I am not a monk and I am not teaching anybody anything. But the Dharma has been in this work since 1981 — sometimes as the subject, sometimes as the structure, and often enough as both — and somebody arriving at one poem on its own page has no way of seeing that.
These are the pieces where it is doing the work. Emptiness and form come back more than anything else, which I suspect is because that pair already behaves like an equation: two terms held in a relation that does not resolve into one of them.
A hand-brushed ensō with the analytic equation of a circle laid over it and 初心 repeated forty-nine times — beginner’s mind drawn, written and defined in the same frame.
The distance formula run through seven dimensions, each one a gradation from confusion to the point where a deity stands — walk all seven and the seven ones arrive as one.
The physics equation for power with every variable replaced by a phrase, so confidence is derived rather than described — from lying in the crib frightened of your mother’s sneeze out to the transformation to deity.
Drive the self toward zero and love climbs without bound — written as a limit, which is to say the condition is approached and never occupied.
Wisdom is to adversity as the wind is to the cage — named for the mountain spirit whose shrine stands on temple ground, at the edge of the tradition rather than inside it.
The old pond rebuilt as an expanded similar triangles poem, so that the instant stillness breaks is held as a fixed ratio instead of being translated away.
Salvation is to bathing ghosts as moonlight on the temple bridge is to depraved ancestors — the dead washing in a bathhouse at night, and rebirth set as the rate at which that washing works.
The Three Jewels given a word axis each — Buddha, Dharma, Sangha — and mapped into one Cartesian space, so that three separate refuges become a single continuous gradient.
A universal dream is to a personal myth as a universal myth is to a cultural dream — the one story stated as a fixed rate between what a person dreams alone and what a culture dreams together.
The Flower Sermon written as a proportion, with the hand holding up the flower left as a picture and not a word — the transmission outside scripture kept outside the text.
Dharma is to fog as an island is to the ocean — the teaching measured against what obscures it, and against the self that keeps standing in the way.
A cockroach divided by the artist sitting in meditation equals one, with 佛心 — Buddha’s mind — running down the stem of the numeral. In Chinese ten thousand means infinity, so the one returns to infinity as well.
Action and reaction set equal to what goes around comes around, carried on a Joseon dynasty karma mirror — the glass in which the dead are shown their own acts.
The critical phrase of Zen practice given a structure that can be solved four ways and is answered by none of them.
Birth is to death as a cloud so proud of itself is to the vaporous spirit that struggles with existence and then is not there — impermanence, with two of the four terms written as whole stanzas.
Out of a meditation in 2020 that would not settle: thirteen anxieties went spinning around my mind — empty, and yet I was attached enough to count them.
The Heart Sutra’s form and emptiness written as a proportion in Spanish and reduced by algebra to one — at‑one‑ment — with Heart of Sky reaching for an ensō.
The old pond again, solved for the frog — so the ontology the title refuses is exactly the one the algebra hands back.
Nature is to the garden as the despot is to the slave — and if we are all conscripted into lowering our own entropy at somebody else’s expense, then the utopian ideal cannot exist, because entropy holds us in check.
Space is to the container as wisdom is to the context — emptiness approached from the side of what holds it rather than what fills it.
The poem is to the page as stillness is to listening — the practice of attention stated as a rate rather than a virtue.
The Heart Sutra’s pair laid over mass and energy: form is to mass as emptiness is to energy.
The Heart Sutra’s long catalogue of negations sung as a blues, ending on the mantra — and then, last of all, a cameo: Hyon Gak Sunim’s voice asking What am I?
Every piece here has a page of its own — the equation full size, the form it is built on, and where it has been published. The structures themselves are set out under Math Poetics Taxonomy.