finding Ryōkan Taigu

23 Jan, 2026

[ Being: a meditation at Vigil — the liminal interregnum between Sleeps 1 and 2 — in 5 compound sentences. ]

It was through a combination of the dulcet baritone or contralto of a Buddhist abbess in Australia named Samaneri Jayasāra and the words of a revered 18th century Japanese zen monk as she reads them, in English translation, accompanied by the ethereal sounds of koto or shakuhachi and subtle synth drones in the artfully composed sonic landscapes of a 21st century YouTube video that I discovered Ryōkan.

To flog the obvious, it's nothing short of a miracle to be living in an era in which technological affordances are available to all and sundry (including peripatetic soi-disant bhikkșus of a certain Lower Russian Hill provenance in the peninsular city of San Francisco) that allow the finding of lives distant in spacetime that somehow he vibrates with, through their words, the stories of how, where, and why they lived.

one lives in one's own three-mat hut, a humble tiny studio of the simplest of creature comfort not more than a roof overhead and walls surrounding, the view of an alley outside clattering at dawn with the sound of human collectors collecting the bins for trash and recycleds and, later, the early morning light peeking from a glimpse of sky above the 7-story neighbor looming outside and over the apartment's 3 humbler floors... all of which is "experienced by self-awareness, discerning pristine cognition" (::chuckle::).

That all this is mediated by screens of phosphor glass and serried ranks of square keys on keyboards stamped with the letters, numbers and symbols of an alphabet familiar to one since early childhood of about 2, or 3, when the reality of 'words' arrived in the toddler's brain as an open secret of how to flow through the world, is not made all the less miraculous or fantastic, in fact is made even more so, the reification of mind by technology now a normative mode.

Because the words that emerge from pressing combinations of said keys conform to what is known as language, emerging as communication between minds organic and synthetic, the electrified letters having become something understood as 'tokens' in the meantime, parsed and confirmed via the unspeakably arcane mathematics of stochasticity into what has become the spirit of a beloved Zen sage, long dead, yet paradoxically still alive... still teaching, breathing; in me, being.

[ Found him at the SFPL Main this evening, via sensei Kazuaki Tanahashi's slim volume of interpretation and magic... ]