by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
The master of the Haiku expresses poetic qualities that charge his words with unmistakable clarity. Clarity is the medium for Basho’s perception of the now. Born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644, his name shifted under a series of pen names until he was safely lodged in his first home, a small rustic hut built for him by his disciples. They planted a rare tree, the Japanese banana tree (Basho), on the grounds and Matsuo took the name, happy with the shade its leaves provided in the summer months.
Basho’s life is punctuated by unease and restlessness. Basho was forced to resign himself to poetry as his life-long love: “In this mortal frame of mine… there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business… indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself”. Poetry took Basho at a young age when he was serving as a page to a young relative of the local feudal lord. He rose to become the greatest poet and literary theoretician of his age, finding work through judging poetry competitions and teaching.
He wondered at times whether he should seek security through a courtly position or “measure the depths of his ignorance by trying to be a scholar”. He did neither; he rambled around and wrote exquisite poetry. He cast away his possessions, walked dangerous routes plagued with arduous terrain and threats from bandits, embodying the lifestyle of a Zen Buddhist monk. Zen Buddhism was the greatest influence on his life and subtly informed his poetry. On occasion, his Zen thought peaks through the sparseness of his poetry, but Basho was far from a didactic writer and kept his mind wholly on the task of obeying nature: “to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the years: whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of it the moon”. Here is a clearer example: a conversation between Basho and the Buddhist monk Master Buccho (as related by the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki):
Master Buccho: How are you getting along these days?
Basho: After a recent rain the moss has grown greener than ever.
Master Buccho: What Buddhism is there prior to the greenness of moss?
Basho: A frog jumps into the water, hear the sound!
This conversation is, apparently, the origin story behind one of Basho’s most famous Haiku (or Hokku as it was then known):
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water –
A deep resonance
A haiku is not disjointedly describing nature, nor is it a Zen Buddhist exercise, even if, paradoxically, it is both these things. There is a difference between looking up when you are strolling and expressing yourself in the terse, faux-charged manner that is characteristic of a second-rate Haiku (especially in translation), and confronting and dispersing into nature. Eugen Herrigel, who wrote the book Zen and the Art of Archery, dedicated many years to perfecting how to shoot an arrow. He had to become both the arrow and the target; he had to, in a sense, lose his individuality and instead perceive as from the bow, the arrow, and the target. Notes written by students, or, more likely, disciples, of Basho, tell us that he enticed them to “enter” their subjects: “learn about a pine tree from a pine tree; if you want to learn about a bamboo tree, go to a bamboo tree. Detach your mind and enter the object, then the poem will come”. This practice is called Muga; the self is forgotten; you are looking as the object.
Basho’s talent as a poet mixed perfectly with his Zen practices. He would have been aware of the rich tradition of Zen poetry; the best of them, however, did not think of themselves as poets. They were monks. Basho was a poet through and through and was very aware of his artistry. It is perhaps the tension between these two sides of himself that produced a Zen poetry without the didacticism of any Zen learning. Here he is talking about sabi, what he thought of as a kind of loneliness: “if a man goes to war wearing a stout armour or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. It [sabi] is in the poem regardless of the scene it describes”. He does not abstract the matter; he shows it through perception and mood.
The urge to explore the land was also an exercise in shedding his possessions, shedding his individuality to “flow” through the land, leaving poems as his footprints. His journeys were long. His journals of these travels record impressions and his fleeting desires; desires to see the moon, to view the cherry blossom. He travels at once in the present of the land and simultaneously recounts the poets and monks who wrote or sequestered themselves by this sea or in that hut perched on the mountain. The inspiration came from the ancient priest who ‘travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attained the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon’. D.T. Suzuki writes: ‘when a feeling reaches its highest pitch, we remain silent, even 17 syllables may be too many. Japanese artists… influenced by the way of Zen tend to use the fewest words… suggestibility is the secret of the Japanese arts’. Basho did travel thousands of miles with little provisions, but he remained a poet. It was perhaps his wind-swept spirit, his poetry, that attained a state closer to that of sheer ecstasy. The tension of Zen ecstasy and poetry meet at a crossroad in Basho.
As Basho aged, he felt an increasing need for solitude; it was perhaps this silence he felt owed his respect, his body and mind: “If someone comes to see me, I have to waste my words in vain. If I leave my house to visit others, I waste their time in vain”, and that he was “disturbed by others, I have no peace of mind”; or, in other words:
Only for morning glories
I open my door –
During the daytime I keep it
Tightly barred.
After a month of solitude, Basho relented his reclusive behaviour, citing ‘Karumi’ as his reason for loosening the bar. Karumi is a kind of lightness, an idea based around non-attachment, a way of greeting and embracing the world instead of falling into a mind that is separate from the world. It would be fitting to think that Basho’s poetry caught up with him in the end, that he had attained the peace of mind, the mind that embraces wholly what it perceives. Karumi was, in fact, something that influenced his poetic style. When teaching his disciples how a haiku ought to be linked, Basho says: “the joining of its two parts, [should] seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed”. Again, we see the theory unclouded by abstruse terms; it is expansive enough to influence, to prod the budding poet along the way.
After his solitude, Basho travelled once again. From Edo he made his way to Osaka (around 2000 km). It was in Osaka that he died. His last recorded Haiku is:
Sick on a journey –
Over parched fields
Dreams wander on.
There is another record from a disciple: “later I was summoned by our master, who told me he had in mind another poem which ended like this:
Round, as yet round,
My dreams keep revolving”
The disciple did not want to disturb the ailing Basho so he did not ask for the preceding lines. It’s true, Basho’s dreams did ‘keep revolving’. He became sacrosanct to Japanese culture. In fact, in 1793, Basho was deified by the Shinto Bureaucracy – criticizing his poetry amounted to blasphemy. The Imagists, under Ezra Pound, in the early 20th century, were possibly the first poetic movement in Western poetry to seriously take the time to understand what the incessant rambling Zen poet Basho conveyed. Here is Ezra Pound’s ‘And the days are not full enough’:
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
They were writing some 300 years after his death, without the black cloak of Zen. Here is a last distillation of Basho’s, one of my favourites; a tension between his eye and mind:
Skylark sings all
Day, and day
Not long enough.
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