Twelve and a Half Crippled Verses

Twelve and a Half Crippled Verses is a five-minute setting for tenor and piano of the poem of the same name by Lama Zhang Tsöndrü Drakpa (1122–1193), the 12th-century Tibetan master who founded the Tshalpa Kagyu lineage. Lama Zhang was at once a meditator and monk of the first rank and a regional leader and warlord, deeply involved in the military and political conflicts of Central Tibet. In these verses he abandons standard Tibetan Buddhist verse forms for terse lines of only a few syllables, phrases tumbling one after another with barely a breath between them, each stanza closing on the refrain Astounding!. The piece grew out of a Buddhist poetry course taken during the undergraduate years at Bard College; it was premiered at the Chapel of Holy Innocents by Danny Castellanos and Corey Chang.

Text

Directions: known.
Business: given up.
Retreat: staying.
Put into practice. Astounding!

Staying alone.
Devoted to meditation.
Anxieties: few.
Preserving experiences. Astounding!

Relaxed and unwound.
Immovably settled in meditation.
Dharma Body seen. Astounding!

Nothing to meditate.
Made a habit.
Become real.
Meditation and postmeditation the same. Astounding!

Beggar-monk Zhang.
Directions: skilled.
Distracting doubts: cut off.
Words: abundant harvest. Astounding!

— Lama Zhang Tsöndrü Drakpa; translated by Dan Martin (in Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West, ed. Enrica Garzilli, 1996), reprinted in Sources of Tibetan Tradition, ed. Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle (Columbia University Press, 2013).