Quite a common bird of the subcontinent, males are glossy black steely blue with a small white patch on the shoulder while females are brown with upper darker both have conspicuous chestnut under tail. They are partial to stony barren ravine kind of region and spent most of the time hopping on the ground or nearby wall or post. A sprightly bird with head kept straight and high, tail cocked up, it is a delicately proportionate lovely little bird. Quite bold and could be seen around human habitat heedless to human presence but flit away at slightest hint of danger.
Last few weeks I was doing bit of search on the Net and ended up reading Yasunai Kawabata, his Nobel Prize speech (1968) is probably one of the best. While reading these I came across two poets-zen masters- Saigyo Hoshi and Dogen Zenji (I have read Dogen few years back).
Saigyo Hoshi (1118-1190) was one of the great poets whose influence include none other than Basho. His poems expressed the tension between the renunciatory Buddhist ideals and his love for nature.
“Even to the heartless this sad beauty is felt: snipe-birds rising from a stream in the autumn sunset”.
The following is from disciple Kikai about Saigyo: Saigyo freque
ntly came and talked of poetry. His own attitude towards poetry, he said, was far from the ordinary. Cherry blossoms, the cuckoo, the moon, snow: confronted with all the manifold forms of nature, his eyes and his ears were filled with emptiness. And were not all the words that came forth true words? When he sang of the blossoms the blossoms were not on his mind, when he sang of the moon he did not think of the moon. As the occasion presented itself, as the urge arose, he wrote poetry. The red rainbow across the sky was as the sky taking on color. The white sunlight was as the sky growing bright. Yet the empty sky, by its nature, was not something to become bright. It was not something to take on color. With a spirit like the empty sky he gives color to all the manifold scenes but not a trace remained. In such poetry was the Buddha, the manifestation of the ultimate truth."
Dogen was a great Zen master who wrote extensively on Buddhism and even traveling to 
to seek (if all human beings are born with Buddha Nature, why is it so difficult to realize it?). The primary concept underlying Dogen's Zen practice is "oneness of practice-enlightenment" (practice and enlightenment are one and the same- the absolute reality, the soto school).
Apart from these he wrote many poems. Just before he died he wrote his ‘death poem’:
Fifty-four years lighting up the sky.
A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds.
Hah!
Entire body looks for nothing.
Living, I plunge into Yellow Springs
few more
The true person is
Not anyone in particular;
But, like the deep blue color
Of the limitless sky,
It is everyone, everywhere in the world.
The migrating bird
leaves no trace behind
and does not need a guide.
Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm,
Without looking for the traces I may have left;
A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home;
Hearing this, I tilt my head to see
Who has told me to turn back;
But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
Before I end this I would like to quote from part of the speech made by Yasunari Kawabata, 
quite interesting. I found the expression "Eyes in their Last Extremity” very much touching, deeply meaningful.
I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity". The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927). It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued:
"I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity."
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide. I had another friend who died young, an avant-garde painter. He too thought of suicide over the years, and of him I wrote in this same essay: "He seems to have said over and over that there is no art superior to death, that to die is to live," I could see, however, that for him, born in a Buddhist temple and educated in a Buddhist school, the concept of death was very different from that in the West. "Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?"
