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Matsuo Basho and Zen Haiku
Since the writing of haiku poetry has been a popular pastime in Japan since the 17th century, it is hardly possible to call the whole body of haiku "Zen literature." Nevertheless, Zen thought and experience have had a pervasive influence upon the practice of this art.
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) was the poet who lifted the 17-syllable haiku out of the earlier--and longer--forms of waka and renga poetry to make of it a genre in its own right. During his lifetime several poets, principally Kikaku, Ransetsu, Kyorai, Joso, Kyoroku, Shiko, Sampu, Yaha and Hokushi, became his devoted students, embodying in their own poetry the aesthetic principles Basho had taught them. Thus a poetic tradition was established, and was passed on through the generations.
It is generally believed that Basho was trained as a Buddhist monk at Kinpukuji in Kyoto during the years 1666-1671, where his studies included Japanese and Chinese classics and calligraphy. In 1672 he moved to Edo (Tokyo), where he became actively engaged in writing poetry. Throughout the years of his residence in this city (1673-1684) he also practiced Zen meditation under the guidance of Buchho, a priest residing at Chokeiji Temple.
In the summer of 1684, he started out on one of his long walking journeys. In the beginning of the book he wrote about his travels, The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, he writes:
Following the example of the ancient priest who is said to have traveled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyokyo among the wails of the Autumn wind.
And, like a priest, Basho wore the black robes of the Buddhist monk, a habit he would retain for the rest of his life.
In the record of another trip, A Visit to the Kashima Shrine, Basho comments upon his own view as a religious in the following passage:
I wandered out on to the road one day this past autumn, possessed by an irresistible desire to see the rise of the full moon over the mountains of the Kashima Shrine. I was accompanied by a masterless youth and a wandering priest. The latter was clad in a robe black as a crow, with a bundle of sacred stoles around his neck, and on his back a portable shrine containing a holy image of the Buddha-after-enlightenment. This priest, brandishing his long stick, stepped into the road, ahead of all the others, as if he had a free pass to the World beyond the Gateless Gate. I, too, was clad in a black robe, but neither priest nor an ordinary man of this world was I, for I wavered ceaselessly like a bat that passes for a bird at one time and for a mouse at another.
In a book written in his later years, An Account of the Unreal Dwelling (1690), he described the personal development that led him to dedicate himself to the truth throughout poetry:
As I look back over the past years, reflecting on the blunders committed by my awkward self, I remember that at one time it was my ambition to become a high official with a large fief, and at another I intended to enter a Buddhist monastery and lead a lift of painful wanderings with wind and cloud, racking my brains over poems about flowers and birds. Since this has become my source of livelihood, though I am ungifted by nature and without skill, nevertheless, I have now devoted myself to this art alone.
Thus we can regard Basho as a lay Buddhist monk-poet, since, in addition to wearing the garb of a monk, he continued to be celibate, poor, virtually homeless, and single-minded in his pursuit of truth. He describes his living habits in a passage in The Record of a Travel-worn Sachel:
Since I had nowhere permanent to stay, I had no interest whatever in keeping treasures, and since I was empty-handed, I had no fear of being robbed on the way. I walked at full ease, scorning the pleasure of riding in a palanquin, and filled my hungry stomach with coarse food, shunning the luxury of meat. I bent my steps in whatever direction I wished, having no itinerary to follow. My only mundane concerns were whether I would be able to find a suitably place to sleep at night and whether the straw sandals were the right size for my feet.
In the midst of the plain
Sings the skylark
Free of all things
Given this kind of religious background, it is not surprising that the aesthetic principles Basho taught his poet disciples are in keeping with Zen Buddhist values.
When he began to exert his influence, the poetry of his day was in a degenerate state. There were two schools: the Serious School, given to imitation of the elegant and superficial themes of traditional aristocratic poetry, and the Non-serious School, which satirized the themes of the Serious School in clever and even vulgar word play. Basho, without alienating himself from these groups of poets, suggested a fresh approach.
First, Basho recommended that poets choose commonplace events as their subject matter.
I woke up suddenly
With the ice of a night
When the water-pot burst.
The substance of this poem was closer to Basho's experience than a fine lady's robe of gauze or a feudal lord commanding his retainers. It was closer to his poet-friends' experience too. ["Zen is your everyday life!"] And a good deal more vividly real for that reason.
Shiko, one of Basho's disciples, in Kuzu no Matsubara, a collection of his critical essays, gives an account of circumstances surrounding Basho's writing his most famous poem:
Old pond
Frog jumps in
Splash!
This poem was written by our master on a spring day. He was sitting in his riverside house in Edo, bending his ears to the soft cooing of a pigeon in the quiet rain. There was a mild wind in the air, and one or two petals of cherry blossoms were falling gently to the ground. It was the kind of day you often have in late March--so perfect that you want it to last forever. Now and then in the garden was heard the sound of frogs jumping into the water. Our master was deeply immersed in meditation, but finally he came out with the second half of the poem, "Frog jumps in/Splash!" Our master thought for a while, but finally he decided on "Old pond." The disciple's suggestion is admittedly picturesque and beautiful, but our master's choice, being simpler, contains more truth in it.
Basho recommended not only everyday experience as the subject matter of poetry, but everyday language as well. It was pungent, lively, direct, and put the poet closer in touch with the concrete reality of his material existence.
First winter rain
The monkey also seems to wish for
A straw raincoat
For poets of his day such language was a radical departure from the elegant but limited vocabulary they traditionally associated with writing poetry. If the language common to all the people in the society was used, then poetry was no longer the exclusive province of the aristocracy; common people could begin to appreciate the poetry written in their own idiom, and could even begin to write it as well. Basho's hope was that poetry would beautify plain speech, and that the intrinsic poetry in the language of the people could be realized in the composition of haiku. In his efforts to raise poetry above class, Basho came to be known as the people's poet, and his haiku the poetry that was meant especially for them.
The seed of all song
Is the farmer's busy hum
As he plants his rice.
In Basho's mind, colloquial language did not include vulgar slang. The subject matter was to be treated with gravity and loftiness of feeling. As he phrased it:
What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and, returning to the world of our daily experience, to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
The autumn full moon
All night long
I walked around the lake
Colloquial idiom thus became characteristic of haiku. Curiously enough, but hardly by mere coincidence, the language of the anecdotes, the sermons, the Zen dialogues, in fact the major part of those works we can label as "Zen literature" are also written in conversational style! Basho's insistence on the language of the common man is also consonant with the Zen Buddhist view that all sentient beings are equal in their innate possession of "Buddha Nature," or, to phrase it another way, in their innate potential for becoming enlightened. Basho phrased it poetically in one of his recorded talks this way:
Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of all creation--mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity--and enjoy the falling blossoms and scattering leaves. (Yamanaka Mondo)
Animals are also Basho's companions:
High on the mountain
Faintly we heard far below
A skylark singing
When the hawk's eye darkens
The little quail
Begin to chirp
On a withered bough
A crow is perched
This autumn evening
Of an early death
Showing no sign
The cicada's voice
Basho included even "non-sentient" things in the embrace of his sympathies:
Every form of insentient existence--plants, stones or utensils--has its individual feelings similar to those of men. (Zoku Goron)
All day in the gray sun
Hollyhocks following sun's
Invisible road
Yield to the willow
All the loathing, all the desire
Of your heart
Though thin and weak
The chrysanthemum
Inevitably will bud
The Zen influence upon Basho's life and his writing is once more evident in the instructions he gives to his disciples on the way to prepare themselves for writing a poem:
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one--when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural--if the object and yourself are separate--then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. Submerge yourself into the object until its intrinsic nature becomes apparent, stimulating poetic impulse. (Sanzoshi)
This aesthetic is echoed in the testimonies of other fine artists in the Japanese tradition: painters, potters, sculptors. There are folk tales describing the tiger, for instance, that was so realistically painted it walked out of the painting and disappeared! And the Japanese have a word for the state of mind out of which genuine creativity rises: zammai, which is the Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit word samadhi. Only if the artist can totally lose his discriminatory sense of me/other--for even a brief period of time--can he hope to have grasped the essential nature of the object he would like to express or re-create on paper or canvas.
For the individual trained in the practice of Zen meditation, this state of mind is what he works at constantly, not only in sitting meditation, but in his daily activities. "No secondary thoughts!" as Senzaki Roshi put it. Immersion in quietness or in activity not only reduces the painful sense of self-seperateness that, according to Buddhist thought, is the source of our ignorant suffering, but at precious moments, eliminates it, producing oneness and freedom. Basho himself expressed the momentariness of this experience in his haiku:
My horse Clip-clopping over the fields--Oh ho!
I too am part of the picture!
Finding one's true nature in the realization of the intrinsic identity of all things is the aesthetic/religious experience of the traditional haiku poet, which he tries to transmit in a poem that approaches in its brevity the timelessness of the experience itself. What is more remarkable is the experience of the identity-in-multiplicity of all things:
Under the cherry blossoms
None
Are utter strangers. (Issa)
serves to enhance the appreciation of the multiplicity-in-identity of things:
The two plum trees
I love their blooming
One early, one later (Buson)
To call the haiku of Basho and those poets who followed in his footsteps "Zen literature" simply implies that they can be included with those other forms which more clearly have the literal stamp of Zen upon them. For 300 years the poems of Basho have been one of the treasures of Zen deeply appreciated by the Japanese people, who learn the poems at their mother's knee and recite them by heart throughout their lives. In this way the spirit of Zen has influenced the minds of a whole people. And now, in the 20th century, with the superb translations of R. H. Blyth (as well as other translators in other Western languages), this body of Zen literature has become a world treasure as well, joining West to East through the appeal of Nature and song to all humanity.
What silence!
The voice of the cicada
Penetrates the rocks
These essays are part of Beverly's Legacy Series, and they communicate the breadth and depth of her understanding of Zen Buddhism.