII.29 (Perfection of Strength: Virya-paramita) (circa 700 AD)
(translated by Marion L. Matics, Macmillan, London, 1970, p. 188)

300)

Verse 29 of Chapter 9 in Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara:
When reality is based on nonreality, how can you be the one who acts?
Indeed, your thought needs one companion, the nonexistent.
Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara: Entering the Path of Enlightenment
IX.29 (Perfection of Wisdom: Prajna-paramita) (circa 700 AD)
(translated by Marion L. Matics, Macmillan, London, 1970, p. 214)

301)

Verse 29 of Chapter 10 in Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara:
May beings who have little strength become of great strength. May those
who are wretched and deformed become endowed with beautiful form.
Santideva's Bodhicaryavatara: Entering the Path of Enlightenment
X.29 (Consummation: Parinamana) (circa 700 AD)
(translated by Marion L. Matics, Macmillan, London, 1970, p. 214)

302)

Saying 29 of Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu:
A monk asked, "What is Chao-chou's (Joshu's) master?"
The master shouted, "You hooped barrel!"
The monk answered, "Yes?"
The master said, "A well-done hooped barrel."
Chao Chou (778-897),
The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu
translated by James Green, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 1998, p. 21

303)

Section 29 of Hui Hai's Zen Teaching on Sudden Illumination:
Q: Regarding the quotation 'Transform the eight states of consciousness
(parijnana) into the four Buddha-Wisdoms and bind the four Buddha-Wisdoms
to form the Trikaya', which of the eight states of consciousness must be
combined to form one Buddha-Wisdom and which of them will each become a
Buddha-Wisdom in itself?
A: Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the five states of consciousness which
together form the Perfecting Wisdom. The intellect or sixth state of consciousness
alone becomes the Profound Observing Wisdom. Discriminative awareness or the seventh
state of consciousness alone becomes the Universal Wisdom. The storehouse of
consciousness or eighth state alone becomes the Great Mirror Wisdom.
Q: Do these four Wisdoms really differ?
A: In substance they are the same, but they are differently named.
Q: Yet, if they are one in substance, why do their names differ?
Or, allowing that their names are given according to circumstances,
what it is that, being of one substance (with the rest), is
(nevertheless called) the Great Mirror Wisdom?
A: That which is clearly void and still, bright and imperturbable, is the
Great Mirror Wisdom. That which can face defilements without love or aversion
arising and which thereby exhibits the non-existent nature of all such dualities
is the Universal Wisdom. That which can range the fields of the senses with unexcelled
ability to discern things, yet without giving rise to tumultuous thoughts, so that it
is fully independent and at ease, is the Profound Observing Wisdom. That which can
convert all the senses with their functions of responding to circumstances into correct
sensation free from duality is the Perfecting Wisdom.
Q: As to 'binding the four Buddha-Wisdoms to form the Trikaya', which of them
combine to form one Body and which of them each becomes a Body in itself?
A: The Great Mirror Wisdom singly forms the Dharmakaya. The Universal Wisdom
singly forms the Sambhogakaya. The Profound Observing Wisdom and the Perfecting
Wisdom jointly form the Nirmanakaya. These Three Bodies are only named differently
to enable unenlightened people to see more clearly. Once the principle is understood,
there will be no more Three Bodies with functions responding to various needs.
Why? Formless in substance and by nature, they are established in the basically
impermanent which is not their own (true basis) at all.
Hui Hai (circa 788 A.D.), Zen Teaching on Sudden Illumination, Section 29
(translated by John Blofeld, Rider & Co., London, 1962, pp. 69-71)

304)

Section 29 of Huang Po's Zen Teaching on the Transmission of Mind:
Regarding this Zen Doctrine of ours, since it was first transmitted, it has never
taught that men should seek for learning or form concepts. "Studying the Way' is just
a figure of speech. It is a method of arousing people's interest in the early stages
of their development. In fact, the Way is not something which can be studied. Study
leads to the retention of concepts and so the Way is entirely misunderstood. Moreover,
the Way is not something specially existing; it is called the Mahayana Mind— Mind
which is not to be found inside, outside or in the middle. Truly it is not located
anywhere. The first step is to refrain from knowledge-based concepts. This implies that
if you were to follow the empirical method to the utmost limit, on reaching that limit
you would still be unable to locate Mind. The way is spiritual Truth and was originally
without name or title. It was only because people ignorantly sought for it empirically
that the Buddhas appeared and taught them to eradicate this method of approach. Fearing
that nobody would understand, they selected the name 'Way'. You must not allow this name
to lead you into forming a mental concept of a road. So it is said 'When the fish is
caught we pay no more attention to the trap.' When body and mind achieve spontaneity,
the Way is reached and Mind is understood. A sramanta [monk] is so called because he
has penetrated to the original source of all things. The fruit of attaining the sramanta
stage is gained by putting an end to all anxiety; it does not come from book-learning.
— Huang Po (died 850 A.D.), Zen Teaching on the Transmission of Mind,
The Chün Chou Record, Section 29
(translated by John Blofeld, Rider & Co., London, 1958, pp. 54-55)

305)

Section 29c of Rinzai's Lin-chi Lu:
Venerable ones, do not look for robes! Robes cannot change the man. It is the man
who wears the robes. There is the robe of purity, the robe of the unborn, the robe
of Bodhi (awakening) and the robe of Nirvana, the patriarchal robe and the robe
of the Buddha. Venerable ones, those are only noisy names, wordy sentences, and
are all a mere change of robes. Names arise from the ocean of breath in the region
of the belly; their fierce drum beat rattles your teeth so that they stutter out
interpretations. Do you not see that these are but illusory phantoms? Venerable ones,
outwardly voice, speech and action are brought forth; within they are but surface
expressions of the Dharma. When you have thoughts, there is also volition and all
these make the various robes. If you seek those robes that are worn and mistake them
for the real thing, you will spend innumerable Kalpas only to learn these robes,
will be driven around in the Three Worlds, and circulate among birth and death.
Far better it is to have nothing to seek. "To meet him without recognizing him;
to speak with him without knowing his name."
Rinzai Gigen (died Jan. 10, 866 A.D.),
The Zen Teaching of Rinzai, Section 29c
(translated from the Chinese by Irmgard Schloegl)
Shambhala, Berkeley, 1976, pp. 52-53

306)

Section 29 of Record of the Chan Master "Gate of the Clouds":
The Master said, "All twelve divisions of the three vehicles' teaching
explain it back and forth, and the old monks of the whole empire grandly
proclaim, 'Come on, try presenting to me even a tiny little bit of what it
all means!": all of this is already medicine for a dead horse. Nevertheless,
how many are there who have come even that far? I don't even dare to hope for
an echo of it in your words or a hidden sharp point in one of your phrases."
A blink of an eye— a thousand differences.
When the wind is still, the wave are calm.
May you rest in peace!" Master Yunmen (864-949),
Record of the Chan Master "Gate of the Clouds"
translated by Urs App, Kodansha International, NY & Tokyo, 1994, p. 98

307)

29th Teaching of Teachings of Quetzalcoatl:
[Ce Acatl told them:] "Get close to the ceiba and to the willow;
get close to the one who is a role model and a good example, to the one who
is a paragon and signal, black and red, book and painting. Get close to the
honorable man of good reputation, to the social condition, to the light,
to the torch, to the mirror. Get close to he who everywhere excels, gives light,
lives in a way that is good and prudent, joyful and serene, who goes about creating
order. Get closer to the ones who are box and coffer, shade and good shelter—
thick ceiba, sprouting willow that rises up straight and powerful."
Quetzalcoatl Ce Acatl (b. 947 A.D.),
Gospel of the Toltecs: The Life & Teachings of Quetzalcoatl, XI.29
by Frank Díaz, Bear & Company, Rochester, VT, 2002, p. 147

308)

Case 29 of Hekiganroku: Daizui's "It Will Be Gone with the Other"
Main Subject: A monk asked Daizu, "When the kalpa fire flares up and the great
cosmos is destroyed, I wonder, will 'it' perish, or will it not perish?"
Zui said, "It will be gone with the other."
Setcho's Verse:
Blocked by the double barrier,
The monk asked from the heart of the kalpa fire.
Wonderful the words, "It will be gone with the other."
Thousands of miles he wandered in vain, seeking a master.
Setcho (980-1052), Hekiganroku, 29 (Blue Cliff Records)
(translated by Katsuki Sekida, Two Zen Classics, 1977, pp. 223-225)

309)

Chou Tun-Yi (1017-1073), Penetrating Book of Changes,
Ch. 29: The All-Embracing Depth of the Sage
[Confucius said,] "I do not enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse
those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves. If I have presented one
corner of the square and they cannot come back to me with the other three, I should not
go over the points again." [Analects 7.8] He also said, "I do not wish to say anything...
Does Heaven say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things are produced."
[Analects 17.19] Thus the all-embracing depth of Confucius could be seen only by
Yen Tzu. He was the one who discovered the all-embracing depth of the Sage and taught>
the ten thousand generations without end. A sage is equal to Heaven. Is he not profound?
When an ordinary person hears or knows anything, he is afraid that others will not quickly
know that he has it. How superficial it is to make haste to let people know and to seek a name!
(Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, pp. 476-477)

310)

Shao Yung (1011-1077), Supreme Principles Governing the World, Section 29:
We can handle things as they are if we do not impose our ego on them. The sage gives
things every benefit and forgets his own ego. To let the ego be unrestrained is to give
rein to feelings; to give rein to feelings is to be beclouded; and to be beclouded is
to be darkened. To follow the natural principles of things, on the other hand, is to
grasp their nature; to grasp their nature is to be in possession of spiritual power;
and to possess spiritual power is to achieve enlightenment.
(Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, p. 494)

311)

Chang Tsai (1020-1077), Correcting Youthful Ignorance, Section 29:
There has never been any substance which is nonexistent.
Nature means examining and practicing the substance.
(Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, p. 508)

312)

Ch'eng Hao (1032-1085), Selected Sayings, Section 29:
Chou Tun-yi did not cut the grass growing outside his window. When asked about it,
he said that he felt toward the grass as he felt toward himself. (When Tzu-hou
[Chang Tsai] heard the cry of a donkey, he said the same thing.)
(Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, p. 535)
[jen: humanity, altruism, benevolence, goodness, universal love, perfect virtue]

313)

Ch'eng I (1033-1107), Selected Sayings, Section 29:
"When you go aboard, behave to everyone as if you were receiving a great guest.
Employ the people as if you were assisting at a great sacrifice." [When Confucius
said that], he meant nothing other than seriousness. Seriousness means unselfishness.
As soon as one lacks seriousness, thousands of selfish desires arise to injure his humanity.
� (Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, p. 556)

314)

Aphroism 29 of Guigo's Meditations:
In joy receive the truth, as the Lord; bear
with a lie peacefully, or else fix the charge.
Guiges de Chastel (1083-1137), Meditations of Guigo, Prior of the Charterhouse
translated by John J. Jolin, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, 1951, p. 10

315)

Section 29 of St. Bernard's On Loving God: discusses the fourth degree of love:
I do not think that can take place for sure until the word is fulfilled:
"You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and
all your strength," [Mark, 12.30] until the heart does not have to think
of the body and the soul no longer has to give it life and feeling as in
this life. Freed from this bother, its strength is established in the
power of God. for it is impossible to assemble all these and turn them
toward God's face as long as the care of this weak and wretched body keeps
one busy to the point of distraction. Hence it is in a spiritual and immortal
body, calm and pleasant, subject to the spirit in everything, that the soul
hopes to attain the fourth degree of love, or rather to be possessed by it;
for it is in God's hands to give it to whom he wishes, it is not obtained by
human efforts. I mean he will easily reach the highes degree of love when he
will no longer be held back by any desire of the flesh or upset by troubles
as he hastens with the greatest speed and desire toward the joy of the Lord.
All the same, do we not think the holy martyrs received this grace, at least
partially, while they were still in their victorius bodies? The strength of
this love seized their souls so entirely that, despising the pain, they were
able to expose their bodies to exterior torments. No doubt, the feeling of
intense pain could only upset their calm; it could not overcome them.
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), On Loving God
Chapter X.29: The fourth degree of love: man loves himself for the sake of God
(Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God with Analytical Commentary by Emero Stiegman,
Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1995, p. 31, pp. 127-129)

316)

Section 29 in Chapter IV:
"Preserving One's Mind and Nourishing One's Nature"
of Chu Hsi's Chin-ssu lu (1175):
When one observes the myriad things after one becomes tranquil,
they will all naturally show their impulses of spring.
[To be tranquil means to be free from the impurities of selfishness or
rashness and to be very much at home in preserving the mind and nourishing the nature.
Tranquillity involves both activity and inactivity. It means calmness of mind and not
absence of activity. (Sakurada Komon, Kinshi roku tekisetsu, 4:21a)
The impulses of spring means the operation of yang (active cosmic force) in the spring,
that is, the feeling of production and reproduction. When one's mind has become tranquil,
if one looks at the myriad things, he will find that they all naturally show a flourishing
feeling of life which does not stop for a moment. One will feel identified with humanity,
and be full of the feeling of love for life. (Nakamura Tekisai, Kinshi roku shimo kukai, p. 194]
Chu Hsi (1130-1200), Reflections on Things at Hand (Chin-ssu lu)
translated by Wing-Tsit Chan, Columbia University Press, NY, 1967, p. 135

317)

Lu Hsiang-shan (1139-1193), Complete Works, Section 29:
Someone said that the Teacher's doctrines concern morality, human nature and destiny,
and what exists before physical form, whereas the doctrines of Chu Hsi concern
the names, varieties, and systems of things and what exist after physical form, and
that a student should learn the doctrines of both teachers. The Teacher said, "Chu Hsi
would not be satisfied with what you have said about him. He himself said that there is
one thread running through his doctrines. However, he has not understood the Way clearly
and in the end there is no thread running through them. I once wrote him and said,
'When imagination and imitation are skillful and copying and borrowing are close,
their particulars are enough to make one self-confident, and their details enough
to give him self-comfort.' These words cut into the very heart of his doctrines."
(Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 1963, p. 583)

318)

Section 29 of William of Auvergne's The Trinity, or the First Principle:
So too the first one precedes every thing universal or common. Therefore, it does not stand
under something universal or common; for what is under anything universal or common necessarily
follows after it. and so nothing universal or common is said of the first one, which is one and
indivisible in every way. we have already shown that being through its essence is said of it;
therefore, being through its essence is not common or universal... For concrete things have in
themselves a plurality beyond their whole essence or definition of what is common to them.
Thus they are more multiple and more composite than their common. We have already shown that
neither the common nor the singular can be more bare or simpler than the first one, beyond
which there is no one higher or simpler. We will add another proof for this. I say that, if
there is going to be an essentially plurality under this kind of being (esse), it is
necessary that each one of that plurality be most bare. For it is clear from what preceded
that everything which is a being through its essence is most bare so that there is not
something bare before or higher than it. Hence, each one of this plurality will be just as
bare as its common, which is a being through its essence. This is patently impossible,
since only by some new and further addition can what is common be individuated.
William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris (1180-1249),
The Trinity, or the First Principle, Ch. IV
(translated by Roland J. Teske & Francis C. Wade,
Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, 1989, pp. 75-76)

319)

Chapter 29 of Saint Francis of Assisi's The Little Flowers:
How the devil appeared in the form of Christ to
Brother Ruffino and told him that he was damned.
Brother Ruffino, one of the most noble men of Assisi, a companion of St. Francis
and a man of great sanctity, was once sorely tempted in his soul by the demon
of predestination. He became deeply melancholy and depressed, for the demon
had put it into his heart that he was damned and not one of those predestined
to eternal life, and that all he did in the Order was thus for nought. This
temptation lasted for many days, and out of shame he did not reveal it to
St. Francis; but he did not cease praying and performing his customary acts
of abstinence...
Then Brother Ruffino clearly recognized that it had been the devil
who had deceived him: and returning to St. Francis, he again threw himself at
his feet and acknowledged his fault. St. Francis comforted him with sweet words
and sent him strengthened to his cell. There, in devout prayer, the Blessed
Christ appeared to him, warming his heart with divine love, and said: "You
did well, son, to believe Brother Francis, for he who had troubled you was
the devil; but I am Christ, your teacher; and to make you quite certain of it
I leave you this sign, that as long as you shall live you will feel neither
sadness nor melancholy."
Having said this, Christ departed, leaving him in such joy
and elevation of mind that day and night he was absorbed and lifted up in God.
From that time on, he was so confirmed in grace and in the certainty of his
salvation that he became completely transformed into another man, and had he
been allowed, he would have remained day and night in prayer and contemplation.
That is why St. Francis said of him that Brother Ruffino was
in this life canonized by Jesus Christ and that, except in his presence,
he would not have hesitated to say "St. Ruffino" even though he was still
among the living. In praise of Christ. Amen.
Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226),
The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Ch. XXIX
(translated by Serge Hughes, Mentor-Omega Book, NY, 1964, pp. 104-106)
( Another translation: Dom Roger Hudleston)

320)

Case 29 of Mumonkan: The Sixth Patriarch's "Your Mind Moves" [circa 7th century AD]
The wind was flapping a temple flag, and two monks started an argument.
One said the flag moved, the other said the wind moved; they argued back
and forth but could not reach a conclusion. The Sixth Patriarch said,
"It is not the wind that moves, it is not the flag that moves;
it is your mind that moves." The two monks were awe-struck.
Mumon's Comment:
It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves;
it is not the mind that moves. How do you see the patriarch?
If you come to understand this matter deeply, you will see that
the two monks got gold when buying iron. The patriarch could not
withhold his compassion and courted disgrace.
Mumon's Verse:
Wind, flag, mind moving,
All equally to blame.
Only knowing how to open his mouth,
Unaware of his fault in talking.
Mumon Ekai (1183-1260), Mumonkan, Case 29
(translated by Katsuki Sekida, Two Zen Classics, 1977, pp. 96-97)

321)

Chapter 29 of Rumi's Discourses (Fihi ma fihi):
The Christian said, "The dust went to dust and the pure to the pure."
"If Jesus' spirit were God," said the Master, "then where did his spirit go?
The spirit returns to its origin and maker, and if he were the origin
and maker, where would it go?"... Nothing is worshipped for its own sake
except God; nothing is loved for its own sake except God. All things other
than God are loved for the sake of God. The end is God, that is, the end
is that you should love and seek a thing for other than itself until you
reach God— and then you will love Him for himself.
Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273)
Signs of the Unseen: Discourses of Rumi, Chapter 29
(Translated by W. M. Thackston, Jr., Threshold Books, Putney, VT, 1994, pp. 130-132)

322)

Sermon 29 of Meister Eckhart: Be You Creative as God Is Creative
"It is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above." (Jeremiah, 1.17)
Saint James says in his Epistle: "The best gift and perfection comes from on high
from the Father of lights." Now pay attention!... No matter what sickness or
poverty or hunger or thirst God inflicts or does not inflict upon you, and no
matter what God gives or does not give, all of this is best for you. It may be
that you have neither devotion nor inwardness. Whatever you have or do not have,
focus carefully on the fact that you have God's honor in all things before your eyes,
and whatever he then does to you is best... My being which is more inward, is held
in common with all creatures. Heaven is more encompassing than all that is under it,
and for this reason it is more noble. Love is noble because it is all-encompassing...
Know that, whenever you are seeking your own interest, you will never find
God, since you are not seeking God alone... When we find the things we are looking
for, we throw the candle away. Whatever you are seeking along with God is nothing.
It does not matter what it is— be it an advantage or a reward or a kind of spirituality
or whatever else— you are seeking a nothingness, and for this reason you find a
nothingness. The reason that you find a nothingness is that you are seeking a
nothingness. All creatures are a pure nothingness. I do not say that they are
of little value or that they are something at all— they are a pure nothingness.
Whatever has no being is nothing. All creatures lack being, for their being depends on
the presence of God. If God were to turn away from all creatures only for a moment,
they would come to nothing... Now note also the expression: "They come from above."—
whoever wishes to receive something from above must of necessity be below in proper
humility... If you are really below, you will receive fully and completely. It is God's
nature to make gifts, and his being depends on making gifts to us if we are down below...
See to it that you give everything to him as his own, and that you humble yourself beneath
God in proper humility, and that you raise up God in your heart and you perception...
May the Father of lights help us to be ready to receive his best gift! Amen.
Meister Eckhart (1260-1329), Sermon 29
Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality
(Translated by Matthew Fox, Doubleday, NY, 1980, pp. 397-401)

323)

Chapter 29 of The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous (c. 1350):
That a man should patiently persevere at the work of contemplation,
willingly bear its sufferings, and judge no one else.
Anyone who desires to regain the purity of heart lost through sin and to win that
personal wholeness beyond all pain must patiently struggle in the contemplative work
and endure its toil whether he has been a habitual sinner or not. both sinners and
innocents will suffer in this work although obviously sinners will feel the suffering
more. And yet it often happens that some who have been hardened, habitual sinners arrive
at the perfection of this work sooner than those who have never sinned grievously.
God is truly wonderful in lavishing his grace on anyone he chooses; the world stands
bewildered before love like this... My point is that in this life no man may judge
another as good or evil simply on the evidence of his deeds. The deeds themselves
are another matter. These we may judge as good or evil, but not the person.
The Cloud of Unknowing Edited by William Johnston,
Image Book/Doubleday, New York, 1973, p. 86

324)

Verse 29 of Drg-Drsya-Viveka ("Seer-Seen Discernment") by Bharati Tirtha (c. 1328-1380):
The insensibility of the mind (to external objects) as before, on account of the
experience of Bliss is designated as the third kind of Samadhi (Nirvikalpaka).
The practitioner should uninterruptedly spend his time in these six kinds of Samadhi.
(translated by Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, Mysore, 1964, p. 38)

325)

Letter 29 of The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (1474):
Amatoria; quornodo amandus quisque sit et quornodo laudandus
Matters of love; how each man should be loved and how praised:
Marsilio Ficino to the magnanimous Lorenzo de' Medici: greetings.
That you esteem me, Lorenzo, I have known for a long time, since you have given me
many clear proofs. That you love me I have recently realised from this sign in particular;
that you get angry, as though you were jealous, at the most trifling and imaginary offences.
Get angry if you like, jealous man; provided you get passionate. The fire of anger and the fire
of love are alike; for when I become angry with you, which I often do, then I burn with the fire
of love. You too are on fire with no ordinary passion; I know what I am saying. And if ever we
appear to grow cool, even so, our coolness burns with more heat than the passion of others; and
our hatred, by Jupiter, is more loving and more lovable than their love.' For, my Lorenzo, your
anger seems to me more soothing than the kind of others. Your bite is sweeter than sweetness.
Oh how sweetly you bite, how sharply you kiss! You mingle a magic sweetness with the sharp,
and a sharpness with the sweet, as does Nature in the most succulent tastes. And as your
sharpness grows more bitter, so, like wine vinegar, it smells more sweet.
What fault do you find in me, stringent accuser, most stringent lover? Is it
not brevity? But you are the cause. The scale of your affairs makes me brief, but the
greatness of your love makes me appear briefer still. You accuse my silence, suspecting
that it springs from forgetfulness, and forgetfulness from absence. But you ought to remember
that if Lorenzo is not absent, neither is Marsilio, for Marsilic, dwells in Lorenzo if the
soul is everywhere at the same time, as you yourself truly proved 'm your recent letter.
How, therefore, does the divine Christopher prevent me from seeing you? Especially
since he is clear and transparent, and in Christopher I see Lorenzo, just as through Lorenzo I see
and embrace Christopher. Do you want me to confess the truth? The eclipse which prevents me from
seeing or being heard is not caused by the interposition of Christopher. No, it is you with your
flashing lightning and thunderclaps that have stunned me, and rendered me blind and speechless.
Ah! Impudent young man, you triumph overmuch in your victory, however fairly won;
for what more do you leave for yourself, or anyone else? For you, that you conquer yourself; for
others that they allow themselves to be conquered with equanimity. Certainly, if I may speak for
myself, I rejoice at being overcome by you almost as much as you rejoice at overcoming me and others.
What shall I say of the rest? The morning sun gathers the clouds, and the mid-day sun disperses
them. Youthful virtue arouses envy, but virtue in a mature man dissolves it and overcomes that jealousy
which previously dominated every other idea. You have converted almost everyone's envy to admiration.
Many now openly praise Lorenzo who previously envied him. But although hardly anyone who praises Lorenzo
speaks falsely, no-one except the Platonists praise him justly. Since the Aristotelians see Lorenzo so
successful in whatever he does, they praise him in all things; on the other hand the Platonists praise
all things in him. For when they consider how quickly he has become master of each art, they realise
that these arts have not been acquired by labour, but supplied by nature and granted from God.
And so it is that I esteem your character in myself, and I love my own in you.
I praise you in art, and I value art in you. I honour you in nature, and I marvel at nature
in you. I revere you through God, and I reverence God through you. And so to God alone be
all glory sung from age to age by everyone.
Farewell.
Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492) to Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499),
Letter of Marsilio Ficino to the magnanimous Lorenzo de' Medici
The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Vol. I, Shepheard-Walwyn, London, 1975, pp. 69-71

326)

Section 29 of Wang Yang Ming's Instructions for Practical Living:
I asked, "When Confucius' disciples expressed their wishes, Tzu-lu and
Jan Ch'iu [522-462 BC] chose governmental positions and Kung-hsi Hua
[b. 509 BC] chose ceremonies and music. How practical they were!
But when Tseng Tien expressed his wishes, they seemed to be frivolous.
And yet Confucius approved of him. What does it mean?"
[The Teacher said,] "The three other disciples were opinionated and dogmatic.
When one is opinionated and dogmatic, one inevitably becomes one-sided. He may
be able to do one thing but not the other. The attitude of Tseng Tien shows that
he was neither opinionated nor dogmatic. It means that he 'does what is proper to
his position and does not want to go beyond it. If he is in the midst of barbarous
tribes, he does what is proper in the midst of barbarous tribes. In a position of
difficulty and danger, he does what is proper in a position of difficulty and danger,
he can find himself in no situation in which he is not at ease with himself. The other
three disciples may be described as utensils, that is, specific and therefore limited
in their usefulness. Tseng Tien's indication was that he was not such a utensil.
Nevertheless, the three disciples' talents were all outstanding and excellent;
they were unlike people of today who lack substance but have only empty words.
This is way Confucius approved of all of them."
Wang Yang Ming (1472-1529),
Instructions for Practical Living or Ch'uan-hsi lu (1518), I.29
(translated by Wing-tsit Chan, Columbia University Press, NY, 1963, p. 31)

327)

Section 29 of Lo Ch'in-shun's Knowledge Painfully Acquired:
Humaneness (jen) is extremely difficult to discuss. In answering questions
about humanity, Confucius only spoke about the manner in which one should exert effort.
Nor did Mencius ever clearly explain its meaning. When he said, "Humaneness is the
human mind," he was referring to one in order to clarify the other and to show that
it is extremely important to people and cannot be neglected. The idea is the same as
that in the subsequent passage which speaks of rightness being man's path. Therefore
Li Yen-p'ing said that Mencius "was not defining humaneness in terms of the word mind."
This is an excellent perception. Yet among scholars in general there are none who take
account of it, and as a result they commonly miss the point. When one takes up the
definitions offered by our Confucian predecessors, one finds that it was only the elder
Master Ch'eng who, in speaking of "forming one body with all things without any differentiation,"
seems to have understood it fully. He also thought that "Rightness, propriety, wisdom, and
faithfulness are all humaneness." Thus all the distinct particularizations are brilliantly
clear, and not one is omitted. It is precisely because not one is omitted that all in their
wholeness and entirely constitute this one thing. This is what is meant by "without any
differentiation." The general idea of Master Chang's "Western Inscription" is consonant
with this. As to others who saw humaneness as impartiality or love and the like, everything
can be understood if we infer from the idea of "forming one body."
Lo Ch'in-shun (1465-1547), Knowledge Painfully Acquired or K'un-chih chi
translated by Irene Bloom, Columbia University Press, NY, 1987, pp. 76-77

328)

Magical Figure 28 of Prophecies of Paracelsus:
"Thus shall it come to pass that each one will be led into its own
pasture. For feeding in strange pasture causeth distress, contention,
and misery in this world. As soon as each one cometh into its own stall
there shall be unity. For the mouth becometh depraved, feeding according
to its lust as it pleaseth the jaws; all that cometh of going into strange
pastures. How blessed shall be the hour, and the poverty, that will come
and shall ordain each one to its meadow, not far from the year XXXXIII."
Paracelsus (1493-1541), Prophecies of Paracelsus, Magical Figure 29
(translated by Franz Hartmann, M.D.,
Rudolf Steiner Publications, Blauvelt, NY, 1973, p. 65)

329)

Verse 29 of Nostradamus's Centuries I & IV:

Quand le poisson terrestre, et aquatique Par forte vague au gravier sera mis, Sa forme étrange, suave et horrifique, Par mer aux murs bien tôt les ennemis.	When the fish that travels over both land and sea is cast up on to the shore by a great wave, its shape foreign, smooth and frightful. From the sea the enemies soon reach the walls.
Le Sol caché éclipsé par Mercure, Ne sera mis que pour le ciel second: De Vulcan Hermes sera faite pâture, Sol sera vu pur rutilant et blond.	The Sun hidden eclipsed by Mercury Will be placed only second in the sky: Of Vulcan Hermes will be made into food, The Sun will be seen pure, glowing red and golden.

Nostradamus (1503-1566), Centuries I.29, IV.29 (1555)
Edgar Leoni, Nostradamus: Life and Literature
Exposition Press, New York, 1961, pp. 140-141, 228-229

330)

Giordano Bruno's 29th Seal: The Polymath—
The polymath, that is, the scholar, if he could speak suitably in Latin,
or in Greek for greater or more refined tastes, is able to advise concerning
all matters that are disposed in controversy and dispute, since he is learned.
He will, without making a mistake, moreover, make known the genera of the names,
that is of the two seasons in space, completely divided into three classes, of sun
and moon and sky; certainly of male, female and neuter; while the common and universal
genera remain abandoned at the gates and at the atrium in front of the gates. As they
journey through the classes' parts they will discover the multitude of their images
(in the expression of the conspicuous images of those things that are signified).
For the words' conjugation the polymath has the four atria of regular relationships
and the same number of atria of exceptions, which are quickened by their proper spirits,
and through all of them run, under the leadership of the Chainer or of Theutis, animate
beings. With the same skill in his other necessities and relationships it will happen
he can easily accomplish in three days what otherwise he would not dare promise to do
in a year (even with much earnest effort).
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas (1591)
Book Three, which is about the images of the Thirty Seals, 3.14
(translated by Charles Doria, Willis, Locker & Owens, NY, 1991, pp. 273-274)

331)

Emblema 29 of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (1617):
Emblema XXIX: Just as the Salamander, the stone lives in the fire.

Epigramma XXIX:
The Salamander lives more vigorously in a red-hot fire
Without paying attention to your threats, Vulcan:
In the same way also the Stone, which was born in an ever burning fire,
Does not shun the merciless glow of the flames.
The Salamander, which is cold in itself, extinguishes the fire & gets off scot-free,
But the Stone is hot & is further helped by an equal heat.

Michael Maier (1566-1622), Atalanta Fugiens, 29
(translated by H.M.E. de Jong,
Gardening: Maitreya Three, Shambala, Berkeley, 1972, p. 81)

332)

Jacob Boehme's The Way to Christ (1622)
The Fourth Treatise on True Resignation, Chapter I, Section 29:
The spark of divine power falls and glimmers into such humble complete
resignation like a kindler into the centrum of the life-forms, into the
soul fire, which Adam made a dark coal, and begins to glow. Since the light
of divine power has been ignited in it, the creature must go forward as an
instrument of the Spirit of God, and speak what God's Spirit tells it to.
It is then no longer its own possession but is an instrument of God.
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), The Way to Christ (1622), IV.1.29
(translated by Peter Erb, Paulist Press, New York, 1978, p. 120)
Bibliography, Online texts

333)

Verse 29 of Angelus Silesius The Cherubinic Wanderer (1657):

Das Grosse im Kleinen

Du sprichst, das Grosse kann nicht in dem Kleinen sein,
Den Himmel schleusst man nicht ins Erdenstüpfchen ein.
Komm schau der Jungfraun Kind, so siehst du in der Wiegen
Den Himmel und die Erd' und hundert Welte liegen.

The Big Is in the Small

You say the big cannot be in the small?
Heaven cannot be in a dot of earth?
Come and see the virgin's child, in the crib you see
Lying heaven and earth, and a hundred worlds.

Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), The Cherubinic Wanderer III.29
translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch,
Maria M. Böhm, Angelus Silesius' Cherubinischer Wandersmann
Peter Lang, New York, 1997, p. 110 (German version, III.29)

334)

Section 29 of Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia (1837):
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the tender herb, the herb yielding seed,
and the fruit-tree bearing fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the
earth; and it was so. When the "earth" or man, has been thus prepared to receive
celestial seeds from the Lord, and to produce something of what is good and true,
then the Lord first causes some tender thing to spring forth, which is called the
"tender herb"; then something more useful which again bears seed in itself, and
is called the "herb yielding seed"; and at length something good which becomes
fruitful, and is called the "tree bearing fruit, whose seed is in itself", each according to
its kind... Wherefore such a person is also called "heaven", because heaven is in him;
and likewise the "kingdom of God", because the kingdom of God is in him; as the
Lord Himself teaches in Luke: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither
shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you." (xvii.20-21)
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)
Arcana Coelestia, 29 (Swedenborg Foundation, NY, 1965, pp. 14-15)

335)

Section 29 of Swedenborg's Worlds in Space (1758):
What I have said so far proves clearly that spirits retain in their memory
what they see and hear in the next life, and that they can be taught just as
much as when they were human beings in the world; and this applies equally to
matters of faith, so that they can become more perfect. The more inward spirits
and angels are, the more readily and fully they absorb what they learn and the
more exactly they retain it. Since this process continues for ever, it is evident
that their wisdom continually increases. In the case of the spirits from Mercury
their knowledge of facts continually increases, but this does not cause an
increase of wisdom, because they love knowledge, which is a means, rather
than the purposes to which it should be put, which are the ends it serves.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), The Worlds in Space, 29
(translated from Latin by John Chadwick, Swedenborg Society, London, 1997, p. 16)

336)

Section 29 of Sage Ninomiya's Evening Talks: Mutability and Constancy
All the flowers in this world are certain to go, but though they fall, the plants
that bore them are sure to bloom again when spring returns. Grass and herbs that
appear in spring are doomed to wither when they are blown by chilly autumnal winds,
but though they disappear from sight, they will surely come out afresh when spring
winds call them to life again. This is the rule with all things. Such being the case,
though things are apparently mutable, they are not so, but though seemingly constant
they are not changeless. In a twinkling of time seeds will change into herbs, herbs
bear flowers, flowers develop into fruit and fruit change into original seeds.
Thus one can never say which was the origin, seeds or herbs. In Buddhism this
is called the law of ceaselessness and changelessness, while the Confucian term
for it is the law of rotation. Nothing is outside of the dictate of this law.
Sontoku Ninomiya (1787-1856),
Sage Ninomiya's Evening Talks, Section 29
translated by Isoh Yamagata from Ninomiya-Ô Yawa,
Tokuno Kyokai, Tokyo, 1937, pp. 66-67)

337)

Verse 29 in Jack Kerouac's Sutra,
Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960):

Are you tightwad and are you mean, those are the true sins,
and sin is only a conception of ours, due to long habit.
Are you generous and are you kind, those are the true virtues,
and they're only conceptions. The golden eternity rests beyond
sin and virtue, is attached to neither, is attached to nothing,
is unattached, because the golden eternity is Alone. The mold
has rills but it is one mold. The field has curves but it is
one field. All things are different forms of the same thing.
I call it the golden eternity-what do you call it, brother?
for the blessing and merit of virtue, and the punishment
and bad fate of sin, are alike just so many words.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
Totem/Corinth Book, NY, 1970, p. 28

338)

Chapter 29 in René Guénon's
Symbolism of the Cross (1958) is titled "Centre and Circumference":
The foregoing by no means implies that space can be regarded as "a sphere which has its
centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere", to use the oft-quoted formula of Pascal...
to speak here of "inward" and "outward", of centre and circumference, is to use symbolical
language, the language of spatial symbolism; but the impossibility of doing without such
symbols proves no more than the inevitable imperfection of our means of expression...
Evidently Pascal let himself be carried away by his geometrician's imagination, which led
him to reverse the true relationships as they should be envisaged from a metaphysical
standpoint. It is the centre that is rightly speaking nowhere, because it is essentially
"non-localized": it is not to be found anywhere in manifestation, since it is absolutely
transcendent in respect thereof, while being at the centre of all things. It is beyond all
that lies within the scope of the senses or any faculty proceeding from the sensible order...
it can be said that, not only in space, but in all that is manifested, what is everywhere is
the exterior or the circumference, whereas the centre is nowhere; since it is unmanifested;
but the manifested would be absolutely nothing without that essential point, which in itself
is not manifested at all, and which, precisely by reason of its non-manifestation, contains
in principle all possible manifestations, being the "motionless mover" of all things, the
immutable origin of all differentiation and modification. This point produces the whole of
space by as it were issuing from itself and by unfolding its virtualities in an indefinite
multitude of modalities, with which it fills space in its entirety.
René Guénon (1886-1951), Symbolism of the Cross
translated by Angus MacNab, Luzac & Co., London, 1958, p. 127

339)

Chapter 29 of Franklin Merell-Wolff's Pathways through to Space (1936):
is titled "Concerning Opposition Aroused by Sages"

Why do the words of a Mystic or a Sage so often arouse such severe
antagonism? Take, for instance, poems like the Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
They have aroused storms of criticism as well as enthusiastic admiration.
Yet, on the other hand, readers of all sorts generally are not troubled by
the weird meanderings of the written words of an insane mind. This reveals
the fact that it is not simply the unconventionality of the form that stirs
the antagonism. Now these storms of criticism are really tributes. They
indicate, at least, an unconscious recognition of Power in the words of
the Mystic or the Sage. The complacency of the forces of Mara— to employ
a Buddhist term— has been struck a vital blow, and this arouse resistance.
But in all such engagements, Mara is doomed to defeat, for the Power that has
burst forth is united with the inexhaustible Fount. The only effective defense
for Mara would be complete indifference. For if Mara causes any man to fight
the Light, that man, sooner of later, is conquered by the Light and then becomes
One with It. St. Paul affords us the classic example. He fought earnestly and
sincerely so that quickly the Light conquered him and claimed him for Its own.
From the standpoint of Mara, there is nothing more dangerous than an effort
to slay a Sage or Mystic. The latter, in Their real Natures are invulnerable
and, in the end, win to Themselves their would-be slayers.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887-1985),
Pathways through to Space
Chapter XXIX: "Concerning Opposition Aroused by Sages"
(2nd Edition, Julian Press, NY, 1973, pp. 57-58)

340)

Aphorism 29 of Franklin Merrell-Wolff's Consciousness Without an Object (1973):
The state of tensions is the state of ever-becoming.
Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object
(Reflections on the Nature of Transcendental Consciousness)
(Julian Press, NY, 1973, p. 109)

341)

Chapter 29 of Wei Wu Wei's Ask the Awakened (1963)
is titled "The Photographic Image Also Is Negative":
The Void only appears to be Emptiness or Nothing when it is regarded as
the opposite of Something or Everything. Or it is only when Non-being
is seen as the counterpart of Being that it appears as Nothing.
But when Something or Everything is seen as the counterpart of Nothing—
then Nothing becomes Everything, and Non-being can be seen as Being.
Wei Wu Wei (1895-1986), Ask the Awakened
Little Brown, Boston (1963), p. 64

342)

Chapter 29 of Wei Wu Wei's Open Secret is titled "Rumours—I":
In Both Kinds of Dream: We are all part of the party: the party goes on
even if we fall asleep, but our falling asleep is also part of the party.

Do you remember? When you look at a reflection of the moon
in a puddle you are the moon looking at itself.

We are required to cease looking at objects as events apart from ourselves,
and to know them at their source— which is our perceiving of them.

Your only self is other— there is no other that is not yourself.

Intention can make you a saint,
But it can prevent you from becoming a sage?
Appearance only: there is no entity to be either.

All forms of practice are learning to kill dragons.
Wei Wu Wei (1895-1986), Open Secret,
Hong Kong University Press, 1965, p. 49

343)

Paul Brunton (1898-1981),
Notebooks of Paul Brunton,
XV, Paras #29
from various chapters
Volume 15:
Advanced Contemplation
& The Peace Within You,
Larson Publications,
Burdett, NY, 1988,
Part I: pp. 7, 70,
94, 172, 217;
Part II:
pp. 19, 41, 82
(Excerpts)

Para #29 from Volume 15 of Paul Brunton's
Notebooks: "Advanced Contemplation"—
Job carried the answer to his own question, "Oh that I knew where
I might find Him," within himself all the time, but he did not know it. (1.29)
The Long Path is likely to come first in a man's spiritual career,
with the bizarre result that he is required to become much more aware
of what is going on within himself— his thoughts, feelings, and
character— and then, with entry on the Short Path, to become much
less aware of it, even to the point of ignoring it. (4.29)
On the Short Path he become aware of the fact of forgiveness.
He leaves out the constant self-criticism and self-belittling,
the painstaking self-improvement practices, of the other Path
and begins to take full note of this saving fact. (5.29)
In this condition [mental silence], with mind shifted away from
sensory experience into a fixed self-absorption and stilled to the utmost
degree, the meditator may be said to have mastered contemplation. (7.29)
At this crucial moment [entering the Void] the mind must be
utterly submissive, the self-will wholly relinquished. (8.29)

Para #29 from Volume 15 of Paul Brunton's
Notebooks: "The Peace Within You"—
Chinese wisdom verified Indian experience. "Perfect calm
with gentleness makes Tao prosper," wrote Tze Ya Tze. (2.29)
The notion that the fortunes and misfortunes of life should
be of little importance to a philosopher is not a correct one.
To practice a calm detachment is not to ignore worldy values. (3.29)
We may hold talent— be it the craftsman's, the intellectual's
the artist's— in high esteem, yet not lose our hold on the stillness.
It is a delicate balanced position, reached after risky attempts. (4.29)

344)

Page 29 of Master Subramuniya's Reflections (1971):
Sitting in a state of meditation
you must be more alive and alert
than a tightrope walker
suspended without a net
on a taut cable three hundred feet
above the surface of the earth.
Master Subramuniya (1927-2001), Reflections
Tad Robert Gilmore & Co., San Francisco, 1971, p. 29

345)

"Awareness, a Ball of Light" is Lesson 29
of Subramuniyaswami's Merging with Siva (1999):
The average person who is not a mystic lives two-thirds in the external
area of the mind and one-third within himself. The within of himself can be,
and sometimes is, very foreboding. He doesn't understand it. He is a little
afraid of it and prefers to involve himself with external things. Possibly
he's had some inner experiences, some emotional unhappinesses, and he shuns
anything that is inner. The mystic lives, and is taught to live, two-thirds
within himself and only one-third in the external. In learning how to do
this, the mystic is taught to become consciously conscious, or aware that
he is aware. He learns to separate awareness from that which he is aware of.
The person who is not a mystic, living two-thirds in the external mind, says,
"I am happy," meaning, "I am aware of a state of mind called happiness, and
I am in that state, so that is me." Or, "I am unhappy. Unhappiness is me."
The mystic living two-thirds within says to himself, "I am flowing through
the area of the mind that's always unhappy." He doesn't change; he is
a pure state of awareness.
Visualize a little ball of light. We'll call that man's
individual awareness, and that light is shining right out from his eyes,
and this little ball of light is going through the mind. It's going through
the area of the mind that's always unhappy. It's going through the area of
the mind that's always dreaming, the area of the mind that's delightfully
happy, the area of the mind that's in absolute bliss, the area of the mind
that's absolutely in jealousy all the time, the area that's in fear all
the time— many people live in this area of the mind; it's quite crowded
with lots of balls of light there. This ball of light flows through the area
of the mind that's in resentment. It's like a churning ocean. It's a delightful
place to be in, especially if you're a little ball. You get bounced all around.
Then there's the area of the mind that is completely peaceful and has always
been peaceful. No mood or emotion has ever been in it to ruffle it, because
that's the peaceful area of the mind. The one who meditates seeks out this
area to become aware in. Man's individual awareness is just like this
little ball of light, and it's like a camera. It photographs. It registers.
It understands. It is pure intelligence. Man knows where he is in the mind,
but the first step in awakening on the path of enlightenment is to separate
awareness from that which it is aware of.
Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (1927-2001)
Merging with Siva: Hinduism's Contemporary Metaphysics
Himalayan Academy, Kapaa, Hawaii, 1999, pp. 61-62

346)

Koan 29 of Zen Master Seung Sahn:
Not Depending on Anything:
Not depending on words, a special transmission outside the sutras,
pointing directly to mind: see your true nature, become Buddha.

1. What is "a special transmission outside the sutras?"
2. How do you point directly to mind?
3. "See your true nature, become Buddha." What does this mean?

COMMENTARY:
This world was originally complete stillness. That means there were no names,
no forms, no words. If mind appears, then the sky, the earth, the mountains,
the rivers, everything appears. If mind disapppears, where do these things
return to? If you say, "They return to emptiness," then you have opened
your mouth, which is already a mistake. What can you do? If you don't
understand, go to the kitchen and drink cold water.

Seung Sahn (born 1927), The Whole World Is A Single Flower:
365 Kong-ans for Everyday Life, Tuttle, Boston, 1992, pp. 24-25

29 in Poetry & Literature

347)

"Lord Apollo, who deals death from afar" in Line 29
from Book I of Homer's Iliad:
"Sons of Atreus and Greek heroes all:
May the gods on Olympus grant you plunder
Of Priam's city and a safe return home.
But give me my daughter back and accept
This ransom out of respect for Zeus' son,
Lord Apollo, who deals death from afar."
Homer, The Iliad, I.24-29 (circa 800 BC)
(translated by Stanley Lombardo)
Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, IN, 1997, p. 2

348)

Ethiopians— "those burnished people at the ends of the earth"
in Line 29 from Book 1 of Homer's Odyssey
But Poseidon was away now, among the Ethiopians,
those burnished people at the ends of the earth—
Some near the sunset, some near the sunrise—
To receive a grand sacrifice of rams and bulls.
There he sat, enjoying the feast.
Homer, The Iliad, I.27-31 (circa 800 BC)
(translated by Stanley Lombardo)
Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, IN, 1997, p. 2

349)

Verse 29 of Ch'ü Yüan's Tian Wen:
Taking up the original work,
The son completed the father's task.
Ch'ü Yüan (c. 343 BC-277 BC)
Tian Wen: A Chinese Book of Origins
translated by Stephen Field
New Directions, New York, 1986,

350)

Han-shan's Poem 29 of Cold Mountain:
The six extremities constantly hem them in;
The nine rules of conduct— in vain do they discuss
them 'mongst themselves.
Those with talent are discarded in the grasses and swamps,
While those who are artless are locked in by their bramble doors.
Though the sun rises, their cliffs are still dark;
Though the fog lifts, their valleys remain in a haze.
In their midst, the sons of great, wealthy men
Are, each one, completely without any pants.
Han-shan (fl. 627-649), Cold Mountain, Poem 29
(Notes: The "six extremities" are illness, anxiety,
poverty, evil, weakness, and to die young through misfortune.)
translated by Robert G. Henricks, 1990, p. 66
( Red Pine translation, 1990)
Burton Watson translation, 1962)

351)

Poem 29 of Tu Fu is titled "The Song of War Chariots":
Chariots rumble, horses neigh, Men are marching with bows and arrows.
Parents, wives, and children rush to bid them farewell;
The rising dust obscures the Hsien-yang Bridge.
They clutch at the soldiers' clothes, stumble, and bar the road;
Their cries pierce the clouds... New ghosts murmur while the old ones weep,
You can always hear them when night or rain comes.
Tu Fu (712-770)
William Hung, Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1952, pp. 64-65

352)

Poem 29 from The Manyoshu:
Yearning for the Emperor Tenji
While, waiting for you,
My heart is filled with longing,
The autumn wind blows—
As if it were you—
Swaying the bamboo blinds of my door.
The Manyoshu, Poem 29 (circa 750 AD)
(The Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai translation of One Thousand Poems
Foreword by Donald Keene, Columbia University Press, NY, 1965, pp. 11-12) Japanese text

353)

Poem 29 of Selected Poems of Po Chü-I is titled "Satisfied in Mind":
Ten years a traveler,
ever plagued by hunger and chill;
three years an admonisher at court,
so often ashamed to be drawing pay unearned.
There was wine, but no leisure to drink it,
mountains, but I never got to stroll them.
Always hoping to retire,
but, yanked and pulled about, what freedom did I have?
Then one morning I came home to the Wei,
bobbing like an unmoored boat,
mind fixed on other than worldly concerns,
not joyful, not downcast either.
Every day the same sort of vegetable fare,
all year one cloth-lined jacket,
and with the cold, lazier than ever#151;
comb my hair once in how many days?#151;
mornings up only when I've had all the sleep I want,
nights to bed after I've drunk my fill.
The mind wants nothing more than satisfaction;
outside satisfaction, what's there to seek?
Po Chü-I (772-846), Selected Poems, Poem 29
translated by Burton Watson,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, p. 39
(translated by David Hinton)

354)

Poem 29 of The Poetry of Li Shang-yin:
Moonlit Night
The autumn insects under the grass, the frost on the leaves—
The vermilion balustrade presses down the light on the lake.
The hare is chilly, the toad cold, the cassia flower white:
On such a night, Heng-o would surely break her heart.
Li Shang-yin (813-858), Selected Poems, Poem 29
translated by James J. Y. Liu,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969, p. 100
(translated by David Hinton)

355)

Section 29 from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
is titled "Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster":
Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing.
To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt.
To notice that one's elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy.
To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one's gate and instruct
his attendants to announce his arrival. To wash one's hair, make one's
toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these
preparations still produce an inner pleasure. It is night and one
is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of
rain-drops, which the wind blows against the shutters.
. Sei Shonagon (965-c. 1017),
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Section 29 (circa 994 AD)
Translated & Edited by Ivan Morris
Columbia University Press, NY, 1967, Vol. I, p. 31)

356)

There are 54 chapters in The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
Chapter 29 is titled "The Imperial Progress" (Miyuki)
Miyuki means "imperial progress". In this chapter Emperor Reizei goes on
a winter outing to Oharano, just southwest of the city. The word appears (as a wordplay
on miyuki, "snow") in a poem that Genji sends in reply to one by the Emperor:
"Never as today can the slopes of Oshio, where repeated snows
weigh upon the forest pines, have seen true magnificence."
Lady Murasaki Shikibu (973-1025), The Tale of Genji, Chapter 29
translated by Royall Tyler, Viking, New York, 2001, Vol. 1, p. 497

357)

Poem 29 of Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101)
is titled "Children" (1075):
Children don't know what worry means!
Stand up to go and they hang on my clothes.
I'm about to scold them
But my wife eggs them on in their silliness:,
"The children are silly but you're much worse!
What good does all this worrying do?"
Stung by her words, I go back to my seat.
She rinses a wine cup to put before me.
How much better than Liu Ling's wife,
Grumbling at the cost of her husband's drinking!
(Notes: The poet's two younger sons were three and five at this time.
Liu Ling was a poet of the Chin dynasty and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,
who flourished in the middle of the 3rd century A.D. He was a heavy-drinking poet.)
— translated by Burton Watson,
Su Tung-P'o: Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet,
Columbia University Press, New York, 1965, p. 56
Expanded edition, Copper Canyon Press, 1994, p. 66)

358)

Parzival's tale
in Line 29 of Book 15 in Eschenbach's Parzival:
May this give strength to him in strife
And help him to preserve his life.
for now the tale has gone so far
That he must face a master of war
On his intrepid journey.
From heathen lands he hither came
and ne'er had had baptismal name.
Proceeding, Parzival could ride
Into a forest deep and wide,
Wolfram von Eschenbach (1165-1217) Parzival (1195)
Book 15: "Parzival and Feirefiz", Lines 27-36
(translated by Edwin H. Zeydel & Bayard Quincy Morgan,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1951, p. 299)

359)

Verse 29 of Rubáiyát, of Omar Khayyam (1048-1122):
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
(translated by Edward Fitzgerald, London, 1st edition 1859, 2nd edition 1868)

360)

Verse 29 of Saigyo's Mirror for the Moon:
Tree-filtered
Patch of moonlight fades with dawn;
Staring at it gives
Loneliness... deepened by winds
Soughing through pines on the peaks.
Saigyo (1118-1190), Mirror for the Moon,
(translated by William R. LaFleur, New Directions, NY, 1978, p. 15)

361)

Verse 29 of Kenreimon-in Ukyo no Daibu's The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu:
When a lover has arranged to meet two ladies on the same night:
This night when he had promised
He would come to visit me,
How long would I have waited
Had I not seen his letter,
Sent to me, but meant for her!
Kenreimon-in Ukyo no Daibu (1151-1232),
The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu, Poem 29
(translated by Phillip Tudor Harries, Stanford University Press, 1980, p. 95)

362)

Verse 29 of Dogen (1200-1253):
Following only the deluded path
In the six realms—
The futile meandering
Of a mind chasing after
Its own deceptions.
(translated by Steven Heine,
Zen Poetry of Dogen, Tuttle, Boston, 1997, p. 108)

363)

Verse 29 of Rumi Daylight:
The idol of you self is the mother of all idols.
The material idol is only a snake;
while this inner idol is a dragon.
It is easy to break an idol,
but to regard the self as easy to subdue is a mistake.
Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), Mathnawi, I.772; 778
Rumi Daylight, Verse 29 (p. 31)
(Edited by Camille & Kabir Helminski, 1994)

364)

Verse 29 of Rumi's Magnificient One:
The world consumes men in the earth.
But the creator sends us to eat the whole universe.
The world is a mighty sorceress
Who promises men. "Tomorrow, tomorrow."
Son, we are smarter than that.
We know how we live and enjoy now.

If we were born from a fairy,
Fairies gather at night.
Let's get together at night.
If we are the Sons of Adam,
Let's drink that wine.

We are fish. Our Cupbearer
Is the ocean of Love.
If we drink more or less,
The sea doesn't change.
Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), Divan-i Kebir
Magnificient One, Verse 29
(Translated by Nevit Oguz Ergin)
Larson Publications, Burdett, NY, 1993, p. 38

365)

Chapter 29 of Attar's The Conference of the Birds
is titled "Request of the Thirteenth Bird"
Another bird asked the Hoopoe: 'O you whose motives are without guile,
tell me how I can be sincere on this path to God. Since I cannot give up the
longing of my heart I spend all that I have to achieve my aim. What I had I lost;
what I kept has turned to scorpions in my hands. I am bound by no ties and have
cast off all shackles and impediments. I wish to be sincere in the spiritual Way
in the hope of one day seeing the object of my worship face to face.'
The Hoopoe replied: 'The Way is not open to everyone; only the
upright may tread it. He who strives in this Way must do so tranquilly and with
a whole heart. When you have burnt all that you possess gather the ashes together
and seat yourself upon them. Until you die to all the things of this world, one by
one, you will not be free. And seeing that you will not be long in the prison of
the world detach yourself from everything. When death comes, can the things that
now enslave you turn him aside? To travel this road, self-sincerity is necessary—
and to be sincere with oneself is more difficult than you think.
Set light to your faults, your resentments, and your vanities.
Burn them and do not flatter yourself that you are more sincere than others.
He who prides himself on his sincerity should strive to see himself as he is.
Farid al-Din Attar (c. 1230), The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-tayr)
(translated by C. S. Nott, Shambhala, Boston, 1993, pp. 73-74)

366)

Verse 29 of Yunus Emre's Lyric Poems
is Those who became complete:
I am a Sufi in the eyes of the people.
I go around with prayer beads in hand.
My tongue speaks of knowledge
my heart doesn't accept.

I wear a diploma around my neck,
and yet my prayers aren't real.
Worries occupy my mind
and I can't keep my eyes on the Way.

My speaking of knowledge is a kind of lie.
I can't be modest, pride never leaves my heart.

Although I look like a dervish,
I have no patience at all
and I am full of doubts.
Whatever goes in my ears
never reaches the inside.

Those who see me kiss my hand,
they look at my jacket and hat.
They think I am free from sin.

Outwardly I lecture and lead prayers;
inside, in my heart's bazaar
are things even a sly man
wouldn't dream of in a thousand years.

Yunus, put your need in front of Allah.
He is Generous,
He does not do what you do.
Yunus Emre (1238-1321),
The Drop that Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre
(Translated from the Turkish by Kabir Helminski & Refik Algan,
Threshold Books, Putney, Vermont, p. 54)

367)

Chapter 29 of Dante's Vita Nuova (1294):
Let me begin by saying that if one counts in the Arabian way, her most noble soul
departed this life during the first hou of the ninth day of the month, and if one counts
the way they do in Syria, she departed in the ninth month of the year, the first month
there being Tixryn the First, which for us is October. And according to our own way of
reckoning, she departed in that year of our Christian era (that is in the year of Our Lord)
in which the perfect number had been completed nine times in that century in which she
had been placed in this world: she was a Christian of the 13th Century. One reason why this
number was in such harmony with her might be this: since, according to Ptolemy and according
to Christian truth, there are nine heavens that move, and since, according to widespread
astrological opinion, these heavens affect the earth below according to the relations they
have to one another, this number was in harmony with her to make it understood that at her
birth all nine of the moving heavens were in perfect relationship to one another. But this
is just one reason. If anyone thinks more subtly and according to infallible truth, it will
be clear that this number was she herself— that is, by analogy. What I mean to say is this:
the number three is the root of nine for, without any other number, multiplied by itself,
it gives nine: it is quite clear that three times three is nine. Therefore, if three is the sole
factor of nine, and the sole factor of miracles is three, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
who are Three in One, then this lady was accompanied by the number nine so that it
might be understood that she was a nine, or a miracle, whose root, namely that of the
miracle, is the miraculous Trinity itself. Perhaps someone more subtle than I could find a
still more subtle explanation, but this is the one which I see and which pleases me the most.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Vita Nuova, XXIX
translated by Mark Musa, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, IN, 1973, pp. 61-62)

368)

Chapter 29 of Dante's Convivio (1304) asks the question of children
of nobility, whether they are obligated to carry on the honor of their lineage:
"O you who have listened to me, see how many there are who are deceived!": that is,
those who believe themselves noble because they are of famous and ancient lineage
and are descended from excellent fathers, although they have no nobility in themselves.
Juvenal replies in his 8th satire, where he begins as if exclaiming: "Of what benefit
are these honors which derive from men of earlier times if he who would clothe himself
with them lives an evil life, if he who speaks of his ancestors and describes their great
and wondrous deeds dedicates himself to wretched and base acts?" "Will he," says this same
satirist, "become noble because of his family, who is not worthy of that family? This is
but to call a dwarf a giant."... Therefore, in my judgment, just as he who defames a worthy
man deserves to be shunned and ignored by everyone, so a worthless man descended from
good ancestors deserves to be cast out by all, and a good man should close his eyes so as to
avoid witnessing the disgrace perpetrated on goodness, of which the memory alone remains.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Convivio (The Banquet), Book IV.29
( translated by Richard H. Lansing, Garland Publishing, New York, 1990)
(Another translation: Christopher Ryan, Dante: The Banquet,
Anma Libri, Saratoga, CA, 1989, pp. 198-200)

369)

Canto 29 of Dante's Purgatorio:
(Earthly Paradise, Banks of Lethe, Glorious light & melody,
Invocation to the Muses, Heavenly Pageant, 7 Golden Candelabra,
24 Elders, Four beasts, Chariot drawn by a Griffin, Thunderclap):

Ed ecco un lustro sùbito trascorse
da tutte parti per la gran foresta,
tal che di balenar mi mise in forse.

Poco più oltre, sette alberi d'oro
falsava nel parere il lungo tratto
del mezzo ch'era ancor tra noi e loro;

E quando il carro a me fu a rimpetto,
un tuon s'ud�, e quelle genti degne
parvero aver l'andar più interdetto,

a sudden radiance that swept across
the mighty forest on all sides-and I
was wondering if lightning had not struck.

Not far beyond, we made out seven trees
of gold, though the long stretch of air between
those trees and us had falsified their semblance;

And when the chariot stood facing me,
I heard a bolt of thunder; and it seemed
to block the path of that good company,

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Purgatorio 29.16-18, 29.43-45, 29.151-153
( Allen Mandelbaum translation, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1981, pp. 266-275)

370)

Canto 29 of Dante's Paradiso:
(In the 9th Heaven, the Primum Mobile, Beatrice's silence & discourse):

tanto, col volto di riso dipinto,
si tacque Beatrice, riguardando
fiso nel punto che m'avea vinto.

in sua etternità di tempo fore,
fuor d'ogne altro comprender, come i piacque,
s'aperse in nuovi amor l'etterno amore.

e non voglio che dubbi, ma sia certo,
che ricever la grazia è meritorio
secondo che l'affetto l'è aperto.

Vedi l'eccelso omai e la larghezza
de l'etterno valor, poscia che tanti
speculi fatti s'ha in che si spezza,
uno manendo in sé come davanti".

so long did Beatrice, a smile upon
her face, keep silent, even as she gazed
intently at the Point that overwhelmed me.

in His eternity outside of time,
beyond all other borders, as pleased Him,
Eternal Love opened into new loves.

I would not have you doubt, but have you know
surely that there is merit in receiving
grace, measured by the longing to receive it.

By now you see the height, you see the breadth,
of the Eternal Goodness: It has made
so many mirrors, which divide Its light,
but, as before, Its own Self still is One."

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Paradiso 29.7-9, 29.16-18, 29.64-66, 29.142-145
( Allen Mandelbaum translation, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982, pp. 260-267)

371)

Poem 29 of The Zen Works of Stonehouse:
A hundred years flash by
does anyone think this through
if what you're doing isn't clear
the edge between life and death is sheer
stitches on a monk's robe are a loving wife's tears
grains of sweet rice are an old farmer's fat
don't think charity has no reward
every seed bears fruit in time
Ch'ing-hung (1272-1352), The Zen Works of Stonehouse, Book I, Poem 29
translated by Red Pine (Bill Porter),
Mercury House, San Francisco, p. 17 (Zen Poems)

372)

Verse 29 of Hafiz: The Tongue of the Hidden:
Friends, singers, saki— they are all no more
Than clay and water, phantoms without core;
There is naught but illusions;— bring me wine
That I may leave this sea without a shore.
Hafiz (1320-1389), Hafiz: The Tongue of the Hidden, Verse 29
adaptation by Clarence K. Streit, Viking Press, NY, 1928
(Author on Time cover, March 27, 1950)

373)

Verse 29 of The Divan of Hafez:
The thought of your face is my companion on very road.
The scent of your hair is grafted to my conscious soul.
Contrary to those claimants who inhibit love,
The beauty of your face is an adequate reason for me.
See what the pit of your chin is saying:
"A thousand Egyptian Josephs have fallen in this well."
"If some year Hafez knocks on the door, open it.
For years he has been desirous of my moon-like face.
Though veiled from my eyes apparently,
He is always in the sight of my tranquil mind."
Hafiz (1320-1389), The Divan of Hafez, Verse 29
translated from the Persian by Reza Saberi,
University Press of American, Lanham, MD, 2002, p. 36

374)

Line 29 from the Pearl Poet's Pearl: "Flower and fruit can ne'er be dead"

Blomez blayke and blwe and rede
per schyne ful schyr agayn pe sunne.
Flor and fryte may not be fede
Ther hit doun drof in moldes dunne;
For uch gresse mot grow of graynes dede—
No whete were elles to wones wonne.
Of goud uche goude is ay bygonne;

With yellow flowers and blue and red
That shine so bright in sun's clear ray.
Flower and fruit can ne'er be dead
Where that pearl slipped into the clay,
For grass will grow from seed once shed
Or grain could not be stored away,
And good will always good repay.

Pearl (c. 1370-1400) Lines 27-33
(Ed. Malcolm Andrew & Ronald Waldron, 1987, p. 55)
(This Pearl translation: by Bill Stanton, another by Vernon Eller)

375)

Line 29 from the Pearl Poet's Purity or Cleanness:

As so says, to that syght seche schal he never
That any unclannesse has on, auwhere abowte;

That is to say that the man who has any uncleanness on him,
anywhere about him, shall never come to that sight;

Cleanness (c. 1370-1400) Line 29
(Ed. Malcolm Andrew & Ronald Waldron, 1987, p. 112,
above translation by J.J. Anderson, 1996, p. 48)

376)

Line 29 from the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: "the wonders of King Arthur"

Bot of alle pat here bult, of Bretaygne kynges,
Ay watz Arthur pe hendest, as I haf herde telle.
Forpi an aunter in erde I attle to schawe,
Dat a selly in sizt summe men hit holden,
And an outtrage awenture of Arthurez wonderez.

But of all who lived here as kings of Britain
Arthur was ever the noblest, as I have heard tell
So I intend to tell of one adventure that happened
Which some have considered a marvel to behold,
One of the wonders that are told about Arthur.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375-1400) Lines 25-29
( Verse translation by W. S. Merwin, Knopf, NY, 2002, p. 5)

377)

Poem 29 of Ikkyu's Wild Ways
is titled "In Thanks for a Gift of Soy Sauce"
Untrammeled and free for thirty years
Crazy Cloud practices his own brand of Zen.
A hundred flavors spice my simple fare:
Thin gruel and twig tea are part of the True Transmission.
Ikkyu (1394-1481), Wild Ways: Zen Poems, Poem 29
(Translated by John Stevens, White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY, p. 55)

378)

Verse 29 of Songs of Kabir:
Gorakhnath asks Kabir:
"Tell me, O Kabir, when did your vocation begin?
Where did your love have its rise?"
Kabir answers:
"When He whose forms are manifold had not begun His play:
when there was no Guru, and no disciple: when the world
was not spread out: when the Supreme One was alone—
Then I became an ascetic, then, O Gorakh, my love was
drawn to Brahma. Brahma did not hold the crown on his
head; the god Vishnu was not anointed as king; the power
of Shiva was still unborn; when I was instructed in Yoga.
I became suddenly revealed in Benares,
and Ramananda illumined me; I brought with me the thirst
for the Infinite, and I have come for the meeting with Him.
In simplicity will I unite with the Simple One; my love
will surge up. O Gorakh, march thou with His music!"
Kabir (1398-1448), Songs of Kabir, Verse XXIX
(Translated by Rabindranath Tagore, Macmillan, NY, 1916, pp. 77-78)

379)

Verse 29 of Kabir's Raga Gauri:
All these stars
that I see in the sky,
which painter
painted them?

Say, pundit, what's the sky knotted to?
Only the wise can unravel that.

Sun and moon
give light;
all things are suffused
with the light of Brahma.

Kabir, say,
"Only they will know
in whose hears is Ram,
on whose tongues is Ram."
Kabir (1398-1448), Raga Gauri,
Songs of Kabir from the Adi Granth, Verse 29 (pp. 57-58)
(Translated by Nirmal Dass, State University of NY Press, Albany, 1991)

380)

Verse 29 of Kabir's Raga Asa:
You fast,
trying to appease Allah;
you kill living beings
to appease your palate.
You do not see others
as you see yourself—
so what
are you raving about?

Hey, qazi, the Master is one:
He is yours—
and He is inside you.
Though you ponder and think,
you do not see Him.
Beguiled by religion,
you do not think:
Your life has gone to waste.

Your holy books say
that Allah is true,
without whom
no man or woman can live.
O fool, reading is useless
if you fail
to understand
with your heart.

Allah is hidden
in each body—
think about it.
He is the same
both in Hindus and Turks:
This is what Kabir
is shouting out
so loudly.
Kabir (1398-1448), Raga Gauri,
Songs of Kabir from the Adi Granth, Verse 29 (p. 145)
(Translated by Nirmal Dass, State University of NY Press, Albany, 1991)

381)

Sloka 29 of Kabir's Slokas of Kabir:
Kabir,
the whole world will die—
but no one knows why.
Die in such a way
that you may not
have to die again.
Kabir (c. 1398-1518)
Songs of Kabir from the Adi Granth (translated by Nirmal Dass)
State University of New York Press, Albany, 1991, p. 263

382)

Chapter 29 of Wu Ch'eng-en's The Journey to the West:
Free of his peril, River Float arrives at the kingdom;
Receiving favor, Pa-chieh invades the forest.
The poem says:
Vain thoughts cannot be destroyed by force.
Why must you seek or hope for Suchness?
Cultivate before Buddha the self-existent mind—
Are not illusion and enlightenment the same?

Enlightened, you reach the Right in an instant;
Deluded, you sink into ten thousand kalpas.
If you can cultivate one thought joined with Truth,
Sins vast as Ganges' sand are stamped out.
At night they sought a place to rest; when the cock crowed they looked at the sky.
Stage by stage, they soon traveled some 299 miles. When they raised their heads one day,
they saw a beautiful city. It was the Precious Image Kingdom, a marvelous place indeed!
How boundless the clouds!
How vast the journey!
Though the land is beyond a thousand miles,
Its condition is no less prosperous.
Auspicious mist and smoke surround it;
Bright moon and clear wind befriend it.
Green, towering distant mountains
Spread out like a painted scroll;
The flowing stream, surging and bubbling,
Throws up pieces of white jade.
[Tripitaka Monkey brings the King a letter from the third princess Hundred Flowers
that she was kidnapped 13 years ago by Yellow Robe Fiend who forced her as his wife.]
Wu Ch'eng-en (1500-1582),
The Journey to the West or Hsi-yu chi (1518), Volume 2, Chapter 29
(translated by Anthony C. Yu, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 48, 51)

383)

There are 52 chapters in Part I of Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Chapter 29 is titled "Which Treats of the Droll Device and Method Adopted to
Extricate our Love-Stricken Knight from the Severe Penance he had Imposed upon himself":
At this moment they heard a shout, and recognised it as coming
from Sancho Panza, who, not finding them where he had left them, was
calling aloud to them. They went to meet him, and in answer to their
inquiries about Don Quixote, be told them how he had found him
stripped to his shirt, lank, yellow, half dead with hunger, and
sighing for his lady Dulcinea; and although he had told him that
she commanded him to quit that place and come to El Toboso, where
she was expecting him, he had answered that he was determined not
to appear in the presence of her beauty until he had done deeds to
make him worthy of her favour; and if this went on, Sancho said,
he ran the risk of not becoming an emperor as in duty bound, or even
an archbishop, which was the least he could be; for which reason they
ought to consider what was to be done to get him away from there.
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616),
Don Quixote Part I, Ch. XXIX (1605)
(translated by John Ormsby)

384)

There are 74 chapters in Part II of Cervantes' Don Quixote.
Ch. 29 is titled "Of the Famous Adventure of the Enchanted Bark":
"By stages as already described or left undescribed, two days after quitting the grove
Don Quixote and Sancho reached the river Ebro, and the sight of it was a great delight
to Don Quixote as he contemplated and gazed upon the charms of its banks, the clearness
of its stream, the gentleness of its current and the abundance of its crystal waters;
and the pleasant view revived a thousand tender thoughts in his mind... Don Quixote
looked all round, and seeing nobody, at once, without more ado, dismounted from
Rocinante and bade Sancho get down from Dapple and tie both beasts securely to the
trunk of a poplar or willow that stood there. Sancho asked him the reason of this
sudden dismounting and tying. Don Quixote made answer, "Thou must know, Sancho,
that this bark is plainly, and without the possibility of any alternative, calling
and inviting me to enter it, and in it go to give aid to some knight or other person
of distinction in need of it, who is no doubt in some sore strait; for this is the way
of the books of chivalry and of the enchanters who figure and speak in them. When a
knight is involved in some difficulty from which he cannot be delivered save by the
hand of another knight, though they may be at a distance of two or three thousand
leagues or more one from the other, they either take him up on a cloud, or they
provide a bark for him to get into, and in less than the twinkling of an eye
they carry him where they will and where his help is required; and so, Sancho,
this bark is placed here for the same purpose; this is as true as that it is now
day, and ere this one passes tie Dapple and Rocinante together, and then in God's
hand be it to guide us; for I would not hold back from embarking, though barefooted
friars were to beg me."... "Try the test I told thee of, Sancho," said Don Quixote,
"and don't mind any other, for thou knowest nothing about colures, lines, parallels,
zodiacs, ecliptics, poles, solstices, equinoxes, planets, signs, bearings, the measures
of which the celestial and terrestrial spheres are composed; if thou wert acquainted
with all these things, or any portion of them, thou wouldst see clearly how many
parallels we have cut, what signs we have seen, and what constellations we have
left behind and are now leaving behind. But again I tell thee, feel and hunt,
for I am certain thou art cleaner than a sheet of smooth white paper."
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616),
Don Quixote Part II, Ch. XXIX (1615)
(translated by John Ormsby)

385)

From misfortune & despair to sweet joy
in Sonnet 29 of Shakespeare:
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnet XXIX, Commentary

386)

29 appears once in Shakespeare:
I have known thee these twenty-nine years, come peascod-time;
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Henry IV, Part 2, II.4.383
Maurice Spevack, Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare,
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1973, p. 1387

387)

Chapter 29 of Hsiao hsiao-sheng's The Golden Lotus (1617)
is titled "The Fortune-Teller":
"Sir," the Immortal said, "tell me first the eight words of moment in your
honorable life, and I will relate the future for you." Hsi-mên Ch'ing
told him the Eight Characters, saying that his animal was the Tiger, his age
twenty-nine, and the hour of his birth, noon on the twenty-eighth day
of the seventh month. The Immortal silently made some calculations upon his
fingers and said: "Sir, your horoscope would appear to show the year as Wu Yin,
the month as Hsing Yu, the day as Jên Wu and the hour as Ping Wu. Now the
twenty-third day of the seventh month is the Day of White Dew. We must
therefore reckon your fate as from the eighth month. Taking the months
in order, Hsing Yu is the controlling month, so obviously Shang Kuan is the
controlling factor in your life. As Tzu P'ing says: wealth increases and riches
multiply. You will obtain an official position... you may look forward to a
career of great dignity: you will prosper, be happy, and at peace all your life.
Your fortune will increase; you will obtain promotion, and you are destined
to leave behind you an honourable descendant. Throughout your life you will
be honest and fair dealing; when once you have made up your mind you will not
change it. In joy you will be as agreeable as the breeze in spring, and in
anger as terrible as the sudden thunder and the fierce lightning.
Hsiao Hsiao-sheng (Ming dynasty),
The Golden Lotus (Chin P'ing Mei), Vol. 2, Chapter 29
(translated by Clement Egerton, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1939, pp. 16-17)

388)

Haiku 29 of Basho's Haiku (1678):
Spring winds will make
The blossoms burst out, I hope
Into laughter!
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), Basho's Haiku, Vol. 2, Haiku 29
(translated by Toshiharu Oseko, Maruzen, Tokyo, 1996, p. 20)

389)

"That I may detect the inmost force"
in Line 29 of Goethe's Faust:

Drum hab ich mich der Magie ergeben,
Ob mir durch Geistes Kraft und Mund
Nicht manch Geheimnis würde kund;
Daß ich nicht mehr mit saurem Schweiß
Zu sagen brauche, was ich nicht weiß;
Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält,
Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,
Und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen.

Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,
And thus the bitter task forego
Of saying the things I do not know,—
That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world, and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
Faust, Scene I: Night (Faust monologue)
Verse translation by Bayard Taylor (1870), Lines 24-32
Modern Library, New York, 1950, p. 16 (German, English)

390)

Poem 29 of Goethe, the Lyrist: 100 Poems

WONNE DER WEHMUT
Trocknet nicht, trocknet nicht,
Tränen der ewigen Liebe!
Ach, nur dem halbgetrockneten Auge
Wie öde, wie tot die Welt ihm erscheint!
Trocknet nicht, trocknet nicht,
Tränen unglücklicher Liebe!

SWEETNESS OF SORROW
Never dry, never dry,
Tears if a love that is endless!
Ah, when the eye is but halfway tearless,
How dreary, how dreary the world in its sight!
Never dry, never dry,
Tears of a love that is hopeless.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), "Wonne der Wehmut"
Goethe, the Lyrist: 100 Poems, (translated by Edwin H. Zeydel, 1955, pp. 78-79)

391)

Plate 29 of William Blake's Song of Experience is the title page (1794)

The design on this title-page is conspicuously hard,
with the word EXPERIENCE set like a bar across the page.
This is accentuated by the formality of the architectural
background to the figures below— two young people,
arrived at the age of Experience, mourning beside the
bodies of the parents whose guidance they have lost.
It has been conjectured (Damon) tha the arrangement
of these figures is intended to suggest a Cross.
Between the words SONGS and EXPERIENCE are a
naked man and a clothed maiden flying toward one
another with arms outstretched in anticipation
of the pleasures of love, but between them are
ivy leaves, suggesting by their spiky shapes
the pains of sex-love and experience.
Sir Geoffrey Keynes, commentary to Blake's
Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
Orion Press, New York, 1967 (facsimile copy
of William Blake's 1789 & 1794 edition)

William Blake (1757-1827), Songs of Experience (1794),
Plate 29: Frontispiece to Songs of Experience,
copy C, 1789, 1794 (Library of Congress)
Plate 29: Title-page to Songs of Experience,
copy Z, 1826 (Library of Congress)

392)

Poem 29 of The Zen Poems of Ryokan:
I sit down and shut my eyes, as darkness dims the hills.
The thoughts of human affairs leave me, creating a void.
Unable to sustain myself, I lean against the bedclothes
And, half-awake, look into the bland void of the window.
The smoke of the incense burner has measured itself out.
Dewy as it is, I am naked, with but a thin gown upon me.
Rising from my meditation, I stroll about in the garden,
Whence I see the clear moon rise above the highest peak.
Ryokan (1758-1831), The Zen Poems of Ryokan, Poem 29
translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa,
Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 51
(Poet-Seers, Zen Poems)

393)

Haiku 29 of Issa's Haiku:
House burnt down—
fleas
dance in embers.
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827),
The Dumpling Field: Poems of Issa, Haiku 29
(translated by Lucien Stryk, Swallow Press, Athens, Ohio, 1991, p. 12)

394)

Poem 29 of Thomas Cole's Poetry:

Evening Thoughts
When Evening in the sky sits calm and pure
And all the fleecy clouds are still and bright
And earth beneath the silent air obscure
Waits for the stars that herald in the night;
All earth-born cares unholy cease to move;
Peace dwells on earth and beauty in the sky—
Then is the spirit melted as with love
And tears spring forth upon the brink of joy.
But whence the shade of sadness o'er us thrown
When thoughts are purest in that quiet hour?
From sense of sin arises that sad tone?
Knowing that we alone feel passion's power,
That touches not the mountain far and lone—
Or is it that the fading light reminds
That we are mortal and the latter day
Steals onward swiftly, like the unseen winds,
And all our years are clouds that quickly pass away.

August 23, 1835

Thomas Cole (1801-1848),
Thomas Cole's Poetry, Poem 29
(Compiled & Edited by Marshall B. Tymn,
Liberty Cap Books, York, Pennsylvania, 1972, p. 78

Thomas Cole,
Self-Portrait (1836)

395)

Sonnets from the Portuguese 29: I think of thee!
of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861):
I think of thee!#151; my thoughts do twine and bud
About thee, as wild vines, about a tree,
Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see
Except the straggling green which hides the wood.
Yet, O my palm-tree, be it understood
I will not have my thoughts instead of thee
Who art dearer, better! Rather, instantly
Renew thy presence; as a strong tree should,
Rustle thy boughs and set thy trunk all bare,
And let these bands of greenery which insphere thee
Drop heavily down,#151; burst, shattered, everywhere!
Because, in this deep joy to see and hear thee
And breathe within thy shadow a new air,
I do not think of thee— I am too near thee.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861),
Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet 29

396)

Chapter 29 of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851):
Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through
the bright Quito spring, which at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of
the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing,
redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up- flaked up, with
rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets,
nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden
helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such
seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new
spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially
when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear
ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more
they wrought on Ahab's texture. Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked
with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death...
Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.
Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick, Chapter 29: Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb

397)

Poem 29 of Emily Dickinson (1858):

If those I loved were lost
The Crier's voice would tell me—
If those I loved were found
The bells of Ghent would ring—

Did those I loved repose
The Daisy would impel me.
Philip— when bewildered
Bore his riddle in!

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Poem 29
(edited by Thomas H. Johnson, 1955, pp. 19-20)

398)

29th New Poem of Emily Dickinson:
The love of God may be taught
not to seem like bears.
Emily Dickinson (Letter 230)
New Poems of Emily Dickinson
(edited by William H. Shurr, University of North Carolin Press, 1993, p. 22)

418)

29th bather in Walt Whitman's "I Celebrate Myself" (1855):
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore;
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly:
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
"I Celebrate Myself", Section 11, Lines 1-3, 10-11

399)

"You too with joy I sing"
in Line 29 of Walt Whitman, Passage to India (1871):
You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish'd with gold!
Towers of fables immortal, fashion'd from mortal dreams!
You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest;
You too with joy I sing.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Passage to India, Section 2, Lines 26-29
A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, Vol. III, Poems, 1870-1891
(Edited by Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, William White
New York University Press, 1980, p. 564)

400)

Verse 29 in Tagore's Gitanjali:
He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon.
I am ever busy building this wall all around;
and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day
I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust
and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name;
and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), Verse 29

Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)

401)

Poem 28 in George William Russell's Voices of the Stones (1925):
is titled "Magnificence"
Cloistered amid these austere rocks,
A brooding seer, I watched an hour,
Close to the earth, lost to all else,
The marvel of a tiny flower.

To build its palace walls of jade
What myriads toiled in dark and cold:
And what gay traders fronm the sun
Brought down its sapphire and its gold!

Oh, palace of the universe!
Oh, changing halls of day and night!
Does the high Builder dream in thee
With more of wonder and delight?
A. E. (George William Russell) (1867-1935)
"Magnificence" from Voices of the Stones (1925) included in
Collected Poems by A .E., 2nd Ed., Macmillan, London (1927), p. 337

402)

Page 29 in A. E.'s Song and its Fountains:
O gate by which I entered in!
O face and hair! O lips and eyes!
Through you again the world I win,
How far away from paradise!
Why was this dream projected into the waking consciousness? It was not drawn out
by affinity with any earthly desire, for I had not then come to love in life...
we first imagine, and that later the imagination attracts its affinities, and we
live in the body what had first arisen in soul. I had the sense that that far-
travelled psyche was, in this and other waking dreams, breathing into the new body it
inhabited some wisdom born out of its myriad embodiments. In this dream I was warned
that love was a tale which already had been told, and I must not be allured by the
romance of love, and that even from the noblest beauty the wonder would die swiftly.
There came to me many oracles out of the psych with this wisdom in their music.
A. E. (George William Russell) (1867-1935)
Song and its Fountains, Macmillan, New York (1932), p. 28
(New Edition, Larson Publications, 1991)
(Poem cited: 3rd stanza of Parting, 1913)
[Note: Typesetting on page 29 is from the 1932 edition.]

403)

Page 29 lines in James Joyce's Ulysses, (Lines 1-2, 11, 18):
In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.
— What is it now? he cried continually without listening.
— What is the matter? What is it now?
(29.1-2, 11, 18)
James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses, (1st edition, 1922)
Random House, New York (New Edition, 1961), p. 29

404)

Page 29 lines in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, (12 samples):
pigeons know, weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses, (29.11)
and that'll do now about the fairyhees and the frailyshees. (29.12)
Though Eset fibble it to the zephiroth and Artsa zoom it round (29.13)
her heavens for ever. Creator he has created for his creatured (29.14)
ones a creation. White monothoid? Red theatrocrat? And all the (28.15)
came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial (29.20)
fermament one tide on another, with a bumrush in a hull of a (29.21)
wherry, the twin turbane dhow, The Bey for Dybbling, this (29.22)
archipelago's first visiting schooner, with a wicklowpattern (29.23)
James Joyce (1882-1941), Finnegans Wake, (1939)

405)

Sonnet 29 of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: Part 2

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle,
wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.
Im Gebälk der finsteren Glockenstühle
laß dich läuten. Das, was an dir zehrt,

wird ein Starkes über dieser Nahrung.
Geh in der Verwandlung aus und ein.
Was ist deine leidendste Erfahrung?
Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.

Sei in dieser Nacht aus Übermaß
Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg Deiner Sinne,
ihrer seltsamen Begegnung Sinn.

Und wenn dich das Irdische vergaß,
zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne.
Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Sonnets to Orpheus (1921), II.29 (German)
( translated by Stephen Mitchell, The Sonnets to Orpheus,
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985, pp. 128-129)
(cf. translations by Howard A. Landman and Robert Hunter)

406)

Line 29 of Rilke's Duino Elegies IX: pure, the yellow and blue:

Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange des Bergrands
nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins Tal, die Allen unsägliche, sondern
ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben und blaun
Enzian. Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus,

For the wanderer brings down from the mountainside
not a handful of earth to the valley, all indescribable,
but the word he has gained there, pure, the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we perhaps here just to say House,

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926),
Duino Elegies (1923), IX.27-30
(translated by Stephen Garmey & Jay Wilson)
Harper & Row, New York, p. 66)
(Other translations: Edward Snow; Robert Hunter)

407)

There are 33 sections in Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar:
In Section 29, the poet describes a cathedral scene:
XXIX
In the cathedral, I sat there, and read,
Alone, a lean Review and said,

"These degustations in the vaults
Oppose the past and the festival.

What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.

So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,

To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,

To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like."

The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false.
The bells are the bellowing of bulls.

Yet Franciscan don was never more
Himself than in this fertile glass.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955),
The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Section XXIX
The Palm at the End of the Mind,
Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens
(Edited by Holly Stevens), Knopf, NY, 1971, pp. 147-148

408)

There are 50 poems in Mina Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems Poem 29 is titled "Gertrude Stein":
Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
Mina Loy (1882-1966), The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems,
Edited by Roger L. Conover, Farrar Straus Giroux, NY (1996), p. 94

409)

There are 53 poems in William Carlos Williams' Sour Grapes Poem 29 is titled "The Poor":
By constantly tormenting them
with reminders of the lice in
their children's hair, the
School Physician first
brought their hatred down on him,
But by this familiarity
they grew used to him, and so,
at last,
took him for their friend and adviser.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Sour Grapes,
Four Seas Company, Boston (1921), p. 52
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams
Volume I, 1909-1939, New Directions, NY, 1986, p. 159

410)

Page 29 in William Carlos Williams' Paterson (1958)
is the first page of Book One, Section III (1946) with poem:
How strange you are, you idiot!
So you think because the rose
is red that you shall have the mastery?
The rose is green and will bloom,
overtopping you, green, livid
green when you shall no more speak, or
taste, or even be. My whole life
has hung too long upon a partial victory.

But, creature of the weather, I
don't want to go any faster than
I have to go to win.
Music it for yourself...

The melting snow
dripped from the cornice by his window
90 strokes a minute—
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Paterson (1958)
Edited by Christopher MacGowan
New Directions, NY, 1992, p. 29

411)

Chapter 29 of Ezra Pound's Cantos (selections):
Pearl, great sphere, and hollow,
Mist over lake, full of sunlight...
He said: "Ten thousand years before now...
In cool air, under sky,...
He said: "What I know, I have known,
"How can the knowing cease knowing?"...
He continued his ambulation:
"Matter is the lightest of all things,
"Light also proceeds from the eye;
"In the globe over my head
"Twenty feet in diameter, thirty feet in diameter
"There are many reflections...
Let things remain as they are...
Brookwater over brown sand,
The white hounds on the slope,
Glide of water, lights and the prore,
Silver beaks out of night,
Stone, bough over bough,
lamps fluid in water,
Pine by the black trunk of its shadow
And on hill black trunks of the shadow
The trees melted in air.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972), The Cantos (1-95),
New Directions, NY, 1956, pp. 141-146

412)

Poem 29 in H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall (1944):
Grant us strength to endure
a little longer,

now the heart's alabaster
is broken;

we would feed forever
on the amber honey-comb

of your remembered greeting,
but the old-self,

still half at-home in the world,
cries out in anger,

I am hungry, the children cry for food
and flaming stones fall on them;

our awareness leaves us defenceless;
O, for your Presence

among the fishing-nets
by the beached boats on the lake-edge;

when, in the drift of wood-smoke,
will you say again, as you said,

the baked fish is ready,
here is the bread?
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)
Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall, Oxford University Press (1944), Poem 29
Carcabet Press, Cheshire, UK (1973), Foreword by Norman Holmes Pearson, p. 39

413)

Sonnet 29 in Edna St. Vincent Millay's Fatal Interview (1931)

Heart, have no pity on this house of bone;
Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.
No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own;
To give, to sell at auction, to destroy.
When you are blind to moonlight on the bed,
When you are deaf to gravel on the pane,
Shall quavering caution from this house instead
Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane?
All that delightful youth forbears to spend
Molestful age inherits, and the ground
will have us; therefor while we're young, my friend—
The Latin's vulgar, but the advice is sound.
Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here
For age to invest in compromise and fear
Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Harper & Brothers, NY, 1941, p. 98

Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892-1950)

414)

Poem 29 in e.e. cummings' 50 Poems (1940):

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
Poem 29, 22 and 50 Poems
Liveright, NY, 2001, p. 70-71

415)

Poem 29 in e.e. cummings' Xaipe (1950)

nine birds (rising through a gold moment) climb: ing i -nto wintry twi- light (all together a manying one -ness) nine souls only alive with a single mys- tery (liftingly caught upon falling) silent! ly living the dying of glory	e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
Poem 29, Xaipe Liveright, NY, 1979, p. 29

416)

Rafael Alberti's Poem 29 of Between the Carnation and the Sword:

You will gore on, now more than ever,
parting the fields of your forehead in two,
and sprinkling valleys and hillsides,
you will rise anew green bull.

Villages
will lose their footpaths to see you.

The shoulders of rivers will spring up,
and the cold swords of fountains
will draw dead hands from the ground,
bowers of joy and laurels.

Livestock
will lose their herdsmen to see you.

They will sing to you under your two seas,
and wheatfields will be bridges
you leap over, a new bull free,
your own master and master of everything forever.

Roads
will lose their cities to see you.

Mind is not exiled
Ovid
Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), Poem 29 of Entre El Clavel Y La Espada
Between the Carnation and the Sword included in
The Other Shore: 100 Poems, (edited by Kosrof Chantikian,
translated by José A. Elgorriaga & Martin Paul, 1981, p. 185)

417)

There are 30 poems in Charles Reznikoff's Poems (1920)
Poem 29
Still much to read, but too late.
I turn out the light.

The leaves of the tree are green beside the street-lamp;
the wind hardly blows and the trees makes no noise.

Tomorrow up early,
the crowded street-car, the factory.
Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976),
Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff,
Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1989, p. 36

418)

There are 53 poems in Charles Reznikoff's Inscriptions: 1944-1956 (1959)
Poem 29
Now on our way through the park one meets
birds not unlike the sparrows of our streets
but smaller and colored a softer grey—
without the sparrow's brownish hue
and with a tinge of green, a hint of white:
a soothsayer might read a message in their flight
and I can spell a good omen too.
Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976),
Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff,
Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1989, p. 78

419)

Sonnet 29 in Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets (1960)

You come from poverty, from the houses of the South,
from the rugged landscape of cold and earthquake
that�offered us— after those gods�had tumbled
to thier deaths— the lesson of life, shape clay.

You are a little horse of black clay, a kiss
of dark mud, my love, a clay poppy,
dove of the twilight that flew along the road,
piggy�bank of tears from our poor childhood.

Little one, you've kept the heart of poverty in you,
your feet used to sharp rocks,
your mouth that didn't always have bread, or sweets.

You come from the �poor South, where my soul began;
in �that high sky your mother is still washing clothes
with my mother. That's why I choose you, compañera.

Pablo Neruda
(1904-1973)

Love Sonnet XXIX, 100 Love Sonnets: Cien Sonetos de Amor
Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1960 (trans. Stephen Tapscott, 1986, p. 63)

420)

Poem 29 in Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions (1974)
What is the distance in round meters
between the sun and the oranges?

Who wakes up the sun when it falls asleep
on its burning bed?

Does the earth sing like a cricket
in the music of the heavens?

Is it true that sadness is thick
and melancholy thin?

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
The Book of Questions, LIV
(translated by William O'Daly)
Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 1991, p. 29

421)

Poem 29 in Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers (1978) is
"29 Pachysandra":
Naked spike chocolaty men white
lances girl sewing-awl down stem
flowers join over evergreen saw-edge
upsurge pack in sandy rows
cover ground sun shade the
term it all is box-leaf
winterer white blossom East spurge
when spring beauty goes quicked
Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978)
80 Flowers, "29 Pachysandra"
The Stinehour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, 1978
[Stanford: PS3549.U47.E36.1978F "facsimile pirated copy"]

422)

Poem 29 in Louis Zukofsky's "29 Poems" (1933):
N.Y.
"At heaven's gate" the larks: have
Read to date the nth reversion, "re" Marx

Of the mind's image a hangar
A red crane— on the nearby wharves

In the spring-blue day— not working
But not out of languor

January the 29 , the 29th birthday
Falling on a Sunday

As planned there should be to-day
29 songs written over two years

And with, but without expected, pay

I have written down twenty-three
Leaving 5 and another page blank

To record a January without snow
For the delectation of the file and rank.

Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978)
"N.Y." in "29 Poems" from 55 Poems (1923-1935)
Complete Short Poetry
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991, pp. 64-65

423)

Section 29 of Kenneth Rexroth's
"The Love Poems of Marichiko" from The Morning Star (1979):
XXIX
Love me. At this moment we
Are the happiest
People in the world.
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)
The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
Edited by Sam Hamill & Bradford Morrow
Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2003, p. 723

424)

Rhyme 29 of Henri Parisot's 73 Counting Rhymes and Songs:

Hark, hark,
The dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town;
Some in rags,
And some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.

Ouah! ouah!
Les chiens aboient;
Les mendiants sont arrivés au bourg.
En guenilles les uns, les autres en suroît,
Et leurs bonnes amies en robes de velours.

Henri Parisot (1908-1979),
73 Comptines et Chansons (1978), Rhyme 29
Aubier Montaigne, 1978, p. 66)

425)

Poem 29 in George Oppen's This in Which:
THE OCCURRENCES

The simplest
Words say the grass blade
Hides the blaze
Of a sun
To throw a shadow
In which the bugs crawl
At the roots of the grass;

Father, father
Of fatherhood
Who haunts me, shivering
Man most naked
Of us all, O father

watch
At the roots
Of the grass the creating
Now that tremendous
plunge

George Oppen (1908-1984),
This In Which (1965), Poem 29
New Directions, NY, 1965, p. 68
Review of Oppen's New Collected Poems

426)

There are 38 poems in Kathleen Raine's Selected Poems (1952):
Poem 29 is titled "Self":

SELF

Who am I, who
Speaks from the dust,
Who looks from the clay?

Who hears
For the mute stone,
For fragile water feels
With finger and bone?

Who for the forest breathes the evening,
Sees for the rose,
Who knows
What the bird sings?

Who am I, who for the sun fears
The demon dark,
In order holds
Atom and chaos?

Who out of nothingness has gazed
On the beloved face?

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), "Self" (from The Pythoness, 1949)
Selected Poems, The Weekend Press, New York, 1952, p. 15

427)

There are 130 numbered short poems in Kathleen Raine's On a Deserted Shore (1973):
Poem 29:
Unseen fingers cool as hyacinth-roots
dislimn the clay
Or soul's long-loved discarded mortal face:
She of graves,
Whose secret alchemy
Brings all our ends to her immaculate source.
Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), On a Deserted Shore,
Dolmen Press & Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973

428)

Poem 29 in Kathleen Raine's The Presence:
The Western Path
Bright
Path over all waters,
Dazzling arrows, shards, sheets of brilliance
'More brilliant than a thousand suns'
From the first fiat reflected
From mirror to mirror
that light.
Kathleen Raine (1908-2003),
The Presence (Poems 1984-87), Poem 28
Golgonooza Press, Ipswich, UK, 2000, p. 45
New York Times Obituary, July 10, 2003

429)

Poem 29 in Thomas Merton's Thirty Poems (1944)
is titled "The Holy Child's Song", Stanzas 1 & 2
When midnight occupied the porches of the Poet's reason
Sweeter than any bird
He heard the Holy Child.

"When My kind Father, kinder than the sun,
With looks and smiles bends down
And utters My bodily life,
My flesh, obeying, praises Heaven like a smiling cloud.
Then I become the laughter of the watercourses.
I am the gay wheatfields, the serious hills:
I fill the sky with words of light, and My incarnate songs
Fly in and out the branches of My childish voice
Like thrushes in a tree."
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
New Directions, NY, 1977, pp. 55-56

430)

Poem 29 of The Crane's Bill:
The great poisoned drum
Quakes earth, heaven.
Turn back, look—
Dead bodies miles around.
— Myotan (1176-1247)
Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane's Bill
(translated by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto, Anchor Books, NY, 1973, p. 16)

431)

Poem 29 in May Sarton's Coming Into Eighty: New Poems (1994)
is titled "OBIT":
Next door
He played Bach
On the harpsichord.
I listened
And wrote poems.
Fellow lodgers,
We hardly
Exchanged a word.

The obit has brought me
An acute sense of loss,
Free fall
Down a nowhere shaft,
As when he told me
He was engaged
To someone else.
In Bloomsbury
Fifty-five years
Ago.
May Sarton (1912-1995)
Coming Into Eighty: New Poems
W. W. Norton, New York (1994), p. 59

432)

Poem 29 in Muriel Rukeyser's 29 Poems (1972) is titled "This Morning":
Waking this morning,
a violent woman in the violent day
laughing.
Past the line of memory
along the long body of your life
in which move childhood, youth, your lifetime of touch,
eyes, lips, chest, belly, sex, legs, to the waves of the sheet.
I look past the little plant
on the city windowsill
to the tall towers bookshaped, crushed together in greed,
the river flashing flowing corroded,
the intricate harbor and the sea, the wars, the moon the planets
all who people space
in the sun visible invisible.
African violets in the light
breathing, in a breathing universe. I want strong peace, and delight,
the wild good.
I want to make my touch poems:
to find my morning, to find you entire
alive moving among the anti-touch people.

I say across the waves of the air to you:
today once more
I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day.
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)
29 Poems, "This Morning",
Rapp & Whiting Ltd., London (1972), p. 46

433)

Poem 29 of Robert Lax's A Thing That Is (1997)
is titled "BYZANTINE FACES"

i won't believe i'm really alive until i'm gladder to be alive here now than to have been alive there then living in greece i may be thinking i am, was, alive there then some byzantine time some classical time why think that good? i should know better	i think good any time except the eighteenth century (not too bad) the nineteenth century (bad enough) or the twentieth really, i'm glad to be alive in the twentieth not only glad to be just alive but even to be alive just now right now	yes, but i keep remembering a light in the eyes of certain figures in frescoes certain figures in mosaics that made me wish i was living then as though living then were to live forever some life some liveliness in the eye that seemed eternal	eternally alive eternally infinitely joyous & penetrating (warm with the warmth of life exploding, even, with the joy of life) yet there forever	is it that see ing them in some mu se um seeing them still preserved still living made me envy their state ? not sure	am not sure either, that it was envy they gave me, but rather a life a spark of living to keep alive Robert Lax (1915-2000)
Robert Lax (1915-2000), A Thing That Is, Poem 29 (edited by Paul J. Spaeth, Overlook Press, NY, 1997, pp.52-54)

434)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's What is Poetry? (2000) contains 64 images of poetry.
Image 29:
It is a bare lightbulb
in a homeless hotel
illuminating a nakedness
of minds and hearts
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. March 24, 1919),
What Is Poetry?
Creative Arts Book Co., Berkeley, CA, 2000, p. 29

435)

Chapter 29 in Jack Kerouac's
Desolation Angels (1965):
That rainy afternoon, according to a promise I made myself owing to the memory
of a wonderful Chinese rice dish Jarry'd cooked up for us in the Mill Valley shack
in April, I make a crazy Chinese sweet and sour sauce on the hot stove, compounded
of turnip greens, sauerkraut, honey, molasses, red wine viegar, pickled beet juice,
sauce concentrate (very dark and bitter) and as it boils on the stove and the little
rice pot makes the lid dance I pace in the yard and say "Chinee dinner alway velly good!"
and remember in a rush my father and Chin Lee in Lowell, I see the redbrick wall outside
the windows of the booths of the restaurant, scent rain, rain of redbrick and Chinese
dinners unto San Francisco across the lonesome rains of the plains and mountains,...
and I see generations of rain, generations of white rice, generations of redbrick walls
with the old-fashioned red neon flashing on it like warm compost of brick-dust fire,
ah the sweet indescribable verdurous paradise of pale cockatoos and yocking mongrels
and old Zen Nuts with staffs, and flamingos of Cathay, that you see on their marvelous
Ming Vases and those of other duller dynasties— Rice, steaming, the smell of it
so rich and woody, the look of it as pure as driven lakevalley clouds on a day like
this one of the Chinee dinner when wind pusheth them rilling and milkying over
stands of young fir, toward raw wet rock— Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Desolation Angel: A Novel, Coward-McCann, NY, 1965, Ch. 29, p. 41

436)

There are 33 poems in John Logan's The Zig Zag Walk (1969)
Poem 29 is titled "Lines for Michael in the Picture" (Stanzas 1 &7):

There is a sense in which darkness
has more of God than light has.
He dwells in the thick dark.
— F. W. Robertson

I You are my shadow in the picture.
Once I thought you were my brother,
but to be honest, he and I were never friends.
(Even our boyhood secrets never brought us closer.)
Odd the way you stand behind and to the side,
like a shade. Still it is your own
darknesses you stay in.
You generate shadow like a light
or like an odor
falling from your arrogant shoulder,
eddying into your eyes.
The great eyes almost seem to glaze.
Look! They seem to tip!
Your eyes are alive with the gestures of death.
You've got something of mine shut in there, Michael.
I must enlarge the picture
and let it out
of your ancient, melancholy face.
My shadow yearns for peace.

VII
It was the last ember
of that transforming island fire
that seems to fade in your eyes in the picture.
It makes you brother, friend, son, father.
If it isn't death, it is change,
and in that fine shadow flame
what was locked is yours, Michael, as much as mine.

Seattle, May 1965

John Logan (1923-1987),
The Zig Zag Walk
E.P. Dutton, NY, 1969, pp. 102-106

437)

There are 95 short poems in Kenneth Koch's "On Aesthetics"
Poem 29 is titled "Aesthetics of Greek Night":
In the Greek night
The statues
Of Athena and of Apollo
Are no longer white
But painted
In many colors
As they used to be
Two thousand years ago.
Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), "On Aesthetics"
from One Train: Poems, Random House, NY, 1994, p. 60
Interview by Anne Waldman; Interview by David Kennedy; NY Times Obituary (7-7-2002)

438)

Allen Ginsberg's HOWL (1956) contains 112 lines.
Line 1:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
Line 29:
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire-
place Chicago,
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),
Howl and Other Poems
City Lights Books, 1956, p. 12

439)

There are 48 poems in Allen Ginsberg's White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 (1986).
Poem 29 is titled "Empire Air":
EMPIRE AIR

Flying to Rochester Institute of Technology

Rising above the used car lots & colored dumps of Long Island
stubby white smokestreams drift North above th' Egyptic Factory
roof'd monolith
into gray clouds, Conquer the world!
World Health restored with organic orange juice & Tibetan mule-dung-
smelling Pills— Conquer the World Conquer the World
Conquer the World of Ego, Conquer World Anger
Conquer brick Worlds, Mortal Factories!
Conquer the Dewdrop? Conquer white clouded Sky we pass through?—
O ever-rising intelligent Sun conquer the night of Mind
Conquer War O Technologic Warrior
I ride above the Sun
I look down into the Sun
I'm equal to Sun, Sun & I on the level...
Conquer yourself! Conquer your gluttony Ginsberg! Conquer lust for
Conquest!
Conquer Conquest at last!...
Conquer by Calm!...
Conquer all space by giving it away!
Conquer the Universe by inhabiting it!
Conquer by Dying! By eating decently!...
Pronounce your mother American language marvelously, mouth every
syllable, savor every vowel, appreciate each consonant!
above the clouds! Conquer Karma, the chain of Cause and Effect
Conquer Cause & Effect, see it wouk the Cold War!
See it work in your heart!...
Conquer the President by not insulting him!
Don't insult yourself! stop insulting the Russians! stop insulting the enemy!
It costs $220800000000 a year to insult the enemy!
Conquer Undeveloped Nation Hunger Debt! Conquer World Grief
Bank default! Go Conquer mortal Nuclear Waste!
Then go back Conquer your own heart!
January 30, 1984
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),
White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985, "Empire Air"
Harper& Row, New York, 1986, pp. 51-52

440)

There are 102 poems in Denise Levertov's
Sands of the Well (1996).
Poem 29 is titled "Alchemy":
Deep night, deep woods,
valley far below the steep
thigh of the hill, the sky too
a hazy darkness— yet the moon,
small and high, discovers
a wide stretch of river
to be its mirror, steel
brighter than its own
fogmuffled radiance.
Denise Levertov (1926-1997),
Sands of the Well,
New Directions, New York, 1996, p. 34)

441)

There are 32 poems in Robert Creeley's Gnomic Verses
Poem 29:
ECHOES

Think of the
Dance you could do
One legged man
Two-legged woman.
Robert Creeley (1926-2005),
Gnomic Verses, Zasterle Press, La Laguna, 1991, p. 35

442)

There are 29 poems in Günter Grass's Selected Poems<
Poem 29 is titled "SATURN" (1st, 5th, & 6th stanzas):
In this big house—
from the rats
who know about the drains,
to the pigeons
who know nothing—
I live and suppose much.

I lay horizontal,
smoked the cigarette,
and in the darkness was certain
that someone held out his open hand
when I knocked the ashes
from my cigarette.

At night Saturn comes
and holds out his hand.
With my ashes, he
cleans his teeth, Saturn.
We shall climb
into his jaws.
Günter Grass (born 1927),
Selected Poems (tr. Michael Hamburger & Christopher Middleton),
Secker & Warburg, London, 1966, pp. 60-63

443)

There are 32 poems in Galway Kinnell's Mortal Acts, Mortal Words
Poem 29 is titled "Pont Neuf at Nightfall":
Just now a sprinkling
of rain begins. It brings with it
an impression of more lasting existence—
brings it by removal, by the swiftness
of each drop's drying from the stone. (Soon the stone will be completely wet.
When our stone became wet, that was
when desolation came into the world.)
We can't grasp our debt
to the old masters who heaped up
these stones into palaces,
arches, spires, into a grace
that is beyond us, being behind us.
But we pay them some envy, we imagine
a memory filled almost completely
with what is, without room
for longing backward; and pay them
some sadness, sadness which
comes back and tries to restore us,
being the knowledge that happiness
is not here but
that it exists, even if out of reach forever.
A girl walks by, a presence
in someone's memory, and she is
smiling, clasping flowers
and trailing their odor and the memory
of her smile into the brief past
which follows closely behind.
A light comes on very dim in a hotel
window. Possibly it is a last portion
of what was once
the light of the world. In a tiny room
overlooking a bridge and a dark river, that would be
where it could come on: a dim
past-light
hovers over a narrow bed
where a girl and a boy give themselves
into time, and memory, which affirms time,
lights their moment
all the way to the end of memory.
Galway Kinnell (born September 30, 1927),
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1980, pp. 59-62

444)

There are 63 poems in W. S. Merwin's The Lice (1967)
Poem 29 is titled "DECEMBER NIGHT":
The cold slope is standing in darkness
But the south of the trees is dry to the touch

The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers
I came to watch these
White plants older at night
The oldest
Come first to the ruins

And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon
The water flows through its
Own fingers without end

Tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men
W. S. Merwin (born September 30, 1927),
The Lice, Atheneum, NY, 1967, p. 43

445)

29 poems in Adrienne Rich's "Contradictions: Tracking Poems"
are numbered #1-29 in Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
Poem 29
You who think I find words for everything
this is enough for now
cut it short cut loose from my words

You for whom I write this
in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage
sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones
when the insect of detritus crawls
from shoulder to elbow to wristbone
remember: the body's pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur
Adrienne Rich (born 1929), Poem 29 of "Contradictions"
Your Native Land, Your Life, Norton, NY, 1986, p. 111

446)

Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (1974) contains 63 poems.
Poem 29 is "Up Branches of Duck River":
UP BRANCHES OF DUCK RIVER

Shaka valley— chickens thousands
murmur in sheet walls
past plaster house of welder-sculptor
shakuhachi pond,
dead grass golf-course bulldozed on the hill
pine Dragon Benten
ridgetop— far off Kyoto on the flat,
turn in to deeper hills toward himuru, "Ice house"—

Low pass, a snow patch still up here,
they once stored ice for summer,
old women stoking bath fire
white plum bloom

Old man burning brush, a wood sheath for the saw

Over the edge & down to Kamo River
white hills— Mt. Hier, Hira— cut clean
reseed patchwork, orchard fir

Muddy slipping trail
wobbly twin pole bridges
gully throat
forks in
somebody clearing brush & growing tea
& out, turn here for home
along the Kamo River.

hold it close
give it all away.

Gary Snyder (b. May 8, 1930), Turtle Island
New Directions, New York, 1974, p. 43

447)

Poem 29 of Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras:

TOH! NAH OOH! — EHH! GRAHHR-ROOH!
KAHR MEEST ROOOHR, BYE THA MEE NORR
OOH WEET MEE TEV VOOON NAHHR.
By thy boolt me thah heer mee bye thoon grahn
heer nohth bwah heer nothak beenoor bythe nekk.
Heer gahroor neth grahooor thoon bleth bye neth
oooooh noh toor thee ah oon
write by my breth on a silver scrool
and cast it into thyne grahoor grahahr por mahh
thy doon stahr zaybooth mak-lee nohr.
NOH! NOH! NOH! HOOOOR!
Ooblesh my. Bahhr tha groooh?
HEEEEER!
SHARRAH! SHREEEIIEE! SRAHHH!

Michael McClure (born Oct. 20, 1932),
Ghost Tantras, City Lights Books, 1967, p. 36)

448)

There are 37 poems & essays in Mary Oliver's Blue Iris (2004):
Poem 29 is titled "Upstream" (Sections 5, 11, 13, 14)

I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples,
sometimes along the shore. May company were violets, Dutchman's breeches,
spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could
feel the upward push of the delicate hairs upon their bodies. My parents
were downstream, not far away, then farther away because I was walking the
wrong way, upstream instead of downstream. Finally I was advertised on the
hot-line of help, and yet there I was, slopping along happily in the stream's
coolness. So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us
all be lost always. The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats;
pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and
opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission
to step ahead touched my ankles. The sense of going towrd the source.
I do not think that I ever, in fact, retuned home.

* * *

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don't write books, neither
do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way,
what they are. That they don't know they are alive— that they don't feel,
that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility
is the prize of the leaf-world Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

* * *

Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do.
Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafra
and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbrusts,
the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones— inkberry, lamb's-quarters,
blueberries. And the aromatic ones— rosemary, oregaon. Give them peppermint
to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods
and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them
in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space
they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

* * *

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Mary Oliver (born 1935), Blue Iris, "Upstream"
Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2004, pp. 52-56

449)

There are 46 poems in Lucille Clifton's The Book of Light (1993)
Poem 29 is titled "begin here"
in the dark
where the girl is
sleeping
begin with a shadow
rising on the wall
no
begin with a spear
of salt like a tongue
no
begin with a swollen
horn or finger
no
no begin here
something in the girl
is wakening some
thing in the girl
is falling
deeper and deeper
asleep
Lucille Clifton (born 1936),
The Book of Light, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 1993, p. 43)

450)

There are 70 poems in Charles Simic's A Wedding in Hell (1994)
Poem 29 is titled "Explaining a Few Things":
Every worm is a martyr,
Every sparrow subject to injustice,
I said to my cat,
Since there was no one else around.

It's raining. In spite of their huge armies
What can the ants do?
And the roach on the wall
Like a waiter in an empty restaurant?

I'm going in the cellar
To stroke the rat caught in a trap.
You watch the sky.
If it clears, scatch on the door.
Charles Simic (born May 9, 1938),
A Wedding in Hell, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY, 1994, p. 34)

451)

There are 60 poems in Joyce Carol Oates'
Invisible Woman: New & Selected Poems 1970-1982
Poem 29 is titled "Footprints":
A clownish stubling in the snow last night,
footprints bold outside our windows,
circling the house as we slept....

Who wanted entry into our lives, who pressed
against our darkened windows,
who stood invisible at the edge of our dreaming...?
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938),
Invisible Woman: New & Selected Poems 1970-1982, Ontario Review Press, Princeton, NJ, p. 40)

452)

There are 70 poems in Joyce Carol Oates' The Time Traveler: Poems (1989)
Poem 29 is titled "Winter Threnody":
After twenty hours the snowfall stopped
without our noticing.
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938),
The Time Traveler: Poems, E.P. Dutton, NY, 1989, p. 60)

453)

There are 54 poems in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris (1992).
Poem 29 is titled "The Doorway":
I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past—

not midsummer, the intoxicant,
but late spring, the grass not yet
high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips
beginning to open—

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others,
the ones who go first,
a tense cluster of limbs, alert to
the failures of others, the public falterings

with a child's fierce confidence of imminent power
preparing to defeat
these weaknesses, to succumb
to nothing, the time directly

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery

before the appearance of the gift,
before possession.
Louise Glück (born 1943),
The Wild Iris, "The Doorway"
Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ, 1992, p. 33)

454)

There are 46 poems in Louise Glück's Meadowlands (1997).
Poem 29 is titled "Odysseus' Decision":
The great man turns his back on the island.
Now he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time

begins now, in which he hears again
that pulse which is the narrative
sea, at dawn when its pull is strongest.
What has brought us here
will lead us away; our ship
sways in the tinted harbor water.

Now the spell is ended.
Give him back his life,
sea that can only move forward.

Louise Glück (born 1943),
Meadowlands, "Odysseus' Decision"
Ecco Press, Hopewell, NJ, 1997, p. 42)

455)

There are 69 poems in Stephen Mitchell's Parables and Portraits (1992).
Poem 29 is titled "The Baal Shem Tov":
She used to show her guests an anchor, an hourglass, a key.
That was in the days when symbols lived in an extended family
and were racially homogeneous.
Now you must enter her house blindfolded. There is no
furniture. No conversation. Oh, she will bring you a cup of water
now and then, or a bowl of porridge, but always without a word.
If you are tempted to leave, remember the reports
of those who have been here before you. How each one suddenly felt,
after years or decades, the blindfold taken off by the softest of
invisible hands, saw the bread and wine appear, and the candles in
their crystal holders. And how, after the solitary meal, he was
guided up the winding stairs to her bedroom. How the door opened
by itself, and her soft, fragrant voice said, "Come in." Stephen Mitchell (born 1943),
Parables and Portraits, Harper & Row, NY, p. 37)

456)

Poem 29 in Norman Fischer's Success (2000) is about rain.
Sunday, 27 May
Rain all day today unseasonable
Fate to know doom's a real possibility
But not anything that could actually happen
As anything actually happens
People I used to know not here now
Always the possibility they could appear
In my ear
Pouring rain all day, lovely
all soaked and running everywhere
In the movie
You forget about everything
In the dark for a minute
Trying to get out of
What you cannot get out of
Except just now in the movie
It would be possible not to accept the arrangements
To make a career out of that
People with complicated jobs
Want to do them so later they can do what they
Really want to do
Because later they don't want to
In the way they imagined they would beforehand
Not realizing that among all the things that change
Is them
Has to do with diet
Why it rains when it's not supposed to
It never rains in California in May

Norman Fischer (born 1946),
Success, Singing Horse Press, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 36
Norman Fischer: "Practioners of Reality: Symposium on Poetry & Buddhism"

457)

There are 43 poems in Heather McHugh's A World of Difference (1981).
Poem 29 is titled "Damage":
Evergreens are churning
black as wind. The trouble
goes deep, the doctor has a drill
of light for your eye. You burn
in the dark and you weep splinters.

Eye of the storm, you cannot fill
this hole. It wants the world,
a negative of a satellite or likeness
in a lake. You moon. You pine.
You don't see why.

Always far away, someone
who could have loved you
is awake, casually watching
night begin to fall
or day begin to break.
Heather McHugh (born 1948),
A World of Difference, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1981, p. 38

29 in Numerology

458)

Numerology: words whose letters add up to 29

ANDREW: 1 + 5 + 4 + 9 + 5 + 5 = 29

BETA-TURN: (2 + 5 + 2 + 1) + (2 + 3 + 9 + 5) = 10 + 19 = 29

BO TREE: (2 + 6) + (2 + 9 + 5 + 5) = 8 + 21 = 29

CENTER: 3 + 5 + 5 + 2 + 5 + 9 = 29

CHANGE: 3 + 8 + 1 + 5 + 7 + 5 = 29

ELEMENT: 5 + 3 + 5 + 4 + 5 + 5 + 2 = 29

ETHER: 5 + 2 + 8 + 5 + 9 = 29

FENNEL: 6 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 3 = 29

FIRE: 6 + 9 + 9 + 5 = 29

FOREST: 6 + 6 + 9 + 5 + 1 + 2 = 29

FRANCE: 6 + 9 + 1 + 5 + 3 + 5 = 29

FRUIT: 6 + 9 + 3 + 9 + 2 = 29

GRAIL: 7 + 9 + 1 + 9 + 3 = 29

GRAPE: 7 + 9 + 1 + 7 + 5 = 29

HORSE: 8 + 6 + 9 + 1 + 5 = 29

IRON: 9 + 9 + 6 + 5 = 29

LIGHT: 3 + 9 + 7 + 8 + 2 = 29

LONDON: 3 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 6 + 5 = 29

MEDICAL: 4 + 5 + 4 + 9 + 3 + 1 + 3 = 29

MITRE: 4 + 9 + 2 + 9 + 5 = 29

MONKEY: 4 + 6 + 5 + 2 + 5 + 7 = 29

PANSIES: 7 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 5 + 1 = 29

POINT: 7 + 6 + 9 + 5 + 2 = 29

RUBIES: 9 + 3 + 2 + 9 + 5 + 1 = 29

SIREN: 1 + 9 + 9 + 5 + 5 = 29

THREAD: 2 + 8 + 9 + 5 + 1 + 4 = 29

THREE: 2 + 8 + 9 + 5 + 5 = 29

TRISTAN: 2 + 9 + 9 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 5 = 29

VIENNA: 4 + 9 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 1 = 29

VIOLET: 4 + 9 + 6 + 3 + 5 + 2 = 29

WHITE: 5 + 8 + 9 + 2 + 5 = 29

WISDOM: 5 + 9 + 1 + 4 + 6 + 4 = 29

YELLOW: 7 + 5 + 3 + 3 + 6 + 5 = 29

KOAN KEYS: (2 + 6 + 1 + 5) + (2 + 5 + 7 +1) = 14 + 15 = 29

SUN STONES: (1 + 3 + 5) + (1 + 2 + 6 + 5 + 5 + 1) = 9 + 20 = 29

STAR BOOK: (1 + 2 + 1 + 9) + (2 + 6 + 6 + 2) = 13 + 16 = 29

TUNE SCALES: (2 + 3 + 5 + 5) + (1 + 3 + 1 + 3 + 5 + 1) = 15 + 14 = 29

On the Number 29: Section 1— Mathematics, Science, Arts

"On the Number 29" is dedicated to my niece Elisa on her 29th birthday.
Elisa's great love of numbers, literature, and science, inspired this work.