by Hiroaki Sato
Shunzei’s rhetorical questions suggest some hesitancy, probably because the spirituality of poetry writing was not so much his conviction as his wish. Elsewhere in the Styles of Poetry he says:
Those who immerse their minds in this Way of Poetry (kono michi) all praise the Lord Buddha by employing the words of poetry in a contrary manner, pay respect to Buddha’s domain in the ten directions upon hearing the Law, and try to lead the people of this world so that after springs of ten thousand generations and autumns of a thousand years they may, on account of the profound meaning of Japanese poetry [Yamato uta], understand the inexhaustibility of the Buddhist scriptures, gain the opportunity to go to Paradise after death, and enter the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue’s Sea of Salvation.
Shunzei’s image as a man who sought to attain the Way in poetry was reinforced in a treatise on poetics called Paulownia Brazier (Kiri-hioke), which is attributed to Teika. Here’s a much-quoted passage:
As it grew extremely lucid on cold nights, my late father would turn a faint lamp away, put on a white, sooty priestly robe, tie its strings, pull and spread a quilt over it, hug a paulownia brazier under the quilt, plant his elbows on the brazier, and, utterly alone in hushed quietude and muttering on his bed, compose poems.
The treatise is regarded as a hoax, even though no less than Shōtesu, the renga master and monk of the Rinzai school of Zen, for one, believed it was authentic. One tanka of Shunzei’s that uses the word michi is well known because Teika included it in the One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets (Hyakunin isshu), a mini-anthology that has been used as a card game over the centuries. It reads:
世の中よ道こそなけれ思ひ入る山の奥にも鹿ぞ鳴くなる
Yo no naka yo michi koso nakere omoi iru yama no oku ni mo shika zo nakunaru
In this world the Way does not exist: even in the mountain depths I’ve entered, troubled, deer cry
The poem is generally understood as showing Shunzei’s decision not to take Buddhist vows. Despairing of the state of the world, he entered the mountains, the training ground for the ascetics; but he found himself perturbed by stags calling for their mates and recognized that he himself wasn’t yet capable of transcending lust and other worldly distractions.
Shunzei wrote this piece in 1140, when he was a mere twenty-six-year-old. He didn’t take Buddhist vows until he was in his sixties, after a grave illness. He nonetheless must have had fond memories of his youthful poem, for he included it in the Collection for a Thousand Generations, which he edited nearly half a century later.
Having described Shunzei, I should also describe his contemporary, Saigyō, but let me just say that the samurai turned monk, whom Retired Emperor Gotoba, a great poet himself, called “a born poet” (shōtoku no kajin) in his treatise on poetry Oral Transmissions (Gokuden), greatly helped solidify the notion that prevailed in Japan’s medieval period: “Japanese poetry and Buddhism are no different.”
Likewise, Fujiwara no Tamekane, Shunzei’s great-great-grandson and Teika’s great-grandson, did not hesitate to put poetry and Buddhism on equal footing in his Lord Kamekane’s Comments on Japanese Poetry (Tamekane-kyō waka shō): “The Way of Poetry [kono michi], which is seemingly shallow but deep, seemingly easy but difficult, is one with the Buddhist Law. Therefore, nothing personal should ever be allowed in exploring what is right and what is wrong.” Most of the first part of this statement, i.e., “seemingly shallow,” etc., borrows from Teika’s Superior Poems of Modern Times (Kindai shūka). Characteristically, though, Teika had not related poetry to Buddhism, concluding the sentence by saying, “so there aren’t many who are truly knowledgeable [of poetry].”
The renga master Shinkei, who as a Buddhist attained the rank of “acting bishop,” pushed the argument as far as it could go. His most famous treatise on renga, Idle Whispers (Sasamegoto), is interlaced with religious and moralistic pronouncements, and reads more like a sermon than a commentary on poetics. Let it suffice to quote two sentences: “From the outset, the Way of Japanese Poetry”—kadō, the sinified reading of uta no michi—“has been the dharani of our nation. If you were to argue that poetry is all rhetoric (kigyo), your pursuit would prove all illusory, even if you read sutras and commentaries on them and trained in Zen.” Dharani, in Japan, means the practice of reciting certain passages from Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit, without translation, which is said to endow the reciter with a range of virtues. “Rhetoric” (kigyo), is regarded as one of the ten evils in Buddhism, as noted earlier. Shinkei, then, equated poetry with Buddhism in absolute terms, and did not even allow the suggestion that poetry may be fiction.
It may be said that the effort to find spiritual grace in poetry peaked more or less with Shinkei, a renga poet and therefore Bashō’s predecessor. At any rate, it was this tradition that affected Bashō as he strove to elevate his poetry to something more than a game.
Was Haikai “Serious”?
Does all this mean that Bashō et al. always took poetry writing seriously? Were they all utterly devoid of humor or playfulness? Hardly. To see this, we may begin by reexamining Bashō’s hokku cited at the outset: Kono michi ya yuku hito nashi ni aki no kure (This road: no one taking it as autumn ends).
First, we remember that Bashō was a professional haikai poet. Shikō wrote The Travel Casket Diary as a memorial to the master by visiting many of his followers, who were said to number a couple of thousand, and he did so within a year after his death. Naturally, he maintained a deferential attitude and a subdued, somber tone, but at the same time, he devoted the largest part of the Diary to Bashō’s followers’ haikai.
After all, haikai has been characterized as a “literature of associates” (renju no bungaku) or a “literature of the get-together” (za no bungaku), as Ogata Tsutomu put it, in which “multiple writers take part in making a product,” as another scholar put it, and that these “associates” were at the same time the appreciators of what they made. One feature of this literary endeavor was the need to increase and keep the “associates,” and one important way of doing so was to publish anthologies for those “associates,” listing their “products.” This practice has been carried forward to the haiku groups in Japan today to a great extent, as Yamamoto Kenkichi has pointed out in The World of Haiku (Haiku no sekai).
Indeed, it is difficult to think that Bashō ever forgot his haikai business. For the haikai session that was to take place on the twenty-sixth of Ninth Month, at a teahouse in Kiyomizu (also Shimizu), Osaka, he may have been thinking of using the “This road” hokku, as he had listed it with two others in a letter written jointly on the 23rd to Kubota Isen, a rich man in Iga, and Hattori Tohō, and listed it with an alternate version for the session in his letter to Kyokusui two days later. Since Bashō did not expect a response from any of them in time, his purpose was to weigh the relative value of each hokku for the occasion himself. The alternative in his letter to Kyokusui was:
人聲や此道かへる秋のくれ
Hitogoe ya kono michi kaeru aki no kure
People’s voices: returning on this road as autumn ends
At the session, sponsored by Wada Deisoku, Bashō offered the two hokku for the twelve participants to choose from and start a sequence, according to Shikō. Deisoku chose “This road,” as his haikai anthology that he edited and published in the year of Bashō’s death shows, along with a han-kasen (half of a thirty-six-unit sequence) with a total of ten participants.
Here one might ask: What is the haikai of “This road”?
Haikai, “humor,” comes from many sources. One of them is what we might call, for lack of a better term, “literary affectation.” Literary affectation also takes many forms and guises. One of them, as in “This road,” is to allude to a work of someone who is revered and, by doing so, strike a posture—with a knowing wink. The direct source of “This road” may have been—obviously was, one might say—the following poem attributed to the legendary Ch
inese Zen recluse named Hanshan (Kanzan in Japanese).
Cold cliffs, more beautiful the deeper you enter—
Yet no one travels this road.
White clouds idle about the tall crags;
On the green peak a single monkey wails.
What other companions do I need?
I grow old doing as I please.
Though face and form alter with the years,
I hold fast to the pearl of the mind.
(from Cold Mountain, tr. Burton Watson)
You notice how Bashō’s hokku merely recasts the second line of Hanshan’s poem in Japanese—a point that is evident because of the Japanese way of “translating” Chinese by retaining as many Chinese characters as possible. From this, you can tell the only thing he added was “autumn evening.” This sort of allusion—today, many would condemn as a blatant case of plagiarism—was common, even “permissible,” for poetry composition in his day. In tanka (waka), for example, you could compose a piece with more than half of it consisting of a verbatim quote from another piece, as Fujiwara no Teika said in his manual for poetic aspirants, An Outline for Composing Tanka (Eiga taigai). (See From the Country of Eight Islands.)
Actually, for all his reputation, Hanshan, “Cold Mountain,” may not have existed even as a sizable body of poems have been handed down under his name and some prominent figures believed his existence by the early ninth century, according to Iriya Yoshitaka, a scholar of Chinese classical literature and Zen. But there is one thing that sets Hanshan, along with his supposed companion Shide (Jittoku in Japanese), apart: For centuries the two have been presented in paintings as a cheerful, childlike, raffish, buffoonish duo—regarded, that is, as embodiments of Taoist-Zen ideals—one of them often with a broom. In fact, Bashō’s haikai student, Morikawa Kyoriku, did one such painting named Kanzan (Hanshan), and when Bashō visited him and saw it, he made a hokku:
庭はきて雪をわするゝはゝきかな
Niwa hakite yuki o wasururu hahaki kana
Sweeping the garden forgetting the snow: the broom
So you might say Bashō’s allusion—an almost direct quote at that—puts forward what the Hanshan poem describes: Someone in a bright, clear landscape is happy to find himself beyond all worldly matters. There, “this road,” to wit, “the way of haikai,” and such no longer exist. That, you might say, is the haikai under the circumstance.
Still, it would be remiss for me not to point out that the Chinese poem usually cited as a possible source for Bashō’s hokku is different. It is the following one by Geng Wei (eighth century), “Autumn Day”:
A last glow of sunset lights the village:
gloom coming over me—who can I talk to?
An old road, few people passing,
autumn winds swaying the rice and millet stalks.
(tr. Burton Watson)
Deisoku, a merchant by profession and the host of the renga session, wrote the wakiku:
岨の畠の木にかゝる蔦
soba no hatake no ki ni kakaru tsuta
by the cliff, in the patch, vines hang from the trees
This wakiku also contains haikai in a similar vein—assuming that Bashō was alluding to the Hanshan poem in his hokku. In contrast to the grand Tiantai landscape that Hanshan is reputed to have haunted, Deisoku introduces a picture of a humble patch of cultivated land gone wild.
Haikai Factors Considered
There is another element that complicates our reading: the function of the hokku. As the opening unit of a renga, at least as composed for a typical session of this group activity, the hokku needed to convey a salutatory feature: the person chosen to write it, usually a master like Bashō, would greet the participants in a given session in general, and its host in particular, by saying something complimentary in his hokku. In return, the person chosen to compose the second unit would say something self-deprecating, or return the compliment; hence, the unit’s name, wakiku, a companion, supporting phrase.
The formulaic nature of renga composition meant, in practice, that the hokku writer had little room for being faithful to the state of his mind, especially if feeling gloomy. The seven-person renga session in which Bashō took part just before the one that began with “This road” illustrates this point well. It was held four days earlier, on the twenty-first of Ninth Month, at the house of Shioe Shayō. By the lunar calendar, Ninth Month is the last month of autumn, and literary convention required an autumn night to be perceived as provoking acute loneliness. It was raining, and Bashō was beginning to feel his final illness. So what did he say to greet the gathered people? He composed a hokku:
秋の夜を打崩したる咄かな
Aki no yo o uchi-kuzushitaru hanashi kana
Breaking up this autumn night: the stories you tell
In other words, Bashō’s saying that the dismal atmosphere was dispelled by the casual, perhaps often funny conversations among the participants in the gathering that evening. To this, Shayō, the host, responded with:
月まつほどは蒲團身にまく
tsuki matsu hodo wa futon mi ni maku
waiting for the moon rolled up in a futon
By convention, one was to see, or think of, the moon on an autumn night. But Shayō mentioned that heavenly body in an incongruous fashion by coupling an elegant, poetic notion with a picture of someone rolled up in a futon. His description is at once self-deprecating and humorous.
One could be more straightforwardly complimentary in the hokku if the occasion was right. This happened on the twenty-seventh of Ninth Month, or a day after the session with the “This road” hokku, when Bashō visited Shiba Sonome for a nine-person renga. Sonome, a doctor’s wife whom Bashō admired, must have been a woman of unusual elegance and talent to judge from the opening exchange. Bashō began:
白菊の目に立て見る塵もなし
Shiragiku no me ni tatete miru chiri mo nashi
White chrysanthemum with no speck of dust that strikes the eye
This alludes to one of Saigyō’s tanka:
曇りなき鏡の上にゐる塵を目に立てて見る世と思はばや
Kumori naki kagami no ue ni iru chiri o me ni tatete miru yo to omowaba ya
A speck of dust sitting on a cloudless mirror would strike the eye, we’d wish the world were
By alluding to a tanka by an exalted poet-priest of the past, Bashō reinforces the compliment inherent in his hokku. Part of the haikai of this piece is couched in the switch of the object to be faulted (or not to be faulted) from a religious person (“a cloudless mirror”) to a secular one (“a white chrysanthemum”), while implying that the latter is superior. Here, of course, the “white chrysanthemum” is an overt reference to Sonome.
To this, the hostess responded with:
紅葉に水をながす朝月
momiji ni mizu o nagasu asazuki
the morning moon lets water flow over crimson leaves
Sonome deprecates herself by saying she can only enhance Bashō’s gracious presence (“the morning moon”) with a modest landscape.
So Bashō and his haikai friends were being “playful” in a sophisticated way. This sort of humor can be a little too convoluted for us to readily grasp. A good part of at least some commentators’ work on classical haikai lies in finding out exactly where the humor comes from. But like jokes and witticisms in a foreign language, the quarry often remains elusive.
Here is Bashō’s deathbed hokku:
旅に病で夢は枯野をかけ廻る
Tabi ni yande yume wa kareno o kakemeguru
Falling ill on a journey my dreams run round a withered field
What’s playful about this? Well, Bashō was probably alluding to the following tanka by Archbishop Jien:
旅の世にまた旅寝して草まくら夢のうちにも夢をみるかな
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br /> Tabi no yo ni mata tabine shite kusamakura yume no uchi ni mo yume o miru kana
In the world of travels, again traveling I sleep: on this grass pillow I have dreams even in dreams
In this, Jien had expressed a typically Buddhist sentiment. Bashō gave it a slight twist; instead of saying the illusion itself is an illusion, he said his illusion was vigorous enough to run about in a winterscape.
Finally, yet another factor may complicate the understanding of the “This road” hokku. At the time, Bashō was stressing what would turn out to be the last phase of his pursuit for a change in haikai content: karumi, “lightness.” He advocated for constant change in content. How many times he managed to effect such change in his own work began to be discussed while he was alive. In large strokes, one can note three shifts: when he rejected the Teimon and Danrin schools that stressed wordplay and jokes; when he stressed sabi and wabi; and when he adopted karumi.
As regards this last phase, Bashō’s observation quoted in Shisan’s Different Guestroom (Betsuzashiki) is frequently cited: “The style I think of now is like looking at a shallow sandy river, being light [karuki] both in the shape of a piece and in the heart following it [ku no katachi kokoro-zuke tomo ni]. [Haikai is] meaningful when you reach that point.”
Shisan held a gathering of haikai sessions for Bashō in “a different guestroom” of his in Fifth Month 1694. Bashō was leaving Edo to travel west to his hometown, Iga, in what would turn out to be his last journey. He often traveled from Iga—northeast of today’s Mie—to Kyoto and Osaka, then back to Iga, and so forth, until he died in Tenth Month of that year. His statement on karumi is said to have stirred Osaka haikai writers when Shisan’s anthology of haikai sequences and hokku reached the region.
Privately, Bashō had, on several occasions, expressed his dissatisfaction with the inability of his associates or followers to understand and demonstrate “lightness” in their poems. For example, he complained in his letter to Mukai Kyorai, on the ninth of Eighth Month: “Here [in Iga] there are a number of [haikai] sessions, but they are still unable to move to ‘lightness,’ and it’s with reluctance that I attend them. There are only terrible pieces, and that distresses me a good deal.” He then cited two pairs with him writing the wakiku to show what he meant.