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By Root 532 0

translation it is impossible to convey the effect of their sound and rhythm. However, translation can usually convey the image–and this is the important point. Of course there are many haiku which seem as stilted as the Japanese paintings on cheap lacquer trays for export. But the non-Japanese listener must remember that a good haiku is a pebble thrown into the pool of the listener’s mind, evoking associations out of the richness of his own memory. It invites the listener to participate instead of leaving him dumb with admiration while the poet shows off.

The development of the haiku was largely the work of Basho (1643–1694), whose feeling for Zen wanted to express itself in a type of poetry altogether in the spirit of wu-shih–“nothing special.” “To write haiku,” he said, “get a three-foot child”–for Basho’s poems have the same inspired objectivity as a child’s expression of wonder, and return us to that same feeling of the world as when it first met our astonished eyes.

Kimi hi take

Yoki mono misera

Yukimaroge!

You light the fire;

I’ll show you something nice,–

A great ball of snow!3

Basho wrote his haiku in the simplest type of Japanese speech, naturally avoiding literary and “highbrow” language, so creating a style which made it possible for ordinary people to be poets. Bankei, his contemporary, did just the same thing for Zen, for as one of Ikkyu’s doka poems says:

Whatever runs counter

To the mind and will of ordinary people

Hinders the Law of Men

And the Law of Buddha.4

This is in the spirit of Nan-ch’üan’s saying, “The ordinary mind is the Tao”–where “ordinary” means “simply human” rather than “merely vulgar.” It was thus that the seventeenth century saw an extraordinary popularization of the Zen atmosphere in Japan, reaching down from the monks and samurai to farmers and artisans.

The true feeling of haiku is “given away” in one of Basho’s poems which, however, says just too much to be true haiku:

How admirable,

He who thinks not, “Life is fleeting,”

When he sees the lightning!

For the haiku sees things in their “suchness,” without comment–a view of the world which the Japanese call sono-mama, “Just as it is,” or “Just so.”

Weeds in the rice-field,

Cut and left lying just so–

Fertilizer!

In Zen a man has no mind apart from what he knows and sees, and this is almost expressed by Gochiku in the haiku:

The long night;

The sound of the water

Says what I think.

And still more directly–

The stars on the pond;

Again the winter shower

Ruffles the water.

Haiku and waka poems convey perhaps more easily than painting the subtle differences between the four moods of sabi, wabi, aware, and yugen. The quiet, thrilling loneliness of sabi is obvious in

On a withered branch

A crow is perched,

In the autumn evening.

But it is less obvious and therefore deeper in

With the evening breeze,

The water laps against

The heron’s legs.

In the dark forest

A berry drops:

The sound of the water.

Sabi is, however, loneliness in the sense of Buddhist detachment, of seeing all things as happening “by themselves” in miraculous spontaneity. With this goes that sense of deep, illimitable quietude which descends with a long fall of snow, swallowing all sounds in layer upon layer of softness.

Sleet falling;

Fathomless, infinite

Loneliness.

Wabi, the unexpected recognition of the faithful “suchness” of very ordinary things, especially when the gloom of the future has momentarily checked our ambitiousness, is perhaps the mood of

A brushwood gate,

And for a lock–

This snail.

The woodpecker

Keeps on in the same place:

Day is closing.

Winter desolation;

In the rain-water tub,

Sparrows are walking.

Aware is not quite grief, and not quite nostalgia in the usual sense of longing for the return of a beloved past. Aware is the echo of what has passed and of what was loved, giving them a resonance such as a great cathedral gives to a choir, so that they would be the poorer without it.

No one lives at the Barrier of Fuha;

The wooden penthouse is fallen away;

All that remains

Is the autumn wind.

The