The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [93]
Thinking of past things,
How far-off they are!
Aware is the moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world with sorrow and regret, and seeing it as the very form of the Great Void.
The stream hides itself
In the grasses
Of departing autumn.
Leaves falling,
Lie on one another;
The rain beats on the rain.
That moment of transition is just about to “cross over” in the haiku written by Issa upon the death of his child:
This dewdrop world–
It may be a dewdrop,
And yet–and yet–
Since yugen signifies a kind of mystery, it is the most baffling of all to describe, and the poems must speak for themselves.
The sea darkens;
The voices of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.
The skylark:
Its voice alone fell,
Leaving nothing behind.
In the dense mist,
What is being shouted
Between hill and boat?
A trout leaps;
Clouds are moving
In the bed of the stream.
Or an example of yugen in the Zenrin poems:
Wind subsiding, the flowers still fall;
Bird crying, the mountain silence deepens.4
Because Zen training had involved a constant use of these Chinese couplets since at least the end of the fifteenth century, the emergence of haiku is hardly surprising. The influence is self-evident in this “yugen-in-reverse” haiku by Moritake. The Zenrin says:
The shattered mirror will reflect no more;
The fallen flower will hardly rise to the branch.j
And Moritake–
A fallen flower
Returning to the branch?
It was a butterfly.
The association of Zen with poetry must inevitably bring up the name of the Soto Zen monk and hermit Ryokan (1758–1831). So often one thinks of the saint as a man whose sincerity provokes the enmity of the world, but Ryokan holds the distinction of being the saint whom everyone loved–perhaps because he was natural, again as a child, rather than good. It is easy to form the impression that the Japanese love of nature is predominantly sentimental, dwelling on those aspects of nature which are “nice” and “pretty”–butterflies, cherry blossoms, the autumn moon, chrysanthemums, and old pine trees.5 But Ryokan is also the poet of lice, fleas, and being utterly soaked with cold rain.
On rainy days
The monk Ryokan
Feels sorry for himself.
And his view of “nature” is all of a piece:
The sound of the scouring
Of the saucepan blends
With the tree-frogs’ voices.
In some ways Ryokan is a Japanese St. Francis, though much less obviously religious. He is a wandering fool, un-self-consciously playing games with children, living in a lonely hut in the forest where the roof leaks and the wall is hung with poems in his marvelously illegible, spidery handwriting, so prized by Japanese calligraphers. He thinks of the lice on his chest as insects in the grass, and expresses the most natural human feelings–sadness, loneliness, bewilderment, or pity–without a trace of shame or pride. Even when robbed he is still rich, for
The thief
Left it behind–
The moon at the window.
And when there is no money,
The wind brings
Fallen leaves enough
To make a fire.
When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present–normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen. The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in cha-no-yu, the art of tea. Strictly, the term means something like “Tea with hot water,” and through this one art Zen has exercised an incalculable influence on Japanese life, since the chajin, or “man of tea,” is an arbiter of taste in the many subsidiary arts which cha-no-yu involves–architecture, gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquer, and the arrangement of flowers (ikebana).
Since cha-no-yu has become a conventional accomplishment for young ladies, it has been made the subject of a great deal of sentimental nonsense–associated with brocaded young dolls in moonlit rooms, nervously trying to imitate the most stilted feelings about porcelain and cherry blossom. But in the austere purity of, say, the Soshu Sen School the art of tea is a genuine expression