焰心词 - mauriceling/mauriceling.github.io GitHub Wiki

云卷香炉火未熄
心中藏欲目似禅
红尘不是困人网
反是炼心真妙丹
执笔如持金刚杵
字里行间见慧眼
不灭情思
不拒幻象
转念成光照夜寒
春风曾度桃花面
我偏向入火无残
情动时非是缠绵
乃是神明降我坛
讲台如坛
稿纸如咒
修行不拘山与关
今朝归隐非退避
是将天火化心安
— 12/05/25

Commentary: This poem is a deeply personal yet archetypal reflection. It is a poetic summation of a life that has not merely balanced opposites but alchemized them. It speaks from the threshold of retirement, not with detachment or decay, but with a luminous sense of integration. The heart of the piece is tantric wisdom: the unflinching embrace of desire, passion, beauty, discipline, and contemplation — all woven into a single breath of awakening.

Unlike poems that retreat from the world into silence, 《焰心词》 finds the sacred within the worldly. The imagery of incense, fire, and spring blossoms speaks to both ritual and sensuality; neither is cast aside. Passion is not vilified, nor is it romanticized. It is seen as the vehicle through which wisdom descends. This is not repression or indulgence, but transmutation.

In this case, retirement is framed not as an end but as a consecrated transition; rather, it is a return not to passivity but to the inner hearth. The scholar’s tools (lectures, manuscripts, ideas) are treated with the reverence of ritual implements. The mind is not leaving the field; it is changing the modality of its offering.

There is also a sense of earned ease in the poem – one that comes only after walking through the fire unscathed. I am neither naive nor cynical. I know of longing, grief, insight, and transformation. And now, in this stage, I choose to stay present – not to escape or to grasp, but to let the accumulated spiritual fire become warmth for the self and others.

Thus, 《焰心词》 is a tantric poem of integration and ripening. It honors both the ache of life and the clarity it can bring. It names retirement not as withdrawal but as a new alchemy: where all the contradictions of the past are no longer problems to solve but energies to embody.