Here is a beautiful, many-layered doha by the Mongolian scholar-poet Zava Damdin (b. 1976), accompanied by interpretive notes intended to support intercultural understanding for readers interested in the perspectives that have shaped this reading. The notes are offered not as definitive readings, but as an invitation into a broader view of Buddhist lifeworlds and their contemporary expression.
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FIVE HUNDRED GLANCES
(English Translation)
At the gate of the great palace, toward the honoured northern place;
from the far bank of the river, when going down to draw water;
in the marketplace, when hands brushed lightly together;
from one passing boat toward another passing boat;
like the glance between the fisherman’s daughter
and the helmsman’s son aboard the dragon-boat;
On the boundless steppe, like the gaze of a heroic rider
flying forward through the gallop, over his horse’s mane;
like the gaze of the admirable tender of flowers
as she walked before the flower garden;
like the glance of the young painter
walking among the trees;
As someone, from the window of the writing school,
looked toward that scribe;
like gazing in prayer and devotion
after the one who had gone beneath the mountain to practise as a hermit;
like looking, for reasons unknown,
only at that one person in the midst of the crowd;
like a hand, unintentionally raised in farewell,*
at the railway station;
Thus, in this way, two beings, each toward the other,
five hundred times—
in five hundred births, perhaps in even more*—
for only a few brief instants,
brief enough to be measured in inches,*
their eyes met, and they held one another’s gaze.
It is said that those two human beings
came to meet and find one another
in this present life.
The poet-boy of Dragon Mountain
07.04.2026
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ТАВАН ЗУУН УДААГИЙН ХАРЦ
(Mongolian Original)
Их ордны үүдээр хоймор өөд лүгээ
Голын нөгөө эргээс ус авахуй дороон
Зах зээлийн газар гар шүргэхүй лүгээ
Зөрөн өнгөрөх завин дээрээс нөгөө завь лугаа
Загасчны охин луут онгоцны сартваахь хөвгүүний харц лугаа
Уужим талд баатар эр морин дэл дээр давхиан дундаа
Бахархам цэцэгчин бээр цэцэглигийн өмнүүр алхсан түүн лүгээ
Зураач залуу моддын дунд алхаж агсан түүний харц лугаа
Нэгэн бээр бичгийн сургуулийн цонхоор бичээч түүний зүг лүгээ
Уулан дор дияанчлахаар одсон түүнийг залбиран биширч харахуй лугаа
Олны дунд гагцхан түүнийг яагаад ч юм ширтэхүй лүгээ
Галт тэргэний буудал дээр санамсаргүй гараа даллан үдэхүй лүгээ
Ийн тийн хоёр бодгаль нэгэн нэгэн лүгээ таван зуун удаа
Таван зуун төрөлдөө, магадгүй түүнээс олон төрөлдөө
Инчдэх хэдхэн хором дор харц тулгаран ширтэлцсэнээр
Тэр хоёр хүмүүн энэ насан дор уулзан учирмуй хэмээжүхүй
Луут Уулын шүлэгч хөвгүүн
07.04.2026
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Translation is always an interpretation into another culture and one of its languages. If there are any errors of judgement in this article, they are of my own making, and for those I humbly apologise.
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NOTES
A. Lineation and Architecture
Zava Rinpoche’s original doha already has clusters, even though it is printed as a continuous sequence (cf. above). The English translation adjusts the lineation into stanzaic groupings not to replace the Mongolian form, but to make visible the poem’s own sequence of karmic glances.
Its imagery moves in waves: from worldly crossings into expansive and aesthetic seeing, then toward interior, devotional, and parting glances, before gathering into karmic explanation through five hundred times, five hundred births, and “brief enough to be measured in inches” moments of mutual gaze (инчдэх хэдхэн хором; see below), and finally into present-life ripening and recognition. So the stanza breaks are intended to help the English-language reader feel the poem’s architecture. The stanza breaks are interpretive, but not arbitrary: a way of showing how the poem travels from image, to pattern, to meaning.
* * *
“Brief enough to be measured in inches” translates the unusual Mongolian phrase “инчдэх хэдхэн хором”. Built from инч (“inch”), it makes time feel spatially tiny: the moment is not only brief, but almost physically measurable. This is worth noting because the doha as a whole is concerned … with such eloquence … not only with perception, but with the moment perception turns into recognition. This phrase expresses this particular concern in its most compressed form.
B. Each Glance as Karmic Trace
In my reading of this doha, each glance becomes a small karmic event: a brief, unfinished act of seeing that may nevertheless leave its trace.
1. Palace gate → honoured northern place. A glance of reverence and social orientation. It begins at a threshold and turns toward the хоймор, the honoured northern place in a Mongolian ger, where sacred objects, elders, and honoured guests are traditionally placed and seated. This is seeing shaped by rank, sacredness, and aspiration.
2. Riverbank → drawing water. A glance of daily necessity. Water-drawing is ordinary, bodily, repetitive. Karma here is not grand; it is woven into the humble acts by which life continues.
3. Marketplace → hands brushing. A glance of accidental contact. The market is crowded, worldly, full of exchange. Somehow, this is like the karma of touch almost before recognition: a hand brushes, and a connection flickers.
4. Passing boats → one boat to another. A glance of paths crossing and separation. The two are already moving past each other. This is encounter as transit: brief, beautiful, almost missed.
5. Fisherman’s daughter and helmsman’s son on the dragon-boat. A glance of youth, water, and karmically conditioned passage. The image is more legendary. It suggests two beings carried by different lineages or vessels, meeting through the shared medium of movement. The image of the луут онгоц (“dragon-boat”) adds a broader cultural-historical resonance, carrying associations of ceremony, water-crossing, Chinese tradition, and auspicious power into the poem’s sequence of passing glances.
6. Heroic rider on the boundless steppe. A glance of speed and vastness. The look occurs in motion, across open space. It carries epic energy: recognition flashing through the rush of life.
7. Flower-keeper before the flower garden. A glance of cultivated beauty. Here the karmic look is gentler: a seeing associated with tending, blossoming, fragrance, and impermanence.
8. Young painter among the trees. A glance of aesthetic perception. This is not merely looking at someone; it is seeing as an artist sees—through form, light, distance, and inward attention.
9. From the writing-school window toward the scribe. A glance of learning and inscription. The window separates, while writing preserves. This glance suggests feeling at the threshold of inscription, where what is seen begins to become something written, copied, or remembered.
10. Gazing reverently at the one gone beneath the mountain to practise as a hermit. A glance of devotion. For me, this seems the clearest Buddhist-inflected moment. Seeing becomes reverence rather than possession; the gaze is directed toward practice, renunciation, and the discipline of serious study.
11. In the crowd, staring only at that one person. A glance of unexplained recognition. Among many, one person shines out. This appears to be a karmic affinity felt before it is understood.
12. Railway station farewell. A glance of modern parting. The poem ends its catalogue in a recognisably modern space: train, departure, a hand unintentionally raised in farewell. In the original Mongolian, санамсаргүй can suggest “by chance,” “accidentally,” or “unintentionally”; I chose “unintentionally” because I think it makes the gesture feel inward and embodied, as though an old karmic affinity between the two beings surfaces through the body before it becomes fully recognised. From a contemporary Buddhist perspective, karma is not an idea confined to ancient or Mongolian pastoral worlds; it continues into modern motion, separation, and ordinary gestures.
Rinpoche’s doha offers us these twelve scenes of glancing before turning to its explicit karmic explanation. I do not take this as a strict doctrinal encoding of the twelve links of dependent arising, but the number is suggestive: twelve gives the sequence a sense of fullness, and in a Buddhist context it may faintly echo the logic of conditioned arising. More importantly, the twelve glances show relation appearing across many conditions — social, ordinary, aesthetic, devotional, and modern — before the poem gathers them into the meeting of two human beings in this life.
C. The Order of “Seeing”
The sequence of “glances” moves from honour, to ordinary life, to contact, to journey, to romance, to heroic space, to beauty, to art, to writing, to devotion, to recognition, and finally to farewell. The order matters. It gradually widens the meaning of a glance. At first, looking is directional: toward the honoured place, toward water, toward another boat. Then it becomes more personal: lovers, riders, gardeners, painters, scribes. Then it becomes inward and karmic: devotion, inexplicable recognition, parting. The doha therefore moves from the visible world into the less visible, if not invisible, logic of relation.
Why this sequence? Possibly, because it stages saṃsāra as a field of passing scenes. Palace, river, market, boat, steppe, garden, school, mountain, crowd, station: each opens a different human world in which seeing may leave a trace. The final meeting of two human beings is therefore intimate, but not merely private; it emerges from a larger Buddhist sense of relation, in which recognition ripens from an accumulation of countless small, cascading moments.
D. Five Hundred and the Logic of Encounter
The number таван зуун (“five hundred”) can be read symbolically rather than arithmetically. First, in Buddhist narrative and visual culture, “five hundred” often marks a spiritually charged multitude, as in the tradition of the Five Hundred Arhats: enlightened disciples of the Buddha and protectors of the Buddhist teaching. Museum and exhibition accounts of the Five Hundred Arhats describe them not merely as a counted group but as an iconic assembly, often represented through many individualised figures, each bearing a distinct expression or mode of presence.¹
Second, and I think more centrally for this doha, “Таван зуун удаагийн харц” strongly recalls the widely circulated Chinese Buddhist-romantic formula often translated as: “five hundred backward glances in a previous life are exchanged for one brushing-past in this life.” The phrase is often introduced in popular circulation as something “the Buddha said,” but this attribution is doubtful; Chinese Buddhist commentators have explicitly warned that such lines are not scriptural, and other discussions trace the formulation instead to modern Chinese-language romantic poetry, especially Xi Murong’s “Looking Back” and the broader “five hundred years before the Buddha” motif in “A Tree in Bloom.”²
E. An Older Register, A Present Voice
Zava Damdin’s beautiful, many-layered doha belongs to a contemporary moment, yet reaches toward an older Mongolian literary register: its reflective self-positioning, archaic particles, dialogic teaching form, and movement between landscape, song, and Buddhist counsel recall the Mongolian tradition of surgaal, or instructional poetry, in which verse carries ethical and contemplative reflection into vivid, accessible language.³
In Five Hundred Glances, this older literary modality of poetic expression is joined to an epistemology of karmic encounter. The poem does not offer one backward glance and one passing encounter, but expands the idea into a whole catalogue of glances across palace, river, market, boat, steppe, garden, school, mountain, crowd, and railway station. The number is then loosened by the poem’s own phrase магадгүй түүнээс олон төрөлдөө (“perhaps in even more births than that”), so “five hundred” becomes a threshold of karmic density rather than a closed calculation.
From my perspective, the doha’s movement comes finally to rest in four simple recognitions:
A glance is small
Repeated glances become karmic tendency
Across births, tendency becomes affinity
In this life, affinity appears as recognition.
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¹ Cleveland Museum of Art, “The Five Hundred Arhats,” object page for Wu Bin, The Five Hundred Arhats, accessed May 14, 2026, which describes luohans/arhats as “disciples of the Buddha and protectors of the Buddha’s law”; Powerhouse Museum, “Five Hundred Arhats of Changnyeongsa,” exhibition page, 2021–2022, which describes the Five Hundred Arhats as “enlightened disciples of the Buddha” discovered among the ruins of Changnyeongsa Temple.
² Chongci fashi, “Use Buddhist Learning to Benefit Sentient Beings; Do Not Borrow the Buddha’s Name to Mislead Them,” Ifeng Jiangxi, July 11, 2018, which lists the popular “five hundred glances” saying among statements that are “fundamentally not spoken by the Buddha”; “The Buddha Said: I Never Said Anything—On ‘Pseudo-Buddhist’ Sayings,” Douban, March 3, 2012, which traces the line to Xi Murong’s “Looking Back” rather than to Buddhist scripture; Xi Murong, “A Tree in Bloom,” trans. Ling Chung and Sean Golden, in Renditions 27–28 (1987), where the speaker says, “I have prayed to Buddha for five hundred years, / Asking him to realise our karma of love.”
³ Isabelle Charleux, “The Danzanravjaa Museum in the Mongolian Gobi,” Civilisations 71, no. 2 (2022): see especially her discussion of Danzanravjaa’s poems as Buddhist instructional poems, or surgaal.
End of transcript.
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