Zen Culture Part 16

run its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga.

The _waka_ had been aristocratic, and the best _renga _provincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant cla.s.s. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first called _haikai_, after the first verse of the _renga_, which was called the _hokku_. The term "Haiku" actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant cla.s.s, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older cla.s.sical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in j.a.panese verse. This was the man now considered j.a.pan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to j.a.panese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694).

Basho was born a _samurai_ in an age when it was little more than an empty t.i.tle, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperous _daimyo_ who transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to shift for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho "school," as well as making him a welcome guest at _renga _gatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors:

Red pepper pods!

Add wings to them,

and they are dragonflies!5

This verse is certainly "open-ended" insofar as it creates a reverberation of images in the mind, and, what is more, the effect is achieved by the comparison of two concrete images. There is no comment; the images are simply thrown out to give the mind a starting point. But the overall impact remains merely decorative art. It reflects the concept of _aware_, or a pleasing recognition of beauty, rather than _yugen_, the extension of awareness into a region beyond words.

When he was about thirty-five, Basho created a Haiku that began to touch the deeper regions of the mind. This is the famous_

Kare-eda ni

_ On a withered branch

_karasu-no tomari-keri

_a crow has settled--

_aki-no-kure

_autumn nightfall.6

As a simple juxtaposition of images the poem is striking enough, but it also evokes a comparison of the images, each of which enriches the other. The mind is struck as with a hammer, bringing the senses up short and releasing a flood of a.s.sociations. Its only shortcoming is that the scene is static; it is a painting, not a happening of the sort that can sometimes trigger the sudden sense of Zen enlightenment.

Perhaps Basho realized that his art had not yet drunk deeply enough at the well of Zen, for a few years after this poem was written he became a serious Zen student and began to travel around j.a.pan soaking up images. His travel diaries of the last years are a kind of Haiku "poetics," in which he extends the idea of _sabi_ to include the aura of loneliness that can surround common objects. Zen detachment entered his verses; all personal emotion was drained away, leaving images objective and devoid of any commentary, even implied.

More important, the Zen idea of transience appeared. Not the transience of falling cherry blossoms but the fleeting instant of Zen enlightenment. Whereas the antilogic _koan _anecdotes were intended to lead up to this moment, Basho's Haiku were the moment of enlightenment itself, as in his best-known poem:

_Furu-ike ya

_An ancient pond

_kawazu tobi-komu

_A frog jumps in

_mizu-no-oto

_The sound of water.

These deceptively simple lines capture an intersection of the timeless and the ephemeral. The poem is said to have described an actual occurrence, an evening broken by a splash. The poet immediately spoke the last two lines of the poem, the ephemeral portion, and much time was then devoted to creating the remaining static and timeless part.

This was as it should be, for the inspiration of a Haiku must be genuine and suggest its own lines at the moment it occurs. Zen eschews deliberation and rational a.n.a.lysis; nothing must come between object and perception at the critical moment.

With this poem Basho invented a new form of Zen literary art, and Haiku was never the same afterward. To write this kind of poem, the artist must completely disengage--if only for an instant--all his interpretive faculties. His mind becomes one with the world around him, allowing his craft to operate instinctively in recording the image he perceives. For a moment he is privy to the inexpressible truth of Zen--that the transient is merely part of the eternal--and this instantaneous perception moves directly from his senses to his innermost understanding, without having to travel through his interpretive faculties. Earlier Zen writings in both j.a.pan and China had described this process, but none had captured the phenomenon itself. By catching the momentary at the very instant of its collision with the eternal, Basho could produce a high-speed snapshot of the trigger mechanism of Zen enlightenment. In a modern metaphor, the Haiku became a Zen hologram, in which all the information necessary to re-create a large three-dimensional phenomenon was coded into a minuscule key. Any interpretation of the phenomenon would be redundant to a Zen adept, since the philosophical significance would re-create itself spontaneously from the critical images recorded in the poem. Thus a perfect Haiku is not about the moment of Zen enlightenment; it is that moment frozen in time and ready to be released in the listener's mind.

Haiku is the most dehumanized of all poetry. Instead of the artist's sensations and feelings, we get simply the names of things. By Western standards they are hardly poems at all, merely a rather abbreviated list. As the critic-poet Kenneth Yasuda has pointed out, a Haiku poet does not give us meaning, he gives us objects that have meaning; he does not describe, he presents.7 And unlike the poetry of the No, Haiku seems a form strangely devoid of symbolism. The tone seems matter-of- fact, even when touching upon the most potentially emotional of subjects. Take, for example, Basho's poem composed at the grave of one of his beloved pupils.

_Tsuka mo ugoke

_Grave mound, shake too!

_waga naku koe wa

_My wailing voice--

_aki-no-kaze

_the autumn wind.8

No betrayal of emotion here, simply a comparison of his grief- ridden voice, a transient thing, with the eternal autumn wind. It is a Zen moment of recognition, devoid of emotion or self-pity, and yet somehow our sympathies spring alive, touching us in a way that the early cla.s.sical poems on the pa.s.sage of time never could.

Love in Haiku is directed toward nature as much as toward man or woman.

Part of the reason may be the stylistic requirement that every Haiku tell the reader the season. This is done by the so-called season word, which can either be an outright naming of the season (such as the "autumn" wind above) or some mention of a season-dependent natural phenomenon, such as a blossom, a colored leaf (green or brown), a summer bird or insect, snow, and so on. The tone is always loving, never accusatory (a tribute to the nature reverence of ancient j.a.pan), and it can be either light or solemn. Chirps of insects, songs of birds, scents of blossoms, usually serve as the transient element in a Haiku, whereas water, wind, sunshine, and the season itself are the eternal elements.

_Ume-ga-ka ni

_With the scent of plums

_notto hi-no deru

_on the mountain road--suddenly,

_yama-ji kana

_ sunrise comes!9