The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [91]
Where the mood of the moment is solitary and quiet it is called sabi.c When the artist is feeling depressed or sad, and in this peculiar emptiness of feeling catches a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible “suchness,” the mood is called wabi.d When the moment evokes a more intense, nostalgic sadness, connected with autumn and the vanishing away of the world, it is called aware.e And when the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered, the mood is called yugen.f These extremely untranslatable Japanese words denote the four basic moods of furyu,g that is, of the general atmosphere of Zen “taste” in its perception of the aimless moments of life.
Inspired by the Sung masters, the Japanese produced a whole cluster of superb sumi painters whose work ranks today among the most prized treasures of the nation’s art–Muso Kokushi (1275–1351), Cho Densu (d. 1431), Shubun (1414–1465), Soga Jasoku (d. 1483), Sesshu (1421–1506), Miyamoto Musashi (1582–1645), and many others. Notable paintings were also made by the great Zen monks Hakuin and Sengai (1750–1837), the latter showing a flair for abstract painting so startlingly suggestive of the twentieth century that it is easy to understand the interest of so many contemporary painters in Zen.
Toward the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japanese artists developed a still more suggestive and “offhand” style of sumi-e called haiga as an illustrative accompaniment to haiku poems. These were derived from zenga, the informal paintings of the Zen monks accompanying verses from the Zenrin Kushu and sayings from the various mondo and the sutras. Zenga and haiga represent the most “extreme” form of sumi painting–the most spontaneous, artless, and rough, replete with all those “controlled accidents” of the brush in which they exemplify the marvelous meaninglessness of nature itself.
From the earliest times the Zen masters had shown a partiality for short, gnomic poems–at once laconic and direct like their answers to questions about Buddhism. Many of these, like those we have quoted from the Zenrin Kushu, contained overt references to Zen and its principles. However, just as Tung-shan’s “Three pounds of flax!” was an answer full of Zen but not about Zen, so the most expressive Zen poetry is that which “says nothing,” which, in other words, is not philosophy or commentary about life. A monk asked Feng-hsüeh, “When speech and silence are both inadmissible, how can one pass without error?” The master replied:
I always remember Kiangsu in March–
The cry of the partridge, the mass of fragrant flowers!2 h
Here again, as in painting, is the expression of a live moment in its pure “suchness”–though it is a pity to have to say so–and the masters frequently quoted classical Chinese poetry in this way, using couplets or quatrains which pointed, and said no more.
The practice of taking couplets from the old Chinese poems for use as songs was also favored in literary circles, and at the beginning of the eleventh century Fujiwara Kinto compiled an anthology of such excerpts, together with short Japanese waka poems, under the title Roeishu, the Collection of Clear Songs. Such a use of poetry obviously expresses the same type of artistic vision as we find in the paintings of Ma-yüan and Mu-ch’i, the same use of empty space brought to life with a few strokes of the brush. In poetry the empty space is the surrounding silence which a two-line poem requires–a silence of the mind in which one does not “think about” the poem but actually feels the sensation which it evokes–all the more strongly for having said so little.
By the seventeenth century the Japanese had brought this “wordless” poetry to perfection in the haiku, the poem of just seventeen syllables which drops the subject almost as it takes it up. To non-Japanese people haiku are apt to seem no more than beginnings or even titles for poems, and in