Asleep No More

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            The dawning day is like an open door
            for voyagers adrift in living stream
            to waken from the dream asleep no more.

            When out of slumber’s seas we’re cast ashore
            and consciousness resumes its heady beam,
            the dawning day is like an open door.

            With dialectic feet upon the floor
            the thinker frames a philosophic scheme
            in lieu of wakening asleep no more.

            Stargazers, poets, let their fancies soar
            into the realms beyond what things may seem,
            for dawning day is like an open door.

            Though myriads divinities implore
            within our being lies the path supreme
            to reach awakenment asleep no more.

            Deep wisdom handed down from ages yore
            can teach us of enlightenment’s true gleam.
            The dawning day is like an open door
            to waken from the dream asleep no more.


            ~ Harley White

            

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The poem is a villanelle, which is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

Inspiration was derived from the following writing by Nichiren Daishōnin…

“The ordinary people, who inhabit the nine realms of dharmas, are wholeheartedly immersed in the sleep of the unenlightenment of not wanting to know. They are drowned in the dream of living and dying, as well as having forgotten what the wakefulness of the enlightenment of the original state is all about. They cling at all costs to what is going on in the dream. And they stray from one darkness to the next.”

~ Nichiren Daishōnin (1279)

From ~ A Collation of the Layers of the Various Teachings of all the Buddhas of the Past, Present and Future as to Which Specific Doctrines are to be Discarded or Established (Sō Kan Mon Shō) ~ translated by Martin Bradley

This writing has also been translated as ~ “The Teachings Affirmed by All Buddhas Throughout Time” (Sokanmon Sho)

“Common mortals of the nine worlds are asleep in the mind’s innate delusion. Lost in a dream of the sufferings of birth and death, they forget the reality of original enlightenment. Attached to the rights and wrongs within their dream, they move from darkness into greater darkness.”

~ Nichiren Daishōnin (1279)

Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō means to devote our lives to and found them on (Nam[u]) the Utterness of the Dharma (Myōhō) [entirety of existence, enlightenment and unenlightenment] permeated by the underlying white lotus flower-like mechanism of the interdependence of cause, concomitancy and effect (Renge) in its whereabouts of the ten [psychological] realms of dharmas [which is every possible psychological wavelength] (Kyō).

The reason that we continually recite Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō

The sun is about to come up over the South Pacific Ocean in this colorful scene photographed by one of the Expedition 35 crew members aboard the Earth-orbiting International Space Station between 4 and 5 a.m. local time, May 5, 2013.

The space station was at a point above Earth located at 27.4 degrees south latitude and 110.1 degrees west longitude, a few hundred miles east of Easter Island.

Credit: NASA