Still, Bashō chose Zen as the model for his life as well as his poems, making it his path in both figurative and literal senses. Emulating both the wandering monks of his own time and the earlier Buddhist poets Saigyō and Sōgi, he began traveling for months at a time in tonsure and monk’s robes, depending for his sustenance on what might be offered him along the way. “I look like a priest,” he wrote in his first travel journal, “but I am a layman. I am a layman, but my head is still shaved.” A sharp Zen spirit glints from his poems, in their compassion, insights, and humor, and in the quietly Buddhist stance of poet and object as “not one, not two.” In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bashō instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, “No.”
The fidelity of Zen is to this world, and to how we see and taste it in our lives and our lives in it. Bashō’s haiku—there are over a thousand—have a similar allegiance. They find the gate to Zen’s experience of thusness in the face of a man with mumps-swollen cheeks walking in bitter winter wind or in the sight of a woman tearing salted cods into strips, shaded by a bucket of flowering azalea. A rare haiku explicitly using the vocabulary of Zen appears in a letter Bashō sent to one of his students. In the letter, he first quotes a Zen master’s warning: superficial understanding of the teachings can cause great harm. The poem reads:
how admirable—
a man seeing lightning
and not satori*
inazumani satoranu hito no tattosa yo
Shinto, Japan’s other major spiritual tradition, saturates Bashō’s poems as well, most noticeably in the importance given to place and the way that particular places come to embody certain feelings and themes. Shinto’s kami spirits live not in generality, abstraction, or paradise but embedded in the earthly, visitable, and local—shrines, mountains, islands, fields, and trees. Bashō’s lifelong practice of poetry pilgrimage joined Zen non-attachment with Shinto’s deep-seated spirits of place.
*
Of the haiku Bashō wrote during his late twenties and early thirties, the earliest were often clever or charming, though even these poems often reflect the poet’s seemingly innate compassion and deep sympathy for all beings. Some clearly respond to the circumstances of his personal life. Many show an increasing involvement with Chinese poetry, Zen, and the growing desire to find in a single moment, fully perceived, the multifaceted depths we feel also in Cezanne’s painted apples or Durer’s hare etched into place amid grass.
Here are a few of these early poems. The first was written at age twenty-two, when Bashō was attempting the cleverness then popular among cutting-edge poets:
looking exactly like
blue flag iris: blue flag iris
inside the water’s shadow
kakitsubata nitari ya nitari mizu no kage
The main point in the original Japanese is the poem’s mirroring construction: two identical words at the haiku’s center replicate both visually and in sound what is being described. In Japanese, which is written vertically, the visual onomotopoeia is even more clear; a small “cutting-word,” ya, creates the slim line of water dividing the flower stem’s two apparently equal selves. Yet even in this poem of displayed wit, we find also the echo of a Buddhist question addressed throughout Japanese poetry: what in life is real, what is illusion?
In other early poems, Bashō’s distinctive perception, empathy, humor, and friendship with all existence begin to emerge:
“Written at the house of a person whose child has died”
a withered, leaning, out-of-joint world—
bamboo
upside down under snow
shiorefusu ya yo wa sakasama no yuki no take
a cuckoo!
masters of haiku
vanish
hototogisuima wa haikaishi naki yo kana
shy
above flowers’ faces,
a hazy moon.
hana no kao ni hareute shite ya oborozuki
a hangover?
who cares,
while there are blossoms
futsukayoi monokawa hana no aru aida
cutting a tree,
seeing the sawn trunk it grew from:
tonight’s moon
ki o kirite motokuchi miru ya kyō no tsuki
This tree-cutting haiku presents fertile ground for looking more deeply at poetic image in haiku, and in general.
In Japanese poetry, allusion to the moon is always, first, the moon itself, actual in the night sky. But the image holds almost always some additional meaning—often a Buddhist reference to awakened understanding. With this in mind, various readings of “cutting a tree” begin to emerge. It can be understood as a glimpse of enlightenment, an opening of consciousness fallen suddenly into inside the ordinary moment of felling a tree. It can be read as bitter: the moon is as opaque to the mind as a tree stump. It can be read as comic: the poet, having had no time to look up, finds the moon right under his eyes. It can be read as luminously descriptive: the yellow color of a rising moon recognized as exactly the color of fresh-cut pine. It can be taken as describing the experience that came from sawing down a tree, as describing the moon, or as offering a small Buddhist parable about long effort leading to sudden awakening. It may be that Bashō intended all these meanings. Equally, it could be that he had no intention in mind, and the juxtaposition of moon and tree trunk simply arose, amid the scent of fresh sawdust.
Haiku’s suggestiveness is penumbra, not umbrella. Still, human vision is subjective, and there is a further complication for Western readers: the haiku read alone on a page, blurred by lack of shared cultural reference and by translation, was often originally written in circumstances both specific and knowable by its original readers. As mentioned earlier, many of Bashō’s haiku were composed as part of linked verse gatherings. Others were written for poetry competitions with assigned subjects. Many were personal communications—messages sent between friends, between guest and host or teacher and student—or placed within travel journals or the prose settings of haibun, which gave them added meaning. Some were written about paintings, places, objects, or played on then-well-known phrases opaque to an uninformed reader. Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making. Still, if a person finds a particular haiku baffling or lifeless, that may be because some essential piece of information is missing. A hangover is universally comprehensible. That the specialized lumbering word that means “sawn tree trunk” also means “source,” in an ontological and metaphysical sense, is not—though once this is pointed out, the implication is clearly there, resident in the originating image.
*
When he began to take poetry writing seriously, Bashō was influenced by the rapidly changing aesthetics and schools of poetry of the time. It was a period as volatile as that in American poetry between the 1950s, when most poets were working in formal meter and rhyme, and the late 1970s, when some poets turned to using language in the way the abstract expressionists had used paint. Between these aesthetic periods come both the revolution made by the Beat poets and the “deep image” poetry of Robert Bly, James Wright, and others.
The aesthetic transformations proposed in turn by the Beats and the deep-image school parallel oddly closely those of Bashō’s own lifetime: in each case a radical loosening of language, taste, and subject matter breaks open arthritic conventions of poetic decorum, then is followed by the turn toward a poetry quieter of surface and more inwardly centered. Bashō’s first haiku were written under the influence of a school that advocated word-play, transgression, and turns on well-known earlier classical works. He next wrote poems of simpler, everyday language and imagery that used humor and earthiness as a way to break poetry’s diction free from old ruts. (One haiku from this time parodies a classical scene of courtly love by showing a female cat in heat scrambling over a broken-down cookstove to reach her tomcat lover
.) These taboo-breaking intentions were not Bashō’s invention; they were the fashion of the day—and, it must be added, in no way as lastingly significant as the work of the Beats. But these early foundations instilled in Bashō the experience of a poetry in which almost anything could be said. “Madman’s poetry,” one such style was called. Bashō kept this grant of liberation throughout his life, turning it toward continually deepening ends until its final appearance in his late-life advocacy of the haiku of “lightness.”
The practice of Zen also works to free the mind from its habits of conventional perception. By 1678, Bashō was no longer studying with other teachers, but had taken students of his own, and was developing his own sense of haiku’s possibilities, intentions, and role. For inspiration, he turned less to contemporary poets than to ancient Japanese and Chinese poems reflecting Buddhist and Taoist themes, especially the works of Sōgi, Saigyō, and the Chinese poets Tu Fu and Li Po—poetic tunings that three centuries later would come to influence the deep image poets of America as well.
In 1680, two events, one inward, the other outer, can be taken as markers for the fruition of Bashō’s efforts. The inner boundary-marker can be found in a haiku often referred to as Bashō’s first mature work:
On a leafless branch,
a crow’s settling:
autumn nightfall
kareedani karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure
When autumn’s diminishments and an ordinary crow are felt to be beauty as much as loss, loss is unpinned. In Japanese, the alloy of beauty and sadness found in this poem is described as sabi—a quality at the heart of much of Bashō’s mature writing. The noun sabishi is generally translated as “loneliness,” or sometimes “solitude,” but the word originates in associations very close to those found in this haiku: it holds the feeling of whatever is chill, withered, and pared down to the leanness of essence. “The works of other schools of poetry are like colored paintings; my disciples paint with black ink,” Basho later said. To feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did “infinity in the palm of your hand”—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast. In making the expression of sabi one of haiku’s goals, Bashō turned his own and his students’ writing toward a new spirit. The gravitational pull of that renewed seriousness shifted haiku-writing from the construction of entertainment to the making of art.
Haiku’s imagery is not confined to the lyrical, as we’ve already seen. “Eat vegetable soup, not duck stew,” Bashō famously told his students, calling plainness and oddity the bones of haiku. Another poem from this time begins with a headnote:
“The rich enjoy the finest meats and ambitious young men save money by eating root vegetables. I myself am simply poor.”
snowy morning—
alone,
still able to chew dried salmon
yuki no ashita hitori karazake wo kami etari
In 17th-century Japan, karazake was commoner’s food. For Bashō, to speak of eating dried salmon on a cold morning was neither complaint nor self-pity—it was an evocation of wabi. An idea often linked to sabi, and equally important to Bashō’s work, wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects. A hemp farmer’s jacket, a plain fired-clay cup, the steam rising from a boiling teapot— these are wabi’s essence. A gold-and-cloisonné bowl or ornate silk clothes are its opposite. In the spirit of wabi, then, this poem mulls the deep satisfaction of a life stripped almost bare.
Of the two transition-markers that signal Bashō’s maturation as person and poet, the inward change was his embodiment of a Zen spirit, wabi-sabi, and plainness. The outer change was the alteration of circumstance that led to the name by which he’s now known. In feudal-era Japan, “town teachers,” as they were called, lived by the support of students and wealthy patrons. Such gifts might be monetary, but as often took the form of rice, books, sandals, and clothes. For nine years in Edo, Bashō had lived in rented housing, on a combination of salary from his water-company work, fees for correcting poems, and teaching donations. In the winter of 1680, shortly after Bashō wrote his haiku on the autumn crow, one of his followers built him a simple thatch-roofed hut on the bank of the Sumida River in Fukugawa, a quiet outskirt of the city. That spring, another student planted a kind of Japanese plantain or banana tree in its front garden—a plant known in Japanese as a bashō. The house came to be called the Bashō Hut, and its inhabitant soon took the name as well.
Many years later, when living in a different hut near the site of his first one, Bashō wrote two different versions of a haibun on the occasion of transplanting some shoots from his old bashō tree to a new location in his garden. Here is an excerpt, ending with its haiku:
What year did I come to nest in this area, planting a single bashō tree? The climate here must be good for it—many new trunks have grown up around the first one, their leaves so thick that they crowd my garden and shade my house-eaves. People named my hut after this plant. Every year, old friends and students who’ve grown to like my tree take cuttings or divide the roots and carry them off to replant far and wide.
One year my heart set itself on a trip to the northern interior, and I abandoned this Bashō Hut. […] My sadness at leaving the tree was surprisingly strong. After five springs and autumns away, I’ve now returned, and my sleeves are wet with tears. The scent of blossoming oranges is near; my friends’ warmth has not changed. There’s no way I’ll leave it behind again.
My new thatch-roofed cottage, near the site of the earlier one, fits me well, with its three small rooms. […] I’ve transplanted five bashō saplings so that the moon, seen through their branches, will be even more beautiful and moving. The bashō’s leaves are over seven feet long. When they rip almost to their center ribs in the wind, it’s as painful as seeing a phoenix whose tail has been broken, as pitiful as the sight of a torn green fan.
Sometimes the bashō tree blossoms, but its flowers are small. Its thick stalk remains untouched by any axe. Like the famous ancient tree of the mountains, the bashō’s useless nature is itself the reason to admire it. A monk caressed that mountain tree with his brush to learn its ways; a scholar watched its leaves unfold to inspire his studies. But I’m not like either of them. I just rest in the shade of the leaves I love because they are so easily torn.
bashō leaves
will cover its post-beams—
hut of the moon
bashōba o hashira ni kaken io no tsuki
By the time he wrote this, the poet had long been called by the bashō tree’s name, and each of the major themes of his life appears in this dense meditation on the plant whose identity merged with the poet’s own—his restless wanderings and sensual awareness; his transplanter’s impulse toward revision and renewal; his empathic identification with the tree’s fragile leaves; the importance of friendship; the desire for unusual beauty; and the continuing examination of both inner and outer worlds undertaken by seeing through words, both those of earlier writers and his own.
The aesthetics of spareness and poverty should not disguise the genuine hardship of Bashō’s life. His grass hut, however scenic, had neither a well nor plumbing. In one haibun written late in 1681, Bashō quotes a few lines by the Chinese poet Tu Fu, then says, “I can see the wabi here, but I don’t take any joy in it. I’m superior to Tu Fu in only one thing: the frequency with which I fall sick. Hidden away behind the bashō leaves of this rickety hut, I call myself, ‘Useless Old Bum.’” One of several accompanying haiku reads:
Bitter ice-shards
moisten
the mud-rat’s throat.
kōrinigaku enso ga nodo wo uruoseri
The haiku carries a headnote: “I buy water at this grass-roofed hut,” and it alludes to a statement from the Chinese Taoist writings of Chuang-Tzu: A sewer rat drinks only enough from the river to quench its thirst. Bashō’s container of purchased water, which regularly froze
during winter nights, may have reminded him of that image. Still, this haiku seems as much a portrait of genuine bitterness as any depiction of Taoist austerity.
Another haibun from this time, titled “Sleeping Alone in a Grass Hut,” includes this poem:
the bashō thrashing in wind,
rain drips into an iron tub—
a listening night
bashōnowaki shite tarai ni ame wo kiku yo kana
The haiku is a study in sounds, textures, and scale, and in exposure, both exterior and interior. The banana tree’s leaves are torn by the typhoon winds—the storm was the fiercest in many years—whose huge sound passes over the poem. The plink of rain against a wash-tub (possibly outside, but more likely catching water from a roof leak) is near, precise, and intimate; yet its purchase on the attention is as large as the storm’s. Bashō tree leaves tearing in wind were a long-standing image in classical Chinese and Japanese poems; dripping roofs and ordinary metal basins, less so. The balance of the minute and the vast, of the personal and forces that care nothing about the personal, of idealized and “poetic” experience and the actual living through of a major storm, is registered in each drop of water striking iron.
The Heart of Haiku Page 2
