Self-Torture Never Ends

In Japan I announced that I was going to write 27,000 more poems. Just as God-realisation never ends, my self-torture also does not end. In Japan I completed 1,500 poems for Ten Thousand Flower-Flames, and by August I plan to have all 10,000 completed. Then that will be followed by Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants.

Not only in the evening of my life but actually on the last day of my life perhaps I will be writing poems. Will you read them? Get ready! In August I will start the new series, but I will go very slowly—at bullock-cart speed.

—7 January 1983