To what can we liken human life?

Perhaps to a wild swan’s footprints on mud or snow:

By chance its claws imprint the mud

Before it flies off at random, east or west.

The old monk is dead and a new pagoda built;

The old wall has crumbled, the poem we wrote on it gone.

Do you still remember this rugged mountain path,

the long way, or exhaustion and how the lame donkey brayed?