by Неизвестный
in the summer the cuckoo.
In autumn the moon, and in winter
the snow, clear, cold.
One can, if one chooses, see in Dōgen’s poem about the beauty of the four seasons no more than a conventional, ordinary, mediocre stringing together, in a most awkward form, of representative images from the four seasons. One can see it as a poem that is not really a poem at all. And yet very similar is the deathbed poem of the priest Ryōkan (1758–1831):
What shall be my legacy?
The blossoms of spring,
the cuckoo in the hills,
the leaves of autumn.
In this poem, as in Dōgen’s, the commonest of figures and the commonest of words are strung together without hesitation—no, to particular effect, rather—and so they transmit the very essence of Japan. And it is Ryōkan’s last poem that I have quoted.
A long, misty day in spring:
I saw it to a close, playing ball
with the children.
The breeze is fresh,
the moon is clear.
Together let us dance the night
away, in what is left of old age.
It is not that I wish to have none
of the world,
It is that I am better at the
pleasure enjoyed alone.
Ryōkan, who shook off the modern vulgarity of his day, who was immersed in the elegance of earlier centuries, and whose poetry and calligraphy are much admired in Japan today—he lived in the spirit of these poems, a wanderer down country paths, a grass hut for shelter, rags for clothes, farmers to talk to. The profundity of religion and literature was not, for him, in the abstruse. He rather pursued literature and belief in the benign spirit summarized in the Buddhist phrase “a smiling face and gentle words.” In his last poem he offered nothing as a legacy. He but hoped that after his death nature would remain beautiful. That could be his bequest. One feels in the poem the emotions of old Japan, and the heart of a religious faith as well.
I wondered and wondered when
she would come.
And now we are together.
What thoughts need I have?
Ryōkan wrote love poetry too. This is an example of which I am fond. An old man of sixty-nine2 (I might point out that at the same age I am the recipient of the Nobel Prize), Ryōkan met a twenty-nine-year-old nun named Teishin, and was blessed with love. The poem can be seen as one of happiness at having met the ageless woman, of happiness at having met the one for whom the wait was so long. The last line is simplicity itself.
Ryōkan died at the age of seventy-four. He was born in the province of Echigo, the present Niigata Prefecture and the setting for my novel Snow Country, a northerly region on what is known as the reverse side of Japan, where cold winds come down across the Japan Sea from Siberia. He lived his whole life in the snow country, and to his “eyes in their last extremity,” when he was old and tired and knew that death was near, and had attained enlightenment, the snow country, as we see in his last poem, was yet more beautiful, I should imagine. I have an essay with the title “Eyes in Their Last Extremity.” The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927). It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the power to live, and continued:
I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice. . . . I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.
Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five.
In my essay “Eyes in Their Last Extremity,” I had this to say: “However alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint.” I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide. I had another friend who died young, an avant-garde painter. He too thought of suicide over the years, and of him I wrote in this same essay: “He seems to have said over and over that there is no art superior to death, that to die is to live.” I could see, however, that for him, born in a Buddhist temple and educated in a Buddhist school, the concept of death was very different from that in the West. “Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?” With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyū (1394–1481) twice contemplated suicide. I have said “that fellow,” because the priest Ikkyū is known even to children as a most witty and amusing person, and because anecdotes about his limitlessly eccentric behavior have come down to us in ample numbers. It is said of him that children climbed his knee to stroke his beard, that wild birds took feed from his hand. It would seem from all this that he was the ultimate in mindlessness, that he was an approachable and gentle sort of priest. As a matter of fact he was the most severe and profound of Zen priests. Said to have been the son of an emperor, he entered a temple at the age of six,3 and early showed genius as a poetic prodigy. At the same time he was troubled with the deepest of doubts about religion and life. “If there is a god, let him help me. If there is none, let me throw myself to the bottom of the lake and become food for fishes.” Leaving behind these words he sought to throw himself into a lake, but was held back. On another occasion, numbers of his fellows were incriminated when a priest in his Daitokuji Temple committed suicide. Ikkyū went back to the temple, “the burden heavy on my shoulders,” and sought to starve himself to death. He gave his collected poetry the title “Collection of the Roiling Clouds,” and himself used the expression “Roiling Clouds” as a pen name. In this collection and its successor are poems quite without parallel in the Chinese and especially the Zen poetry of the Japanese middle ages, erotic poems and poems about the secrets of the bedchamber that leave one in utter astonishment. He sought, by eating fish and drinking spirits and having commerce with women, to go beyond the rules and proscriptions of the Zen of his day, to seek liberation from them; and thus, turning against established religious forms, he sought in the pursuit of Zen the revival and affirmation of the essence of life, of human existence, in a day of civil war and moral collapse.
His temple, the Daitokuji at Murasakino in Kyoto, remains a center of the tea ceremony, and specimens of his calligraphy are greatly admired as hangings in alcoves of tea rooms. I myself have two specimens of Ikkyū’s calligraphy. One of them is a single line: “It is easy to enter the world of the Buddha, it is hard to enter the world of the devil.” Much drawn to these words, I frequently make use of them when asked for a specimen of my own writing. They can be read in any number of ways, as difficult as one chooses, but in that world of the devil added to the world of the Buddha, Ikkyū of Zen comes home to me with great immediacy. The fact that for an artist, seeking truth, good, and beauty, the fear and petition even as a prayer in those words about the world of the devil—the fact that it should be there apparent on the surface, hidden behind, perhaps speaks with the inevitability of fate. And the devil’s world is the world difficult of entry. It is not for the weak of heart.
If you meet a Buddha, kill him.
If you meet a patriarch of the
law, kill him.
This is a well-known Zen motto. If Buddhism is divided generally into the sects that believe in salvation by faith and those that believe in salvation by one’s own efforts, then of course there must be such violent utterances in Zen, which insists upon salvation by one’s own efforts. On the other side, the side of salvation by faith, Shinran (1173–1262), the founder of the Shin sect, once said: “The good shall be reborn in paradise, and how much more shall that be the case with the bad.” This view of things has something in common with Ikkyū’s world of the Buddha and world of the devil, and yet at heart the two have their different inclinations. Shinra
n also said: “I shall take not a single disciple.”
“If you meet a Buddha, kill him. If you meet a patriarch of the law, kill him.” “I shall not take a single disciple.” In these two statements, perhaps, is the rigorous fate of art.
In Zen there is no worship of images. Zen does have images, but in the hall where the regimen of meditation is pursued, there are neither images nor pictures of Buddhas, nor are there scriptures. The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in “the discarding of words,” it lies “outside words.” And so we have the extreme of “silence like thunder,” in the Vimalakīrti Mirdeśa Sūtra. Tradition has it that Bodhidharma, a southern Indian prince who lived in about the sixth century and was the founder of Zen in China, sat for nine years in silence facing the wall of a cave, and finally attained enlightenment. The Zen practice of sitting in silent meditation derives from Bodhidharma.
Here are two religious poems by Ikkyū:
When I ask, you answer.
When I do not you do not.
What is there then in your heart,
O Lord Bodhidharma?
And what is it, the heart?
It is the sound of the pine breeze
There in the painting.
Here we have the spirit of Oriental painting. The heart of ink painting is in space, abbreviation, what is left undrawn. In the words of the Chinese painter Chin Nung: “You paint the branch well, and you hear the sound of the wind.” And the priest Dōgen once more: “Are there not these cases? Enlightenment in the voice of the bamboo. Radiance of heart in the peach blossom.”
Ikenobō Sen’ō, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his “secret pronouncements”): “With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains. To the instant are brought all the manifold delights. Verily, it is like the sorcery of the wizard.” The Japanese garden too, of course, symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, for the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of the rocks gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs. Compressed to the ultimate, the Japanese garden becomes the bonsai dwarf garden, or the bonseki, its dry version.
In the Oriental word for landscape, literally “mountain-water,” with its related implications in landscape painting and landscape gardening, there is contained the concept of the sere and wasted, and even of the sad and the threadbare. Yet in the sad, austere, autumnal qualities so valued by the tea ceremony, itself summarized in the expression “gently respectful, cleanly quiet,” there lies concealed a great richness of spirit; and the tea room, so rigidly confined and simple, contains boundless space and unlimited elegance. The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers. The great sixteenth-century master of the tea ceremony and flower arranging, Rikyū, taught that it was wrong to use fully opened flowers. Even in the tea ceremony today the general practice is to have in the alcove of the tea room but a single flower, and that a flower in bud. In winter a special flower of winter, let us say a camellia, bearing some such name as White Jewel or Wabisuke, which might be translated literally as “Helpmate in Solitude,” is chosen, a camellia remarkable among camellias for its whiteness and the smallness of its blossoms; and but a single bud is set out in the alcove. White is the cleanest of colors, it contains in itself all the other colors. And there must always be dew on the bud. The bud is moistened with a few drops of water. The most splendid of arrangements for the tea ceremony comes in May, when a peony is put out in a celadon vase; but here again there is a single bud, always with dew upon it. Not only are there drops of water upon the flower, the vase too is frequently moistened.
Among flower vases, the ware that is given the highest rank is old Iga, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it commands the highest price. When old Iga has been dampened, its colors and its glow take on a beauty such as to awaken one afresh. Iga was fired at very high temperatures. The straw ash and the smoke from the fuel fell and flowed against the surface, and, as the temperature dropped, became a sort of glaze. Because the colors were not fabricated but were rather the result of nature at work in the kiln, color patterns emerged in such varieties as to be called quirks and freaks of the kiln. The rough, austere, strong surfaces of old Iga take on a voluptuous glow when dampened. It breathes to the rhythm of the dew of the flowers.
The taste of the tea ceremony also asks that the tea bowl be moistened before using, to bring forth its own soft glow.
Ikenobō Sen’ō remarked on another occasion (this too is in his “secret pronouncements”) that “the mountains and strands should appear in their own forms.” Bringing a new spirit into his school of flower arranging, therefore, he found “flowers” in broken vessels and withered branches, and in them too the enlightenment that comes from flowers. “The ancients arranged flowers and pursued enlightenment.” Here we see an awakening to the heart of the Japanese spirit, under the influence of Zen. And here too, perhaps, is the heart of a man living in the devastation of long civil wars.
The Tales of Ise, compiled in the tenth century, is the oldest Japanese collection of lyrical episodes, numbers of which might be called short stories. In one of them we learn that the poet Ariwara no Yukihira, having invited guests, put in flowers: “Being a man of feeling, he had in a large jar a most unusual wisteria. The trailing spray of flowers was upwards of three and a half feet long.”
A spray of wisteria of such length is indeed so unusual as to make one have doubts about the credibility of the writer; and yet I can feel in this great spray a symbol of Heian culture. The wisteria is a very Japanese flower, and it has a feminine elegance. Wisteria sprays, as they trail in the breeze, suggest softness, gentleness, reticence. Disappearing and then appearing again in the early summer greenery, they have in them that feeling for the poignant beauty of things long characterized by the Japanese as mono no aware. No doubt there was a particular splendor in that spray upwards of three and a half feet long. The splendors of Heian culture a millennium ago and the emergence of a peculiarly Japanese beauty were as wondrous as this “most unusual wisteria,” for the culture of T’ang China had at length been absorbed and Japanized. In poetry there came, early in the tenth century, the first of the imperially commissioned anthologies, the Kokinshū, and in fiction the Tales of Ise, followed by the supreme masterpieces of classical Japanese prose, the Tale of Genji of Lady Murasaki and the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, both of whom lived from the late tenth century into the early eleventh. So was established a tradition which influenced and even controlled Japanese literature for eight hundred years. The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with it. That such a modern work should have been written in the eleventh century is a miracle, and as a miracle the work is widely known abroad. Although
my grasp of classical Japanese was uncertain, the Heian classics were my principal boyhood reading, and it is the Genji, I think, that has meant the most to me. For centuries after it was written, fascination with the Genji persisted, and imitations and reworkings did homage to it. The Genji was a wide and deep source of nourishment for poetry, of course, and for the fine arts and handicrafts as well, and even for landscape gardening.
Murasaki and Sei Shōnagon, and such famous poets as Izumi Shikibu, who probably died early in the eleventh century, and Akazome Emon, who probably died in the mid-eleventh century, were all ladies-in-waiting in the imperial court. Japanese culture was court culture, and court culture was feminine. The day of the Genji and the Pillow Book was its finest, when ripeness was moving into decay. One feels the sadness at the end of glory, the high tide of Japanese court culture. The court went into its decline, power moved from the court nobility to the military aristocracy, in whose hands it remained through almost seven centuries from the founding of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1192 to the Meiji Restoration in 1867 and 1868. It is not to be thought, however, that either the imperial institution or court culture vanished. In the eighth of the imperial anthologies, the Shinkokinshū of the early thirteenth century, the technical dexterity of the Kokinshū was pushed yet a step further, and sometimes fell into mere verbal dalliance; but there were added elements of the mysterious, the suggestive, the evocative and inferential, elements of sensuous fantasy that have something in common with modern symbolist poetry. Saigyō, who has been mentioned earlier, was a representative poet linking the two ages, Heian and Kamakura.