I was twelve when my maternal grandmother began to teach me a little English prior to my coming to the United States. She had been raised in private colleges in San Francisco and my parents wanted to revive a family dream and raise their offspring in the States. We would abandon Costa Rica for a larger horizon. The year was 1939.

One of the rhymes my grandmother taught me was

          Simple Simon went a-fishing
          for to catch a whale;
          all the water he had got
          was in his mother’s pail.

I recall not understanding the old-fashioned syntax. Why “a-fishing?” Why “for to catch?” My grandmother could not explain these idiomatic terms except to say the rhyme was very old and that I had to accept the vainly mysterious nature of a new language without questioning it.

For years afterwards I considered Simple Simon to be a charming example of anonymous folk poetry, containing a sardonic attitude towards those unfortunates with not enough brains to make their way in the world. Simple Simon was, in our politically correct jargon, a mentally disadvantaged person. In truth, a nincompoop at best, a moron to the less compassionate. This was a verse to entertain children being put to bed, about a kindergarten whale, one you caught with a smile on the way to the school of hard knocks that came later.

And one loved it because it represented the long-lost voice of a folk wisdom expressed succintly, rhymed perfectly, like that other one

          Christmas is coming,
          the geese are getting fat;
          please to put a penny
          in an old man’s hat.

But one day, some sixty years later, as a Rinzai Zen teacher ordained by Prabhassa Dharma Roshi, I saw something else in Simple Simon, something lying under the surface of the mocking tone with which the world is conceived in the little rhyme. I saw a Dharma lesson in each of the four lines and I used the verse for a teisho with my students.

Is Simple Simon merely an idiot or is he a very little boy playing with water in a sandbox? Perhaps he is Simple in another way, in a Mind-less way, all of his capacities intact, and Simple because he is centered. If that is the case, what follows is proof of a sensitivity inherent in the folk wisdom of all peoples, latent and unconscious, Buddhist in its housing.

          Simple Simon went a-fishing

the first line says. Isn’t that what we all do? What life and survival is about? We go fishing for a job, for a livelyhood, even for a cloud of dreams. Simple Simon injects himself in the world to go fishing, to plumb the depths of possibility and the groundswell of the self. What we all do. He may or may not succeed; fishermen can go for days without catching a thing.Taking the four lines at face value, Simple Simon might be doomed to failure. But the important thing is that he is going a-fishing, that he is alive and well.

          for to catch a whale;

A whale! Nothing less, nothing little, nothing insubstantial. He wants to latch onto a dream, the biggest of all fish. He wants to encompass reality, he is after the manifestation of things such as they are. Nothing else will do. He is not after minnows, not after tadpoles, not after the possible. Our small verse has suddenly moved away from the conventional into a realm that defines the human spirit. It has moved this Simple fellow from necessity to the need for completion, and all because he is Simple. Not goal-oriented the way a practical trout fishermen might be so much as single-minded in pursuit of the impossible.

There is no question now of success or failure because the next line provides the necessary sustenance

          all the water he had got

What this means is that the discipline, the awareness to know what we possess, has placed him beyond the duality of success or failure. Each of us has “all the water.” There is never a lack. “All the water” is the realization that we have the means to perceive reality for what it is. “He had got” refers not to a new acquisition but to the primal presence of awareness from the start. We all have the 90% water-bodies wherein to fish for truth and where all manner of fish are to be found. Simple Simon is not going to go fishing in troubled waters or in polluted waters or in lifeless waters. All seven oceans are “all the water he had got” because that is the limit alloted to babies and grandmothers, warriors and monks. People fish in troubled waters when they step outside themselves aiming at concepts while whale blood throbs at their temples.
He had water. He was not stuck in some desert, dreaming impossibilities. He had what it took, and the little bit he had

          was in his mother’s pail.

Absolutely! In his mother’s pail and nowhere else! And who is this mother? Isn’t she, nameless and generic, the mother of us all? She is Kwannon herself, and if you ever forget your mother’s real name you may call her Kwannon and she will let you use her pail for the water of life to contain you.

Yes, it is Kwannon. Her pail is the fish-full bowl of waters circumscribing the earth with its blessed coastines, its ocean depths, its air-blown clouds and wind, its sunshine and its life. Simple Simon is going a-fishing in his mother’s pail. Where else do we fish? All the whales in the world are ignorantly awash in that pail so conveniently at hand. In this four-line poem there is no talk of lines and hooks, harpoons or death. We are going a-fishing the only way to catch the whale!

More tutorials