"Roshi at 89" Leonard Cohen

"Roshi at 89"
Leonard Cohen

Roshi's very tired,
he's lying on his bed
He's been living with the living
and dying with the dead
But he wants another drink
(will wonders never cease?)
He's making war on war
and he's making war on
peace
He's sitting in the throne-room
on his great Original Face
and he's making war on Nothing
that has something in its
place
His stomach's very happy
The prunes are working well
There's no one going to Heaven
and there's no one left in Hell

I remembered this poem from our anthology last year but while we discussed other Cohen works, we didn't touch on this one. I read it and both the clever rhyming scheme as well as the message Cohen gets across resonated with me. Leonard Cohen is a musician, novelist, and poet from Canada. In the 90s, he retreated to a Zen Buddhist monastery where he served as an assistant to Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, whose perspicacity left a lasting impression on Cohen, because he refers to the monk in many of his poems. In "Roshi at 89," Cohen is speaking about his Zen mentor's inner thoughts.

To the casual reader, this poem might be about a listless elderly man who has grown weary of the world in his old age and has acquired a pessimistic view of life and the afterlife. Taking a closer look at some of the words Cohen uses, however, reveals that there is a deeper meaning under the poem's surface. "Original Face" is in fact a term used in Zen Buddhism to describe a state of being that points "to the non-duality of subject and object," therefore rendering the two interchangeable. When the mind is cleared of all thoughts, the Original Face appears. It is the true you without any dualities.

Where Roshi makes war on war and war on peace, "war" is the term Cohen uses to allude to Roshi's Original Face, which, when presented with war and peace, sees them as one and the same.