by Hiroaki Sato
折々や雨戸にさはる荻の聲
Oriori ya amado ni sawaru ogi no koe
From time to time touching the rain door silver grass’s voice
放す所におらぬ松虫
hanasu tokoro ni oranu matsumushi
the bell crickets aren’t in the released place
The hokku of this pair is by Hiro’oka Sesshi, a sake brewer in Iga. The “rain door” (amado) is a movable outermost panel of wood boards, half a dozen of them used to shut up one side or two sides of a house. Sesshi’s hokku describes silver grass, ogi (Miscanthus sinensis), an ornamental clumping grass, touching the rain door (or doors) in a breeze, possibly suggesting a lover’s visit at night. In response, Bashō’s wakiku refers to the elegant custom of releasing tinkling insects in a garden that harkens back to The Tale of Genji and before. I should add that, in this instance, matsumushi, the “pine insect” (Xenogryllus marmoratus), is what is today called suzumushi, the “bell cricket” (Homoeogryllus japonicus).
The other pair goes:
荒荒て末は海行野分哉
Arearete sue wa umi yuku nowaki kana
Wild-wildly, finally the field-cleaver goes out to the sea
靏の頭をあぐる粟の穂
tsuru no kashira o ageru awa no ho
a crane raises his head above the ears of millet
The hokku of this pair is by Kubota Ensui. What’s given as “field-cleaver” (nowaki) is an old name for the typhoon that comes to Japan in the fall. The crane (tsuru) in Bashō’s wakiku is likely to be tanchō, the red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis), although there are two other species of crane that visit Japan—manazuru, the white-naped crane (Grus vipio), and nabezuru, the hooded crane (Grus monacha)—and although the crane was at times confused with kōnotori, the eastern white stork (Ciconia boyciana). Now limited to the northern end of Hokkaidō, the red-crowned crane once visited many parts of Japan, including Edo. Peter Matthiessen lovingly describes these magnificent birds in The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes.
So what did Bashō mean by karumi? From his own wakiku he cited as examples, you may think it meant something that wasn’t heavy, allusive, affective, or convoluted. As Hattori Tohō pointed out in Three Booklets, the wakiku in the first pair is done “eventlessly” (koto mo naku), while the one in the second describes “the way things have quieted down” (shizukanaru tei) after a storm has left. Both follow what’s depicted in the preceding hokku and “become one with it.”
* * *
* This Island of Japon: João Rodrigues’ Account of 16th-century Japan, translated and edited by Michael Cooper, S.J. (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1973).
Haiku and Zen: Association and Dissociation
When Zen and hokku are mentioned in one breath, two or three hokku may leap to mind. One of them surely is avowedly Zen-like by Uejima Onitsura. It comes with a headnote: “Monk Kūdō asked me, ‘What’s your haikai eye like?’ I responded impromptu”:
庭前に白く咲たる椿かな
Teizen ni shiroku saitaru tsubaki kana
In the garden blooming white are camellias
Another is by Matsuo Bashō:
古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto
An old pond: a frog jumps in the water the sound
And when it comes to Bashō and his “frog pond,” there is another hokku of his that used to be coupled with it, and it comes with a headnote: “Composed on horseback”:
道のべの木槿は馬にくはれたり
Michinobe no mukuge wa uma ni kuwaetari
The roadside hibiscus has been eaten by my horse
I’ve called Onitsura’s hokku “avowedly Zen-like,” because its headnote and the hokku allude unmistakably to Case 37 of the one canonical Chinese Zen text The Gateless Gate (Mumonkan, or Wumenguan in Chinese) published in 1229. The case or koan reads, “Once asked by a monk, ‘What is the meaning of the Patriarch coming from the West?’ Jōshū said, ‘The oak tree in the garden.’” The original of this case or koan comes from a collection of anecdotes about the Chinese Zen monk Jōshū Jūshin (Zhaozhou Congshen in Chinese):
Once there was a monk who asked, “What is the meaning of the Patriarch coming from the West?”
The master said, “The oak tree in the garden.”
The student said, “Sir, please do not try to guide me by the stage I’m at.”
The master said, “I don’t try to guide you by the stage you’re at.”
The student said, “What is the meaning of the Patriarch coming from the West?”
The master said, “The oak tree in the garden.”
The question, “What is the meaning of the Patriarch coming from the West?,” is taken to be the same as the question, “What is Zen?” The Patriarch is Bodhidharma, the Indian founder of Chinese Zen. The title Mumonkan comes directly from the name of its compiler, Mumon Suikai (Wumen Huikai in Chinese).
Bashō’s hokku about an old pond and a frog—or perhaps frogs—jumping into a pond has no headnote suggesting Zen, but historically it has been associated with the same Jōshū story, namely, with Zen. The most straightforward linkage of the two appeared in Haikai Mumonkan, a selection of essays edited by Ōshima Ryōta in 1762. The title of the book is a dead giveaway, of course, but the brief description in it of the way Bashō composed the pond-frog hokku is even more explicit. It has a comment by a fellow named Sofuku, probably a Zen monk: “This is a piece that our Patriarchal Master [Bashō] gained when he studied Zen with Monk Butchō and attained enlightenment.”
Butchō was indeed Bashō’s Zen teacher, and he was close enough to hold some haikai sessions with Bashō. But it is doubtful that Butchō had anything to do with the pond-frog hokku. His involvement with his temple Konpon’s lawsuit over a land dispute against the powerful Kashima Shrine, in Hitachi, today’s Ibaraki, kept him busy; Bashō was often on the road, as Satō Madoka details in Bashō and Buddhism (Bashō to Bukkyō). Yet in 1868, Kitsuda Shunko published a dramatic account called The True History of the Venerable Bashō’s Old Pond (Bashō-ō furuike shinden) that described how the pond-frog hokku came about, saying he found it in the personal library of a local poet. In it, Bashō appears under one of his more youthful haikai names, Tōsei (桃青), “Green Peach.” In the following passage, “Jōshū” is not the Japanese pronunciation of Zhaozhou but the name of a province, Jōshū, today’s Gunma.
The Elder Butchō, of Konpon Temple in Kashima, Jōshū, is a widely read and enlightened man of wisdom. The venerable Tōsei’s teacher, he has known him for a long time. Recently, he was moved to the Chōkei Temple in Fukagawa, Edo, when he decided to visit Tōsei. When he, accompanied by Rokuso Gohē, reached the Bashō Hut, Rokuso Gohē first stepped into the hut and asked, “What is the Buddhist Law in the grasses and trees of this quiet garden?” Tōsei replied by saying, “Large leaves are large, small leaves are small.” Then the Elder entered the gate and asked, “How is it lately?” Tōsei replied by saying, “A shower has passed and washed the green moss.” The Elder asked again, “What was the Buddhist Law before the green moss was born and before the spring rain was yet to come?” At that instant a frog on the rim of the pond leapt and plunged into the bottom of the water. In response to that sound, Tōsei replied, “A frog jumps in the water’s sound.” The Elder Butchō chanted, “Well done! Well done!” and endowed Tōsei with the back-scratcher he was carrying.
You might ask, What’s a back-scratcher doing here? In fact, this tool, called nyoi (at-will) was, and perhaps still is, part of an itchy Zen monk’s paraphernalia. Anyway, as you can guess, most scholars think that Shunko made up his “discovery.” After all, he said he “found” it at the end of the Tokugawa Period, that is, two centuries after Bashō. Besides, the account is too obvious an elaboration of the Jōshū anecdote.
Still, by �
�shima Ryōta’s days, the notion that the pond-frog hokku, along with the hibiscus hokku, embodied the ultimate profundity of Bashō’s haikai appears to have taken hold, at least among some people. For example, a haikai poet named Ichi’on tells this story, with some disgust, in his rather large compilation of haikai letters, comments, and anecdotes, Sabi shiori, in 1776. His surname or his dates are not known, but Ichi’on was evidently as influential as Yosa Buson and Katō Gyōtai in his time. When he set down this story, he had been on the road for more than twenty years, according to his own account.
Recently I heard an itinerant’s haikai talk, and it was all about “a frog jumps into the water” and “hibiscus has been eaten by a horse,” from dawn to evening, through night till dawn, on the pretext of commenting on the hokku of the Elder [Bashō].
The “itinerant” (angya) here is thought to be one who traveled around to preach the virtues of haikai, offering to give a homiletic talk in exchange for board and breakfast, and most likely asked for a fee.
What did this particular itinerant talk about? He brought up the allegorical imports of the hibiscus piece in particular, asserting that it meant the same as the saying, “The protruding piling gets hammered down,” and so forth. At this, a Zen monk who was among those listening to him scoffed and said he didn’t believe it. Bashō’s hokku meant what it says, no more, no less, he said. He then cited a line in Chinese, “A monkey snitched the hibiscus flower this morning,” which is a twist on a well-known line from a homiletic verse of Po Chu-i: “The hibiscus prospers just one day.”
Ichi’on went on to say: “Worse, [the itinerant] said, ‘Even if I explained it to you, you wouldn’t be able to understand the profound meaning of the “pond-frog hokku” unless you studied haikai for four to five years. The man was no different from the dumb talk of a corrupt [Zen] monk.’”
Yet, Ichi’on’s contemporary Kaya Shirao simply noted to accept the view that “the two pieces [pond-frog and hibiscus] represented ‘the ultimate intent’ (okugi) of the Bashō school.” He did so in his haikai book Sabi shiori, published posthumously in 1812, specifying that the book was meant for his students only, not to be shown to any others, and thereby endowing it with an esoteric air. As you may notice, it bears the same title as Ichi’on’s book, although the Chinese characters applied to the two words for sabi and shiori were different; perhaps to differentiate the two, the title of this one is preceded by “haikai.”
During the Edo period (1603–1868) there was a strong propensity, or desire, to see a philosophical import in certain types of haikai—“philosophical” in this case meaning Buddhist and, in particular, Zen. This was natural: Buddhism was the government-dictated religion at the time, and certain elements of Zen readily appealed to the popular mind.
To show what I mean, let me cite a few authorities. On the one hand, the great Zen proselytizer Daisetz T. Suzuki wrote in Zen and Japanese Culture that intuition is most important for Zen: “Its teaching is concentrated on the intuitive experience” and it rejects “ratiocination” and “intellection.” In fact, the founder of one important school of Zen, the Chinese master Rinzai Gigen, defined it as anything nonlogical, intuitive, or characterizable as transcending “intellection or volition,” as Burton Watson explains in The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi. Suzuki was a scholar of that school.
On the other, the great scholar of comparative Asian thought Nakamura Hajime, in his Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-China-Tibet-Japan, has characterized Zen in its “nonlogical” aspect as representing “the most sinicized of Chinese Buddhist sects,” even as it pushes the “concrete,” “visual” character of Chinese Buddhism in which “poetical and emotional phrases take the place of logical exposition.”
Take Case 37 of Mumonkan. Following the koan and the answer, Mumon comments: “If you understand Jōshū’s answer fully, there will be no past Buddha Shakyamuni or no future Buddha Maitreya.” Some kind of intuition could be involved between the koan and the “answer,” and between the set and Mumon’s ode that follows, but it is difficult to see any apparent logicality in either. In truth, Nakamura says that there are more than a hundred “answers,” all acceptable, to the question put to Jōshū, “What is the meaning of the Patriarch’s coming from the West?” (“What is Zen?”) Here are a few of the answers other than “The oak tree in the garden”:
“A piece of tile and a bit of stone.”
“The wind blows and the sun heats.”
“Frost comes upon clouds.”
Be it either intuition or illogicality, you might say that Zen makes it easy to feign facile profundity.
Anyway, with the influence of Buddhism, and Zen, so pervasive, people readily resorted to Buddhist terms even when talking about something else. Kagami Shikō, for example, mentioned “the Four Gates,” in his 1715 haikai treatise First Prayer (Hatsu-ganmon), in referring to the four genres of poetry in Japan: kanshi (verse composed in classical Chinese), tanka, renga, and haikai. In common language, the term means the four gates of a palace complex, but in Buddhism it refers to a set of four abstract ideas, such as being, void, being-void, and non-being-non-void, as well as awakening, training, bodhi (salvation), and nirvana. Shikō used it in the latter sense, for his purpose here was to exalt Bashō’s role in haikai.
The term actually appears as an answer to a famous koan, Case 9 of The Blue Cliff Record (Hekiganroku): “Once a monk asked Jōshū, ‘What is Jōshū?’ Jōshū replied, ‘The East Gate, the West Gate, the South Gate, the North Gate.’” The Blue Cliff Record is as canonical in Chinese Zen as The Gateless Gate, and Jōshū appears quite often in both.
Here it must be noted that Shikō, who some say became the most influential PR man for the pond-frog hokku, gave what appears to be a credible account of the birth of the piece in his 1692 haikai treatise The Pine Grove of Kudzu (Kuzu no matsubara):
It must have been during the remaining days of Third Month. The sound of frogs dropping into the water being not frequent, an ineffable feeling along the line [of poetry] floated up, and [Bashō] gained the 7-5 of “kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto.” Shinshi, who was by him, made bold to crown it with the five of “yamabuki [ya],” but it simply settled down with “furuike.” They discussed the matter for a while, but it appears they decided that, though yamabuki was poetic and flowery, the 5-letter furuike [ya] was simple and substantive.
And this reminds us that most haikai treaties of the period addressed the mechanics of haikai composition, how to make your composition haikai, rather than how to demonstrate Zen enlightenment. A good example is the same pond-frog hokku. In First Prayer Shikō said it embodied the aesthetic concept yūgen (幽玄), but only because its abbreviated syntactical structure made it so.
You might say that with Shunko’s made-up description of Butchō’s encounter with Bashō that produced the pond-frog hokku, Zen reached its apogee in haikai. That is mainly because Masaoka Shiki, who appeared in the generation following Shunko’s, loudly called for hokku reform and in so doing stressed the painterly method of “copying” (shasei) in hokku, while downplaying the idea of seeing special meanings in hokku.
Thus, in 1895 Shiki wrote that he didn’t find “enlightenment in Zen studies” in the pond-frog hokku, asserting that “the piece should be seen just as it is, without idealism or anything else. Hearing a frog jumping into an old pond with kyabun, Bashō sang this thus.” By “idealism” Shiki meant something like “that which aspires to be profound,” or “metaphysical,” we may surmise. In fact, his choice of the onomatopoeic kyabun for the sound of a frog leaping into the water, instead of saying just that, the sound of etc., was evidently meant to let the hot air out of such an attempt, adumbrating the word Allen Ginsberg employed in the refrain of his poem that comes with a musical composition, “Old Pond”: “The old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!”
There were, of course, those who did not exactly agree with him.
In 1902, the year Shiki d
ied, Basil Hall Chamberlain, the pioneering British scholar of Japanese literature and culture, presented the Asiatic Society of Japan with a paper “Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram.” He explained that he was using “Epigram” for “Hokku (also Haiku and Haikai) . . . in default of a better equivalent” and, after prefacing his remarks on the pond-frog piece with an observation, noted, “From a European point of view, the mention of the frog spoils these lines completely; for we tacitly include frogs in the same category as monkeys and donkeys—absurd creatures scarcely to be named without turning verse into caricature,” and then concluded:
Nevertheless, the testimony of tradition must be allowed some weight, and I have been brought to believe that a thorough study of the influence of the mysticism of the Zen sect in Japan would bear out native tradition in its attribution of “inner meanings,” not to Bashō’s writings merely, but to the writings and even the actions of many other men of that and previous periods. In any case, whether this current method of interpretations be true or false, it has been so widely received that no study of the Japanese epigram would be complete without some reference to it.
A couple of years earlier, in 1898, Shiki’s close haiku friend Natsume Sōseki had written in his essay “The Word Not Said” (Fugen no gen) a phrase from the Chuang Tzu: “Haiku has a Zen flavor; Western poetry has a Christian flavor. Therefore, haiku is of plain taste; it’s playful. At times it is unworldly. Western poetry is dense; it never leaves human sentiments no matter how far it may go.”