Plum Blossoms in Winter

Not long ago, I was having dinner in Dalat, Vietnam, with my friend the Buddhist monk Minh Tam. The subject rolled around to poetry, at which point he pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down the following poem for me by a Vietnamese Zen Master from the 11th century named Man Giac. I later learned it is a famous and much loved poem in Vietnam. It is also in a long tradition of short “death poems” written by zen masters prior to their departure from this life. Here is my translation.

“Telling the World About My Illness”


Spring goes, a hundred flowers fall

Spring comes, a hundred flowers bloom

Life passes quickly before our eyes

On my head, age has settled in

Don’t say flowers stop falling when spring comes to an end.

Last night in the front courtyard, a plumb branch blossom!

From Chinese to English – Via Vietnamese

My friend Minh Tam is like a lot of monks in Vietnam in that he reads and writes Chinese, and has memorized a lot. He studied at the main Buddhist University in Vietnam (Van Hanh in Saigon), and then went on to get a PhD in Buddhist Studies at Delhi University in India, specializing in the history of Vietnamese Buddhism. After he wrote down the poem in Chinese, Minh Tam then wrote out a version of the same poem in “quoc ngu,” using romanicized letters to spell out the mixture of Chinese and Vietnamese words in the original poem (known as “han viet“). Then he wrote out a version of the poem in “regular,” modern-day Vietnamese, without any of the original loan words from Chinese. These three versions are shown in the graphic here, from left to right.

Mãn Giác – Wikipedia tiếng Việt_1254801054864

What is the Poem About?

The poem begins by saying that at the end of our lives, we all perish (“spring goes, a hundred flowers fall”).  In the second line, he says that we are reborn when spring comes again (“spring comes a hundred flowers bloom”). But then in the fifth and most famous line of the poem, he contradicts his first line and says “Don’t say flowers stop falling when spring comes to an end.”

How could flowers still fall when spring has gone and now the trees have leaves on them instead of flowers? In Asia, the  plum blossoms come out in winter. It is a beautiful way of saying that even the traditional way of understanding reincarnation as explained in the first two lines is limited: it is too linear.  Life begins, passes, ends, yes, but that is looking at it from the point of view of a kind of progression, which does not fit with this master’s understanding. In fact, he seems to want to say, we die and are reborn in every instant, we and all things together.

If that is what he meant, I think it is most beautiful and tender.

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