The Moon Over the Gate

Fluorescent lights.  Halogens.  Energy-efficient LED's.  Even incandescent bulbs.  When I go to the hardware store to purchase some light bulbs, I'm offered a mind-numbing selection.  What kind of coloration do I want?  If I can figure it out, I have myriad choices, ranging from icy white to imitations of sunlight to traditional warmth.

"The Harvest Moon"

Despite all that variety, there is one type of light that people in cities rarely experience today.  It is what a love song in the early 1900's called "the light of the silvery moon."  All the artificial lights of our cities, although making life safer in some ways, prevent us from enjoying full moonlight. That is unfortunate because moonlight is a form of illumination that people have considered to be a nearly transcendent experience.

I did once experience totally undiluted moonlight.  It was when my wife and I went to one of the star-gazing "parties" held at the isolated McDonald Observatory in remote west Texas.  Our ability to observe stars through the two small telescopes set up for the public was impeded by there being a brilliant full moon.  What interested me more than the stars was walking about outdoors using the illumination of nothing but the moonlight.  And how strange that light was!  I can only describe it by saying it was as white in coloration as a halogen, while at the same time being as soft as still air.

Given the uniqueness of that light, it is no wonder that writers down through history have seen moonlight as an aid to coming to a transcendent awareness.  Frequently, it is depicted as a transcendence that returns us to a state of feeling being loved in a way we forgot about.  For example, take this poem by the 8th-century Chinese Li Po:

"So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed --

Could there have been a frost already?

Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight.

Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home."

The moonlight is so strange that Li Po does not recognize it at first, mistaking it for frost.  And yet, it brings him back to a place expressive of being loved -- "home."

Experiencing moonlight thus becomes a passage into a kind of transcendence.  Such movements into transcendence are sometimes expressed by poets' using some symbol for an opening. Thus, it might be a symbol such as a window, through which the moonlight enters, and through which the poet's heart can be transported out beyond its ordinary limits.

Another symbol for opening -- a gate -- is employed by the 8th-century Zen Buddhist writer Yung-Chia Ta-Shih. In his poem, he suggests that the greater consciousness the soft moon brings can not only make us feel more loved, but also make us be more loving.  Some key lines from his poem have been translated in this way:

"One moon is reflected in every expanse of water.

Every reflected moon is the one moon....

The great gate of love is wide open."

~~~

Have you ever experienced how brilliant soft moonlight can be?  Where was that?

(The Li Po poem is from The Jade Mountain, by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu, translators, © 1929.)

(The excerpt from the Yung-Chia poem is taken from Blue Mountain:
 A Spiritual Anthology Celebrating the Earth, ed. F. Lynne Bachleda, © 2000. p. 88.)