by Hiroaki Sato
Across the still lake
through upcurls of morning mist—
the cry of a loon
The old rooster crows . . .
Out of the mist come the rocks
and the twisted pine
But most write like John Wills, the most admired American “nature haiku writer.”
honeysuckle . . .
and for each blossom
a bee
river bluff . . .
a hawk sails out drops down
over the pines
Paul O. Williams belongs to the majority:
wind fills the air
with this year’s leaves—
all perfect leaves
In adopting the tercet, those who write haiku in English are doing the exact opposite of those who write haiku in Japanese: practically all Japanese haiku writers use a monolinear form. In syllabic count, virtually all Japanese haiku writers stick to seventeen syllables, whereas the majority of English haiku writers don’t, as just noted. So, in these two respects, you can say English and Japanese writers have reversed themselves.
In form, in fact, English writers are more venturesome, more willing to experiment than their Japanese counterparts. Some English writers have written concrete or calligrammic haiku. Here are some one-line haiku.
the sun lights up a distant ridge another
—John Wills
blackbird and nightfall sharing the darkness
—Virginia Brady Young
a stick goes over the falls at sunset
—Cor van den Heuvel
As for the content of the haiku, one big question in the United States—if only because the standard idea of haiku, in both Japan and the States, is that it describes a seasonal change—is whether the concept of kigo, “seasonal words,” should be adopted in English haiku as well. This question, actually, is most often asked by the Japanese who are suspicious about haiku written not just in English, but in any foreign language.
At any rate, in recent years some American haiku practitioners have taken up kigo seriously. For example, Bill Higginson, an important figure in what the great haiku anthologist Cor van den Heuvel calls “the haiku movement” in this country, is now pushing the idea in earnest and is even compiling an anthology of haiku indicating the four seasons.†
I do not necessarily object to this movement or effort, but I think creating what may be called a seasonal paradigm comparable to the one that exists in Japan is going to be difficult mainly for two reasons that have nothing to do with the size of the country or climactic variations. Japan is one-twentieth the size of the United States but is not that small; the United States is simply big. Furthermore, Japan’s climactic variations are comparable to the whole range of the East Coast, from Florida to Maine.
One difficulty arises from the fact that Japan is culturally uni-centered whereas the United States is multicentered. Most of Japan’s literary and aesthetic notions were first formed and elaborated upon in Kyoto centuries ago and then carried to outlying provinces. This cultural uni-centralism has allowed the creation and maintenance of things like the seasonal paradigm—not a likely possibility in this country.
There are also the different structures of human relationships in Japan and America. I do not wholeheartedly subscribe to the vertical versus horizontal, group versus individual dichotomy in social relations, most famously propounded by the Japanese social anthropologist Nakane Chie. Still, compared with the Americans, the Japanese do tend to form groups and, in each group, create and accept a teacher- student relationship.
American haiku writers also form groups or associations, but they do so mainly for the casual purpose of getting together with other people or having their pieces published. They do not do so to have one “teacher” or “master” and allow themselves to be guided and led by that person. Most American haiku writers would be shocked to learn that the primary task of the head of any haiku society in Japan, called kessha, is to revise his or her students’ haiku at will, automatically, routinely. Americans are too independent to allow that kind of thing to happen.
* * *
* This may be Williams’s revision of Blyth’s translation in Haiku, vol 2, Spring:
Under the cherry-trees,
On soup, and fish-salad and all,
Flower petals.
† The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World (Berkley, CA: reprint Stone Bridge Press, 2008).
What Is Haiku?: Serious and Playful Aspects
Unlike John Donne, Matsuo Bashō was not a man of the cloth, but he is nevertheless famed for having sought to attain spiritual grace through poetry. In Japan, seeking spiritual grace, or the process of working for it, by nonreligious means is expressed by the Chinese character 道, which reads michi in Japanese (or dō in its sinified Japanese) and tao (or dao) in Chinese. It means “way,” “path,” “trail.”
Now, if tao makes some think of Taoism at once, dō may make many think of various fields of mastery pursued with a sensei. So, there is the act of serving and drinking a bowl of tea which, if practiced according to form for a sustained period of time, is called chadō, “the way of tea.” There is the purposeful act of arranging flowers, called kadō, “the way of the flower” (more commonly known as ikebana, “keeping flowers alive”). There is Japanese-style fencing, called kendō, “the way of the sword.” There is jūdō (judo), “the way of pliance.” There is “the way of matching your breath to that of Heaven and Earth,” aikidō. There is even hōchōdō, “the way of the kitchen knife.”
Actually, this last, “the way of the kitchen knife,” may be far older than “the way of tea,” which, you may be surprised to learn, João Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary who was in Japan from the sixteenth to the seventheenth century, studied and wrote about.* At the time Japan was in the midst of its Age of Warring States, and lords and lordlings loved what is otherwise known as “the tea ceremony.” In fact, the story of how “the way of the kitchen knife” came about could be the mother of the origins of all these “ways,” at least as the Japanese have idealized them. It appears in the Chuang Tzu about a cook (or butcher) who cut up an ox skillfully for Lord Wen-sui. Here’s part of the episode, translated by Burton Watson:
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-sui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way [道], which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants, etc.
The one called “Cook Ting” appears to have originally referred to a skilled cook named Pau-ting. But it came to mean any cook. In Japan, it underwent further transformation and came to mean not the cook but his utensil, “kitchen knife” (hōchō).
The Chuang Tzu is a primary Taoist text, of course. As it happens, Taoism is counted among “China’s three great religions,” along with Confucianism and Buddhism. But neither Taoism nor Confucianism may be properly called a “religion” in some important aspects. As the sinologist and philosopher Herrlee G. Creel has noted in What Is Taoism?, for the Confucians who first used tao in the Analects, the term meant “the way, the method, of right conduct for the individual and for the state” (Analects 7:6: “Aspire to attain the Way, rely on virtue, live by benevolence, and be free in the arts”), and for the Taoists, it meant “not merely a substance and a thing” but “the only substance and the only thing, for it is the totality of all things whatsoever.” So Confucianism and Taoism lay out philosophical, rather than religious, principles. In contrast, Buddhism, which reached Japan as translated and explicated in Chinese, surely is a religion. And tao in Buddhist texts could mean the religion itself, the state of ultimate grace a Buddhist
may achieve.
What complicates the matter is a good deal of amalgamation of the three, “religions” that occurred in China and, accordingly, in Japan. Bashō, like many of his contemporaries in Japan, was influenced by the three. As a result, the meaning of 道 at times is often misleading and ambiguous. The same is true of the Japanese word for it, michi.
In English discussion, another question arises: whether to capitalize michi, dō, or tao in translation. Herrlee G. Creel observed, “It seems impossible to find an appropriate rule for capitalizing tao,” adding, “I therefore always write it lower case, which accords with Taoist philosophy.” In contrast, Herbert A. Giles, who called his History of Chinese Literature (1901) “the first attempt made in any language, including Chinese, to produce a history of Chinese literature,” simply used upper case, giving the famous opening statement of the Tao-Tê-Ching in English this way: “The Way (Tao) which can be walked upon is not the eternal Way.” In his rendition of the episode from the Chuang Tzu quoted above, Burton Watson followed suit. In the rest of this essay, I use upper case.
All this leads me to the image of Bashō as a secular seeker of the Way as typically seen in one of his more famous hokku:
此道や行人なしに龝の暮
Kono michi ya yuku hito nashi ni aki no kure
This road: no one’s taking it as autumn ends
Written only about two weeks before his death, on the twelfth of Tenth Month of the seventh year of Genroku (1694), this hokku—with 道 read as michi and translated as “road”—has provoked commentators to see in it the isolation, or even the despair, of a man who at the end of his life realized the vanity of his effort to attain the Way.
Representative of this view is the account of Kagami Shikō, one of Bashō’s disciples, who traced the places his master had visited in the last years of his life and wrote an account in the anthology The Travel Casket Diary (Oi Nikki), where he cited this hokku immediately followed by a note that Bashō “walked the michi all by himself, with no one else following him; thus some gave [the hokku] the title ‘Some Thought’ (所思) and they did a half kasen.” Shikō was with Bashō in his last days.
Interpretations since Shikō have emphasized the philosophical implications of Bashō’s michi to a greater or lesser degree. At one time the emphasis reached such a point that the indefatigable haiku commentator Yamamoto Kenkichi felt compelled to pose a rhetorical question: “Why do people have to connect these hokku to haikai-dō and interpret it?” The word haikaidō is of course “the way of haikai.”
Bashō wrote haikai, the variety of renga that employs the use of everyday language, though in a limited sense, and quotidian subject matter, distinguishing it from the orthodox renga that followed elegant diction and subject matter approved by the aristocratic court. Renga, a sequential form of verse that supposed participation of two or more people, from the outset possessed the features of a game and was often regarded as one. Especially after it was freed from court constraints, it became an ever more competitive game with monetary prizes as its chief attraction. In this verse-writing, someone like Bashō, with the title of sōshō, “master,” was paid either to preside over a session as the participating judge or to judge submissions. It was by no means an easy medium in which to seek the Way.
Bashō tried, nonetheless. In his letter to the samurai poet Suganuma Kyokusui, dated the eighteenth of Second Month 1692, he divided haikai practitioners into three categories:
When it comes to the Way of Poetry [fūga no michi], there are generally three grades of people, as I see it. There are those who run around, trying day and night to make points, vying to win, with no attempt to see the Way [michi]. These may be called confused noise-makers in poetry. But because they help fill the stomachs of the wives and children of the judges and replenish the money-boxes of their landlords, what they do is better than doing evil things.
Then, there are those who, though wealthy, refrain from engaging in ostentatious pleasures. Looking upon haikai writing as better than gossiping about other people, they compose two or three sequences for winning points, day or night, but do not boast when they win, nor become angry even when they lose. Whatever may happen, they at once set out to work out a new sequence and try to come up with clever ideas during the brief space of time that a fifth of an incense stick takes to burn. When it’s finished they delight in the points given instantly, just like boys playing cards. These people nevertheless arrange food and provide adequate wine, thereby helping the poor and fattening judges. In that sense they, too, in some way contribute to the establishment of the Way.
Then, there are fellows who work hard for the goal of true poetry and soothe their hearts by doing so. These do not easily take to criticizing others, and with the thought that poetry writing is another vehicle for entering the True Way [makoto no michi], explore the spirit of [Fujiwara no] Teika, trace the intent of Saigyō, examine the heart of Po Chu-i, and enter the mind of Tu Fu—all of the remote past. There are so few of these that, the ones in the capital and the ones in the countryside combined, you can readily count them with your ten fingers. You are to be one of those few. It is understandable that you should take great care and work hard at it.
Here, Bashō was talking about the competitive haikai composition called tentori where the participants tried to earn the most points from the “point-giver” (tenja), i.e., judge. This led the judge to decide the number of points depending upon the size of the award he could expect from the winner in return—a bribery. A haikai session often required the participants to complete a thirty-six-unit sequence of renga within a certain length of time and measured the time by burning an “incense stick.”
In the last paragraph, the “True Way” is interpreted to mean Buddhism, and the original word for “hard work” at the end is shugyō, the process of ascetic training in accordance with Buddhist precepts.
This letter is known as the “Letter of Three Grades” (santō no fumi). Kyokusui, the recipient of this complimentary epistle, was a second-ranking house administrator of the Zeze Fiefdom, Province of Ōmi (today’s Shiga). A man of rectitude, he killed the top house administrator for his wrongdoings with a single stab of a spear and disemboweled himself on the spot. Bashō felt close to him.
Buddhism, Japanese Poetry, and Shunzei
The idea of linking verse-writing to Buddhism is old. An early example is an attempt by Fujiwara no Kintō to rank tanka in the manner of kuhon, the “nine grades” that are thought to exist in the Buddhist Paradise. Kintō’s use of a religious term may not, however, have implied anything deep, but soon enough the idea that “Japanese poetry (waka) and Buddhism are utterly inseparable” prevailed. In this regard, I may cite Fujiwara no Shunzei, in particular.
Shunzei sought to explain his reason for being a poet and a Buddhist by trying to enter Buddhahood through poetry. In the preface to the seventh Imperial poetry anthology, the Collection for a Thousand Generations (Senzai shū), that he edited in 1188, he posited that it would be wrong to assume the eventual attainment of the lofty state of the way of poetry (uta no michi) “without being enlightened as to the profound Law (Dharma) of Varanasi and Kapilavastu,” that is, the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
About a decade later, in 1197, when he prepared his treatise on poetics with a mini-anthology called Styles of Poetry Since Ancient Times (Korai fūtei shō) for Princess Shikishi (d. 1201), Shunzei was more forthright. In it he argued that poetry could be an opportunity to lead oneself to the Way of Buddha because it revealed profound truths. Poetry, he said, may be all “fiction and rhetoric” (浮言綺語 fugen kigyo)—among the ten Buddhism proscriptions; Po Chu-i referred to the same idea in one of his prose pieces—but is it not the fundamental tenet of Buddhism that “passions themselves are Bodhi (i.e., salvation)”? Also, does not the Lotus Sutra say, “If [a believer] refers to popular classics, maxims for ruling the world, means of livelihood, and so forth, all will
coincide with the True Law”? Finally, does not the Sutra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue say, “What is sin? What is happiness? Neither has a determinant. It all depends on your mind”?
At the core of Shunzei’s argument lay the Mohezhiguan (Makashikan in Japanese), to which he refers at the beginning of the Styles of Poetry. A book in ten volumes that spells out the philosophical basis of Zen as expounded by the Chinese monk Zhiyi (Chigi), the Mohezhiguan essentially holds that meditation carried out in “concentration and contemplation” (zhiguan, Japanese shikan)—zhi (shi), “concentration,” a translation of Sanskrit śamatha; guan (kan), “contemplation,” a translation of vipaśyanā, meaning dhyana, Zen or zazen—is central to the understanding of the Way of Buddha. And it is said that the Japanese interpreters of Tiantai (Tendai) Buddhism, which Zhiyi established, stressed the attainment of the Way through imagery formed in the state of concentration and contemplation.
(The first complete set of instructions for zazen, Tiantai xiao zhiguan—Tendai shō shikan in Japanese—was translated into English as On the Method of Practicing Concentration and Contemplation by Okakura Tenshin [also Kakuzō], and appeared in Harvard Theological Review, April 1923, XVI.2, with an expert introduction by William Sturgis Bigelow.)
Shunzei’s son, Teika, whom Bashō also mentions in his letter, directly linked zhiguan and poetry when he said in his treatise on poetics, Notes for Monthly Lessons (Maigetsu shō): “You may manage to make a good poem, albeit seldom, only if you entered the state of grace by making your mind completely clear.” (Like his father, Teika took Buddhist vows late in his life, and he copied the entirety of the Mohezhiguan, but he is thought to have been among the least-religious poets of his day.)