Buddha in Glory
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Center of centers, core of cores,
almond which by its own cloistering
sweetens itself—all this, to the stars,
is your fruit-flesh. Greetings.

Look, there are no longer any urges
hanging on; your shell is the infinite,
and there the thick pulp stands and surges.
From outside, your radiance emits

back to you, for your topmost suns
burst forth and glow and spin full blast.
But within you, that which will outlast
them all has even now begun.

Translated from the German by David Keplinger

Buddha in der Glorie

Mitte aller Mitten, Kern der Kerne,
Mandel, die sich einschließt und versüßt, –
dieses Alles bis an alle Sterne
ist dein Fruchtfleisch: Sei gegrüßt.

Sieh, du fühlst, wie nichts mehr an dir hängt;
im Unendlichen ist deine Schale,
und dort steht der starke Saft und drängt.
Und von außen hilft ihm ein Gestrahle,

denn ganz oben werden deine Sonnen
voll und glühend umgedreht.
Doch in dir ist schon begonnen,
was die Sonnen übersteht.

I revealed once to students and faculty at Yale that I don’t speak German, even as I sat before them in the role of translator of German poetry. You could hear an audible gasp in the auditorium. Had I not worked with the artist himself—the poet Jan Wagner, who had recently won a notable literary honor in Germany—and had Jan not been sitting there beside me, my talk might have been over before it began.

By that time, Jan and I had already been crafting our translations for over ten years. We’d produced two volumes of his selected poetry spanning his career. For every poem in English, he and I would sketch a literal draft from several dictionary sources. We’d define the musical, formal qualities of the poem—the laws that set down a container. And we’d discuss the personality of the poem, the smile behind its eyes, the sarcasm or the dark moods, which are based on agreed upon idioms and turns of phrase, what Charles Simic called “the said quality” of the piece of writing.

Then I would get to work. I cross referenced and experimented. I rewrote. I shifted the literal a little to fit the rhyme. I bent the rhymes a bit to capture voice. I spun and unraveled until I landed upon a version that best suited the three refuges of translation: my Buddha (the literal version), my dharma (the formal structure), and my sangha (the cultural connotations). Which is to say, I reconceived the original intention, but in my unique context, peculiar to my own attitudes toward the English language.

A great translation is a different poem from the original, but in some strange, remarkable way, the resurrection of it. As Octavio Paz has written, “[A translation] is a reproduction of the original poem into another poem that…is not so much its replica as its transmutation…The ideal of poetry translation…is to produce similar effects with different means.”

Walking backwards home

As we struggle through confusion, we may find ourselves in the position of the translator-collaborator. We look to the outside for guidance. We work with gurus and spiritual directors. We model our lives after stories of the Buddha or Christ. We live through all the things awakening is not. We memorize the precepts, truths, and paths. We read many accounts of the texts. We err. We recover. We work together in community and we dialogue with the teachings in the context of the modern world. All the while we are walking backwards into the original insight. After all that, even after many years, we must find out the truth for ourselves.

My decision to translate Rilke’s “Buddha in Glory” therefore seems appropriate, considering the spiritual model at its center. The Buddha instructed his followers to make of their own lives a sun. He taught them that they should not merely take his word for the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path, but they should come up with their own conclusions.

To translate the Buddha’s life into mine, I must deeply read these refuges. I must create a transmutation. Twenty-five hundred years after he has lived, I must live the precepts into working systems that learn to speak again.

The star inside the stone

In 1908, when this poem was written, Rainer Maria Rilke was turning 33 years old, an Austrian born in Prague who was living in Paris and working as the sculptor Rodin’s secretary. His poetry before 1907 had been ethereal, philosophical, abstract. It was in those years he began to reorient his attitude about the content of his work. “Not feelings,” he said of what was to come, “but things I have felt.” It marked the beginning of his two-part collection, New Poems, from which some of his most admired and lasting poetry arose, tight forms with wild, explosive content, sonnets and rhymed quatrains that described what he perceived as the star inside the stone of materiality.

In “Buddha in Glory,” Rilke compares the awakened figure to an almond, which is a kernel (the part we consume) surrounded by a porous outer shell at the center of its fruit. The kernel and its shell are the pit of the almond, which is wrapped in a fleshy pulp and sealed in by the hull, the outer skin. In that image I see all the aggregates, the fruit flesh of the body and the mind stretching into eternity, and the core of cores, the Self behind the stories and conditioning and concepts and beliefs.

As the speaker—we’ll just say it’s Rilke himself—studies the figure, he too sees all the way into the center, a seed of true love around which the fruit and flesh are pressing infinitely outward. The first crucial turn of the poem arrives with one word at the end of the first stanza: Greetings. In the Buddha, Rilke meets what is already awakening in himself. He recognizes the light of his own nature in this dense, self-composed figure in contentment and repose.

There is nothing “hanging” on to this figure, no urge to grasp or cling or run away or ignore the calling of this moment. Like the dense fruit of the almond, the enclosing which I call here “self-cloistering” gives birth to inner sweetness. The goodness is always there. In fact, the farther he goes in, the infinitely more his shell presses outward. He realizes what mystics come to know, which is that by looking inward (contemplation) one meets everyone else. By looking outward (action), one sees their own light in all aspects of the other.

Tools for meditation

In meditation we pull back from the mayhem, unhook ourselves from our grasping, unhasp ourselves from the roles and possessions and approval to which we tether our happiness. We take time to remember the heart of the heart of our native country: the one Self empty of separate identities. And the stars reflect back from the edge of the hull of the universe the light that one is emitting from one’s own core. It is a light so constant, so grounded in the dharmakaya or in emptiness or the absolute reality or the consciousness of Christ—however you call it—it outlasts all the impermanence in its midst. Even suns cannot outlive it.

Our practice offers the chance to speak a language that is ours, but which we hardly remember anymore. You might say it is a language we spoke fluently in childhood. It was the language of being awake. Soon we begin to recall again its grammar and trill. Imagine being given the chance to speak German for a moment, just to glimpse this poem, say, just one time. We would know every nuance Rilke planted here. Walking backwards into the original poem, we would suddenly understand everything: we would not only perceive its meanings and its many parts, but the wholeness of their resonance in one fell swoop: the waves of smiles and darknesses, the wisdom, the easy music rising and receding. That flash of understanding could last a lifetime.

When I step back and cloister myself, just for these few minutes each day, an incredible sweetness opens up from the inside, and I know the seed at the center of my life again, as from the source of its springing. That is the point of deep looking. Walking backwards into the original Self, I instantaneously arrive where I already am. I can experience first hand my own Buddha nature, needing no one’s explanations or approval from outside.

To listen to the meditation around this talk, visit here.