Ten Songs Of Zen
On the Road Going Back

After writing the TEN WANDERING SONGS in 1988, I thought I could end my songwriting career there. I was extremely busy with my performances all over the world, and the expatriate life was becoming somewhat monotonous, offering little inspiration. Unexpectedly, however, I wrote ten more song! Amen and Amitabha ...

In June 1992 I was performing in Boston. As it was not far from the Eastern Coast to Europe, I decided to go to Paris for a week. One Sunday I was free to wander the city by myself to brood and to dispel my melancholy. That's my usual way to react to some unhappy event. For some time, as I got older and less able to roam freely and indulge my whims, I had been constantly haunted by unhappy thoughts: a love affair that had to be terminated soon, a declining health, a feeling that people - both overseas and inside Vietnam - no longer esteemed artists as highly as in the past, etc.

However, wandering in deserted Paris streets bathed in the morning sunshine, I dispelled the misgivings in my heart. Once more, after the Songs of Tao and the Wandering Songs, I ventured into spiritual music. I found comfort in the supernatural. In one night I completed ten songs, which I called Songs of Zen.

I wrote these otherwordly songs firstly to say good bye to a lover; secondly, to realize my dream of writing about Zen, which I formed when performing in Japan. Furthermore, I was thinking of Phạm Thiên Thư and praying that the melancholic monk would read or hear these songs. I wanted also to thank a music lover in Saigon (Phạm Phú Lợi) who recently wrote an article in the Los Angeles magazine PHẬT GIÁO (Buddhism), calling me an exiled boddhisattva who lived half-way between the world and the beyond, and whose unfulfilled karma forced him to eternal reincarnation.

I returned to Boston to finish my performance schedule and to complete the Ten Songs of Zen. For three days and nights, I lived at the home of the Venerable Giác Ðức, who happens to be a distant relation. Being one of those who had never read in detail a buddhist sutra or a book on Zen, I read my verses to him and took three nights of sleep from him.

Back to Midway City, the Ten Songs of Zen was immediately recorded with harmonization by Duy Cường and the voice of Thái Hiền. A number of friends have written about these songs, which were also known under the title HÁT TRÊN ÐƯỜNG VỀ (Singing On The Return Path). I have chosen the article by Thuỵ Khê, published in the magazine HỢP LƯU and in the selection SÓNG TỪ TRƯỜNG (Magnetic Waves) (VĂN NGHỆ Publishers, California - USA) to introduce the listener to the Songs of Zen.

Phạm Duy In The Journey To Infinity
Songs Of Tao and Songs Of Zen, whose titles are parallel in meaning yet not the same, were written in two different backgrounds, separated by twenty years, by two different Phạm Duy.

They are close together in their esthetic values, their inaccessibility, their selective targetting. Neither belong to Phạm Duy's body of popular music. They don't have these intimate elements of homeland, folk rhymes, Viet nation, etc. The Songs Of The Tao opened the way, and the Songs Of Zen completed the search for religious truth by a non-believer.

In the circle of life and death of man, the Songs of Tao raised a mystic and intimate voice to lead us to the first stages of Buddhist teaching. Phạm Duy's music, Phạm Thiên Thư's words, Thái Thanh's angelic voice guided mankind lost in the unknowing world, made them listen to their unending cycles of suffering, encouraged them to transcend the circles of reincarnation, to look for enlightenment:
Once you were a bird, dead and rotting on the path
I was a tree trunk mourning, waiting many years
. . . . . . . .
Wait for me tomorrow, be reborn into a flower
In the cloudy future, wait for a bird's song

Phạm Duy's music in the Songs of the Tao is pure, free, trancending, close to the mind of a monk who might have washed his earthly heart but still looks back at the past with regret and longing. Its sound is reminiscent of a church hymn, pure and merciful. Thái Thanh's crystal voice rises like a prayer, a saintly voice soaring up to teach mankind to treat each other with love and virtue:
Love others as you love yourself!

Songs of the Tao present a basic, elementary version of Buddhist doctrine that can be found in the Buddhist canon. It is the people's buddhism: to do good, so that your next life will be better than this one, for:
Life after life
Life and death are still with us...

Phạm Duy and Phạm Thiên Thư romanticized the Buddhist canon, they brought love into the holy land. But the soul of Ðạo Ca was like a butterfly's, a love that has yet to enter Eden before it was awakened by the gong of Master Không Lộ. It was an interrupted love, a love cleansed of all desire. Ðạo Ca was a consciousness wanting enlightenment, but only halfway there. The song TÂM XUÂN (Spring In The Heart) ends the pilgrimage on the verge of the unknown:
Is spring there? Or is the World of Spirit?
Is spring there? Or is Nirvana?

Twenty years later, in Thiền Ca, Phạm Duy breaks up with dogma completely. Stepping outside all doctrines, he is content with the world as it stands, he stops searching; there is no need to search for he has found himself. Enlightenment is affirmed, via self-knowledge, by life itself. Thiền Ca belongs to the world. The Songs of Zen are songs of Living, of Love, greater and higher than the songs of Tao and philosophy. Thiền Ca represents enlightenment, therefore they are close to man, yet very far. That's how it goes in abstract reasoning, but in practice the road Phạm Duy took from Tao to Zen spans over seventy years of living and creating. Thiền Ca summarizes this journey and affirms Phạm Duy's artistic personality, one that is very zen-like and tao-like yet anti-zen and non-Tao.

Anti-zen, for to attain the ultimate end (enlightenment, nirvana, buddha) one must get away from the worldly concerns, one must have serenity, one must be in a meditative position. The road to Zen is quietude and seclusion. Phạm Duy's way of life, living among the people and for the people, is anti-zen. Yet it is also very zen-like for it contains three of Zen's liberating characteristics: intuition, non-speech and non-self are constantly present in Phạm Duy's person and in his work.

To be precise, Zen liberates the internal energy contained in each person. In normal circumstances, this natural energy is repressed and distorted by social and intellectual conventions. Zen proposes a liberation of man, calling for a light that comes from personal experience rather than from bookish knowledge for zen considers that this very knowledge is the cause of many insoluble questions. It is a knowledge that cause ignorance, and it must be discarded to make way for a higher truth (Suzuki). Enlightenment must comes by direct experience and not through the intermediary of language and books. Language is a product of man and its nature is constantly changing with taste and social preconceptions. Language sometimes betrays man and truth, giving us a false perception. Therefore, to really understand the nature of a problem, we must use our innate abilities. Faced with life's sufferings, pleasures, happiness, etc., man must stop speaking, stop thinking, stop making distinctions between self and the world. Intuition, non-verbality and non-self are zen's arguments when faced with the infinite. They are zen's paths to the infinite.

Music is an art based on two fundamental principles: non-verbality and intuition. Music comes to us or it does not come at all. We feel or do not feel a piece of music. With music there is no ''understanding'' or ''not understanding''. For music needs no reasoning, no explanation. Music is non-verbal, it's a higher level of speech. Phạm Duy has fully used the non-verbal and intuitive character of music to speak, to live and to create all through life. His education has come from life more than from schooling. He attained the heights of art, not through intellect and reasoning but via intuition and feeling: writing songs in the flash of a moment, writing verses in a second. He did not study music before writing his masterpieces NƯƠNG CHIỀU (1947), BÀ MẸ GIO LINH (1948), VỀ MIỀN TRUNG (1948)... And Thiền Ca was produced within a night to pay tribute to a lover. Phạm Duy is by nature against academic studies and looks down on it. He often said of himself ''I just picked up bits and pieces here and there''. For the academically trained, Phạm Duy is a non-believer. His non-reliance on bookish knowledge, his sudden flashes of inspiration, his leaps of knowledge without the intermediary of thought, all these are also very zen-like.

When Zen holds that thought is that which leads to ignorance, it has indirectly admitted that enlightenment is creation, it is absolute freedom, two basic factors that open the door to infinity and eternity. This journey to infinity was grasped by Phạm Duy since his youth:
In this world they walk
Breathing the winds of millenia past
Winds that shake the Hoành Sơn range
Winds that raise the Eastern Sea
In the youthful spring they walk
Basking in the warmth of the life giving sun
Blood boiling the color of the sky
Pressing on to outpace the world.
. . . . . . . .
In the universe they walk
Turning with the wheel of life and death
A hearse in the suburb
A cradle in a wreath
Through life they walk
. . . . . . . .
A long way they have walked
But their legs are not tiring
Through time they has walked
With many loves calling
Through the world they have walked...
(TRAVEL - 1953)

It is easy to understand why Phạm Duy later chose LỮ HÀNH (TRAVEL) as his credo. But what is the force that made him see that man can travel in all directions: in the world, in the spring of youth, in nature, i.e. towards the infinite? And how will he make this journey?
I travel on a strand of silk
(VOYAGE IN A DREAM -- 1959)

This force cannot be anything else but love. Apart from its binding power and its fragility, love is the first opportunity for the self to know the non-self. Until then the self thinks of itself as indivisible. Now it splits, at the same time affirming itself and leaving itself to enter another. (Suzuki). How? In body and in spirit. In love the self loses itself in the object of love and becomes non-self, and at the same time demands ownership of that object. Faced with love, the self splits to welcome the other into itself. The self dissolves in the other. The other is man's freedom. Love is the first step to non-self. Love brings freedom and at the same time destroys freedom, for in love we offer our freedom to another. This is one of the deepest contradictions of life. Those who wish to experience love many times will give and take back this freedom (CHO NHAU -- 1957). But this is also a form of eternity. Therefore Phạm Duy is both a seducer and a faithful lover:
Into the other world we walk
Taking refuge by the river of the dead
In each other's arm we walk far away
Into eternity.
(PITIOUS LOVE - 1956)

This sense of eternity eternity in my heart (LỮ HÀNH) and of the infinite let not space and time collide (THƯƠNG TÌNH CA) is apparent not only in the love songs but in all of Phạm Duy's work: in the immensity of the music of CHIỀU VỀ TRÊN SÔNG (Sunset On The River,1956), in the vastness of melody and verse of VIỄN DU (Long Journey, 1953), MẸ TRÙNG DƯƠNG (Mother Ocean, 1963-64), in the depth of TÂM CA (Songs Of The Heart, 1964-65), in the love that spans lives of RONG CA (Wandering Song, 1988).

This sense of eternity is in the end the opening of the heart every night you open your heart (MỘNG DU) to give each other the four oceans (CHO NHAU), and love each other like the ocean (TÌNH HOÀI HƯƠNG): in Buddhism it's called Tâm (Heart), Phật (Buddha), enlightenment, it is the core of Zen.

But how did Zen enter Phạm Duy's music? As he told it himself, the sound of bells and prayers came to him since early childhood: ''... My mother was a dutiful buddhist and as a child I often followed her to famous religious sites such as Thầy pagoda, Hương pagoda, Ðền Sòng Phố Cát temple. I could recite prayers and knew by heart the BÁT NHÃ SUTRA. I knew it by heart but didn't understand a word.''

It's the '' not understanding a word '' that was the essence of that experience and that followed him into the music through all his life. Had he '' understood everything'' it wouldn't have been zen, and there would not be Songs Of Zen.

On the melancholic road leading back to the village, where a pagoda bell echoes in the district of Gio Linh in 1948, the bell's sound and the mother fused into a call in the mind: Mother, mother, can you hear the echo of a pagoda bell? the call started in NGƯỜI VỀ (The Returning Man, 1954), and became deeper in MẸ TRÙNG DƯƠNG (Mother Ocean) and BIỂN MẸ (Sea Mother). The most passionate meetings in Phạm Duy's love life were also tinted with religion: We meet in a prayer, in a peal of bells (TÌM NHAU - Searching For Each Other - 1956), with benevolence: Love's immensity spreads over the world (XUÂN THÌ - Springtime - 1963) with humanity: We love the world, we love each other in the sunset (CHIỀU VỀ TRÊN SÔNG - Sunset On The River), and sometimes strongly with zen:

Far away rises a prayer
Melancholy pervades the world as evening falls
(SPRINGTIME)

So that which Phạm Duy calls not understanding a word actually was a sense of the Tao, of love and humanity, which has seeped into his being since birth, through his mother, and has stayed in his unconscious ever since (the same way as folk rhymes and folk songs entered his mind) and which reveals itself whenever there was a motivating force: the Tao in him does not come from thought or purpose. It comes from non-thought. And non-thought is the deep essence of Zen.

The essence of Phạm Duy's living and of creating is therefore both Zen-like and anti-Zen. This essence is actualized, musicalized in the SONGS OF ZEN.

The world of nonbeing which Phạm Duy sensed in LỮ HÀNH (Travel) 40 years ago, now comes to its full musical expression. Stepping into the Songs of Zen is to enter an infinite world of nonbeing, echoing on a scale which I shall term spatio-temporal scale . Duy Cường's harmony is an experiment. Ordinarily music is an art where sounds take place in fixed intervals of time. Here Duy Cường has created a second dimension in space, which then transforms itself into other dimensions: a world dimension, a human dimension... and Phạm Duy's world of nonbeing becomes fuller, deeper, and approaches the infinite.

This world of nonbeing therefore is not just pure space but is also a living void, a void filled with living cells, the basic consituents of life. In this living space, the voice of Thái Hiền suddenly rises up, captivating the listener:
Song Of Zen 1
THE VOID
The Void
Immense, empty
Wide without limit
High without bound
Suddenly
Is full of living things
All is me
All belong to all

The Zen nature becomes clearer when the sense of non-self gradually fills the musical void: all is me, all belong to all . Musically speaking, Phạm Duy offer the listener a new universe of sound, very different form the melodies we are familiar with. Duy Cường's orchestration takes us into a colorful world of sound. This void filled with living cells is a universe of planets, where two milky streams of love converge to create life. But this universe is only an illusion:
The Void
Empty, pensive
Quiet and silent
Infinitely serene;
Suddenly
Jubilant and festive
All is one
But all is nothing.

The principle of life is hidden in the sound of a hammock. It is a sound that lies in our subconscious since childhood. The white haired artist reflects on his life and sees death, life, love, hate, waiting, longing, joy, pain ... Song Of Zen No.2's structure lies in of the sound of hammock: swinging from side to side. But even this is only an external sensation. Once you come to the shore of enlightenment, the heart is always serene, it does not vacillate: I lie there... everywhere lie quietly. The coincidence of the sound of hammock with the principle of relativity is an existentialist essence in Phạm Duy's being and art. He has sensed this and lived it since childhood, it has always been in his subconscious, then one afternoon, in Midway City, he saw everything. Spontaneously and intuitively... That's Zen. No need to explain. These commentaries are only an superfluous embellishment.
Song Of Zen No.2
HAMMOCK
I'm lying on the hammock, swinging, swinging
I'm lying on the hammock, swinging, swinging
Ah the pleasures of mortal life !
Ah sublime paradise !
Death, life
Love, hatred
Heights of waiting, abyss of longing
Joy, suffering.
I'm lying on the hammock, swinging, swinging
I lie there
Everywhere lie quietly ...

Love, suffering, beauty, the principal elements of life are all uncertain. Therefore happiness is to be enjoyed immediately when it is found. Do not wait, do not demand.
Song Of Zen No.3
THAT'S ALL
A rose garden
A rose garden
A rose garden
Alas! Too many thorns.
A love story
A love story
A love story
Durable, then in suspense
A drop of tear
A drop of tear
A drop of tear
Salty, tasteless
Painful, happy
A life
A life
A life
Yes ! That's all I need.

Happiness is a flower, nameless, colorless, scentless, but like my heart it spreads in all directions, magnificent and fragrant. The music is inviting, gentle, loving, captivating. The music spreads its fragrance and the voice of Thái Hiền brings into the senses all four oceans .
Song Of Zen No.4
NAMELESS
A flower, nameless,
Colorless, scentless
But like my heart
It spreads in all directions
Magnificent, fragrant
A stream, nameless
Little, gentle,
But like my heart
It rises in waves
Becomes the four oceans
And my heart is nameless
Like a fairy stream, a fairy flower.

In the days of LỮ HÀNH love opened to door to infinity for Phạm Duy, in The Songs Of Zen he lays down the whole of the nonself nature of love. Song No.5 is titled XUÂN. Xuân is Spring. Xuân may also be the name of a person, but here Xuân is Love. When singing everyone is violent, except me, do not think that ''me'' refers to Phạm Duy. No, ''me'' is Spring, ''me'' refers to Spring, a butterfly tasting the nectar of spring love, a spring breeze, a spring rain, a poem in the spring page... Phạm Duy explains the theory behind this music: music opens the day with the whips and slashes of life. Then comes a sad song Then the music becomes loving, passionate ...

The listener hears the non-selfness, the dissolving of human beings into each other, through the sweet and pure voice of Thái Hiền: I am I, I am you, you are I , you are you... And not everybody can see these ''losses''. Phạm Duy has sung of love for more than half a century, he has written passionate love songs for several generations. But only in the Songs Of Zen did he look right through at the essence of love. This insight is zen, the force of life.

Song Of Zen No.5
SPRING
All is cheats and lies
Everyone is violent but me.
They hate and they slash and they kill
And they all die, but I remain.
Time passes and old paths wear out
Men are divided and forget laughter
If you want to reach the shore of enlightenment
Sing quietly and contentedly with me.
I'm I, I'm you too.
You're I, you're all others too
A butterfly drinking the nectar of springtime,
A rosy wind, a spring rain,
A passionate poem in the book of Spring.

Song No.6 brings this force into love, what is often called ''sóng tình'', the waves of love. It is expressed in a lyrical melody, with a sensual, Arabic sounding character. The ''waves of love'' here are not wet, condensed and fragile. It comes and goes suddenly, as if it never existed: I haven't yet held you, yet I've lost you...
Song Of Zen No.6
EVENING
In the rising dusk
Men and Nature softly sing.
I search for you
And find you.
1 I drag you toward me
2 I pull you along
3 I raise you to Heaven
4 I take you to Hell
5 I bury you in my heart
6 I take you out of me.
In the rising dusk
Men and Nature softly sing.
I search for you
And find you.
I have not yet held you
Yet I have lost you.

In Song No.7, Phạm Duy summed up his love life, his concept of love, and the essence of his love: faithful yet free loving:
Song Of Zen No.7
THE LOVER
Wonderful lover
In a hundred years of loving
His love spreads
Everyway, everywhere.
Wonderful lover
Sincere, deceitful
He loved a thousand
As he loved one only.
Wonderful lover
A hundred years of sin
He's also the one
Who brings joy to you.
At twenty
He was a hungry tiger
He was also a prey
Offering himself to the world.
The twenty years old lover
Did not have time to talk
The seventy years old lover
Is still in a hurry.
Wonderful lover
From beginning to end
He has claimed no victory or defeat
Has won or lost no one.
Wonderful lover
He treks the path of love for ever
A love lost one day
A love found the next.

In Song No.8 the topic widens into eating, partying; living, dying; loving, hating; crying, laughing; longing, forgetting... things that encompass all of human life. Phạm Duy's optimism towards the world is expressed in what he terms ''music for laughing''. It is about peace of mind and contentment. Music and words are simplified to the maximum: Eat what you need, play heartily, live straight, die honestly. No need to philosophize. To live that way is enough for anybody. That's enlightenment!
Song Of Zen No 8
ADMONISHMENT
Eat what you need
Play heartily
Live straight
Die honestly
Love long
Hate briefly
Cry fully
Laugh clearly.
Ha ha ha!
Remember those who helped
Forget those you hate
Remember sadnesses
Forget joys
Remember this love
Forget that love.
Remember yourself
Forget yourself.
Ha ha ha!

If this world is ephemeral, why shouldn't we go visit other worlds: in Song No.9 Phạm Duy wanders in heaven and in hell, and he discovers heaven is pitch dark, hell supposed to be dark is brighter than the lights. This song destroys illusions of good and bad, black and white, heaven and earth. Everything is relative. Man's nature oscillates between white and black. Why make the distinction? You can interprete the image of God side by side with a nude woman any way you like, but it shows there is no god and angel, God is just a man with secret loves and desires.
Song of Zen No.9
HEAVEN AND HELL
Traversing nine clouds to get to this Heaven
To look for you through nine seasons of sunshine and rain
I saw you standing naked beside God
And all the angels, under the radiant lights.
An earthly wind escaped to Heaven
Throwing the whole paradise
Into chaos and confusion
My earthly wind blew out the light
Then I realized Heaven was also such a dark place.
I overcame nine vessels of boiling oil
To find myself in Hell.
To find you, unfaithful, sinful lover,
For punishment, you had chosen to be burned alive
The fire blazed amid the howling of the devils
In extreme suffering, your soul is free
Hell was thought to mean Darkness
But it was brighter than Light.
To look for you in Heaven or Hell is all an illusion
Let's stay somehere between
And think of each other in this life.

NHÂN QUẢ (Karma) ends the journey in a circle, as round as a bullet, as round as the earth. It's the roundness of the universe, of life and death, of reincarnation, of an embrace, of an expecting mother. From a bullet, an instrument of war, a cause of bloodshed, Phạm Duy made a wrap to dry up the sufferings and condense them into a grain of dust, which is reborn into a heart beating in a world fill of peace, love and forgiveness.
Song Of Zen No.10
KARMA
Round as a bullet
Whose blood stain has dried, who has forgotten war
Round as the peaceful earth
All creatures are one, life is unscarred
Round as a young man's heart
Whose destiny will be fulfilled a hundered years hence.
Round as a bird's wings flapping
Tirelessly through life
Round as a vow of love
Our karma is not yet completed, many rebirths will come.

The promise of many rebirths does not carry the usual implications of karma but is a message of hope: the reincarnation will be for the continuance of human life, for the permanence of artistic creativity. All of Phạm Duy's work reveals an optimism about humanity, creativity and closeness to eternity. The Songs Of Zen are no exception. After a whole lifetime entangled in wars, Phạm Duy records the word FORGET: Even a bullet can forget, why can't man. ''To forget'' is the mind of the artist in the deepest state of Zen.
Artistic creation is an act that goes against the self: it is the search for permanence, a permanence that can only come after death. But man is by nature afraid of death and struggles against it. Phạm Duy is no exception to that rule: THIỀN CA is a work that summarizes the contradictions in his life and in his art.

Thụy Khuê, Paris - 20/6/93

---

Back to Overview of PD's Works