Finding The Sky

Finding The Sky 

- Michael Dylan Welch

There’s a story told about Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche that speaks to the idea of implication in haiku. In 1971, Rinpoche was teaching a class on Buddhism at the University of Colorado. In one lecture, as John J. Baker reports in his reminiscence, “The Dharma in a Single Drawing” (Tricycle, Spring 2015; http://www.tricycle.com/newbuddhism/teachings-and-texts/dharmasingle-drawing), Rinpoche drew a picture on the blackboard, and asked, “What is this a picture of?” Eventually someone answered by saying the obvious, “It’s a picture of a bird,” as indeed it was. But Rinpoche then said something that altered his students’ view of the obvious, akin to how we might approach haiku. He said, “It’s a picture of the sky.”