CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zen and Haiku

_Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory--

_Percy Bysshe Shelley

HAIKU IS REGARDED by many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes of _koan _riddles, _sutras_, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional Japanese poetry--an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the Japanese of the early Zen masters.

On first acquaintance Japanese seems an unlikely language for poetry. It is a syllabic tongue with each syllable ending in a vowel or the nasal n; consequently there are only five true rhymes in the entire language. Italian poets overcame a somewhat similar handicap, but their language is stressed, which Japanese is not. With no usable rhymes and no stress, how can the music of poetry be created? Over the centuries, the Japanese solved this problem by replacing meter with a system of fixed syllables--either five or seven--for each line. (This means that some lines of Japanese poetry may have only one word, but the system seems to work.) In place of rhyme, Japanese poets learned to orchestrate the pitch of individual vowels within a single line to give a sense of music. This device was illustrated by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth using a poem from the classical era. (The vowels are pronounced as in Italian.)

_Fu-ta-ri yu-ke-do

Yu-ki su-gi ga-ta-ki

A-ki ya-ma wo

I-ka-de ka ki-mi ga

Hi-to-ri ko-ge na-mu

_

In his analysis of this particular poem, Rexroth has pointed out that the first and last lines contain all five vowels in the language, whereas the middle lines contain various combinations and repetitions, which produce a pronounced musical effect.1 The ability to create such music without rhyme, one of the finer achievements of Japanese poetry, is far more difficult than might at first be imagined and leads naturally to assonance, or the close repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repetition of similar consonant sounds. Some of the vowels have psychological overtones, at least to the sensitive Japanese ear: u is soft, a is sharp and resonant, o connotes vagueness tinged with profundity.2 Various consonants also convey an emotional sense in a similar manner.

Another clever device of the early Japanese versifiers was the use of words with double meanings. One example of this is the so-called pivot word, which occurs approximately halfway through a poem such as the above and serves both to complete the sense of the first part of the poem with one meaning and to begin a new sense and direction with its second meaning. This can at times produce a childish effect, and it does not always elevate the overall dignity of the verse. Another use of double meaning is far more demanding. Since the Japanese kana script is entirely phonetic and allows for no distinction in spelling between homonyms, words which sound alike but have different meanings, it is possible to carry two or more ideas through a poem. (A somewhat labored example in English might be, "My tonights hold thee more," "My two knights hold the moor." If these were written alike and pronounced alike, then the poem could mean either or both.) The first meaning may be a concrete example of a lover pining for his love, and the second a metaphor. Ideally, the two meanings support each other, producing a resonance said to be truly remarkable.

The early Japanese poets overcame the limitations of the Japanese language both by attuning their ears to the music of the words and by capitalizing on the large incidence of homonyms. They settled the matter of meter, as noted, by prescribing the number of syllables per line, with the principal form being five lines with syllable counts of 5,7,5,7, and 7. This thirty-one-syllable poem, known as the _waka_, became the Japanese "sonnet" and by far the most popular poetic form during the Heian era. Almost all a poet can do in five lines, however, is to record a single emotion or observation. The medium governed the message, causing Japanese poets early on to explore their hearts more than their minds. The _waka_ became a cry of passion; a gentle confirmation of love; a lament for the brevity of blossoms, colored leaves, the seasons, life itself. A sampling of _waka _from the early classical era shows the aesthetic sense of the seasons and lyric charm of these verses.

_Tsuki ya aranu

_ Can it be that the moon has changed?

_Haru ya mukashi no

_ Can it be that the spring

_Haru naranu

_ Is not the spring of old times?

_Waga mi hitotsu wa

_ Is it my body alone

_Moto no mi nishite

_ That is just the same?3

Judged on its concentrated power alone, for this is virtually all an English reader can evaluate, this poem is a masterpiece. Its content can be condensed into five lines because much of its impact lies in its suggestiveness. It is, however, closed-ended, with no philosophical implications other than a wry look at human perceptions. Haiku added new dimensions to Japanese poetry.

The early aristocratic era gave Japanese poetry its form, the five-line _waka_, and its subject matter, nature and the emotions. Later the familiar Japanese idea that life is but a fleeting moment and all things must blossom and fade was added. One critic has noted that as this idea took hold, poems gradually changed from praise of the plum blossom, which lasts for weeks, to praise of the cherry blossom, which fades in a matter of days.

_Hisakata no

_On a day in spring

_Hikari nodokeki

_When the light throughout the sky

_Haru no hi ni

_Warms with tranquility.

_Shizugokoro naku

_Why is it with unsettled heart

_Hana no chiru ran

_That the cherry flowers fall?4

Japanese poetry of the pre-Zen period has been handed to us primarily in a few famous collections. The first great anthology of Japanese poetry is the Manyoshu, a volume of verses from the middle of the eighth century. A glance through the Manyoshu shows that the earliest poets did not confine themselves to five-line verses, but indulged in longer verses on heroic subjects, known as _choka_. The tone, as Donald Keene has observed, is often more masculine than feminine, that is, more vigorous than refined. As sensibilities softened in the early part of the Heian era and native verse became the prerogative of women, while men struggled with the more "important" language of China, the feminine tone prevailed to such an extent that male writers posed as women when using the native script. The next great collection of verse, the Kokinshu, published in the tenth century, was virtually all five- line _waka _concerned with seasons, birds, flowers, and fading love, and embracing the aesthetic ideals of _aware_, _miyabi_, and _yugen_.

As the aristocratic culture gradually lost control in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new verse form, derived from the _waka_, came into being: _renga_. This form consisted of a string of verses in the repeated sequence of 5,7,5 and 7,7 syllables per line--in reality a related series of _waka _but with the difference that no two consecutive two-or three-line verse sequences could be composed by the same individual. At first this new form seemed to offer hope of freeing poets from the increasingly confining range of subject matter prescribed for the _waka_. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Before long the _renga_ was saddled with a set of rules covering which verse should mention what season; at what point the moon, cherry blossoms, and the like should be noted; and so forth. Little creativity was possible under such restrictions. Versifying became, in fact, a party game much in favor with provincial _samurai_ and peasants alike in times. While the remaining Kyoto aristocrats tried to keep their _renga _in the spirit of the classical _waka_, with allusions to Chinese poems and delicate melancholy, the provincials threw _renga _parties whose only aesthetic concern was adherence to the rules of the game. During the Ashikaga age, _renga_ and sake parties were the most popular forms of entertainment, but _renga's _only genuine contribution to Japanese poetry was the use of the vernacular by provincial poets, which finally broke the stranglehold of Heian feminine aesthetics.

By the beginning of the Momoyama era, linked verse had

run its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga. The _waka_ had been aristocratic, and the best _renga _provincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant class. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first called _haikai_, after the first verse of the _renga_, which was called the _hokku_. The term "Haiku" actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant class, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older classical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in Japanese verse. This was the man now considered Japan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to Japanese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694).

Basho was born a _samurai_ in an age when it was little more than an empty title, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperous _daimyo_ who transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to shift for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho "school," as well as making him a welcome guest at _renga _gatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors:

Red pepper pods!

Add wings to them,

and they are dragonflies!5

This verse is certainly "open-ended" insofar as it creates a reverberation of images in the mind, and, what is more, the effect is achieved by the comparison of two concrete images. There is no comment; the images are simply thrown out to give the mind a starting point. But the overall impact remains merely decorative art. It reflects the concept of _aware_, or a pleasing recognition of beauty, rather than _yugen_, the extension of awareness into a region beyond words.

When he was about thirty-five, Basho created a Haiku that began to touch the deeper regions of the mind. This is the famous_

Kare-eda ni

_ On a withered branch

_karasu-no tomari-keri

_a crow has settled--

_aki-no-kure

_autumn nightfall.6

As a simple juxtaposition of images the poem is striking enough, but it also evokes a comparison of the images, each of which enriches the other. The mind is struck as with a hammer, bringing the senses up short and releasing a flood of associations. Its only shortcoming is that the scene is static; it is a painting, not a happening of the sort that can sometimes trigger the sudden sense of Zen enlightenment.

Perhaps Basho realized that his art had not yet drunk deeply enough at the well of Zen, for a few years after this poem was written he became a serious Zen student and began to travel around Japan soaking up images. His travel diaries of the last years are a kind of Haiku "poetics," in which he extends the idea of _sabi_ to include the aura of loneliness that can surround common objects. Zen detachment entered his verses; all personal emotion was drained away, leaving images objective and devoid of any commentary, even implied.

More important, the Zen idea of transience appeared. Not the transience of falling cherry blossoms but the fleeting instant of Zen enlightenment. Whereas the antilogic _koan _anecdotes were intended to lead up to this moment, Basho's Haiku were the moment of enlightenment itself, as in his best-known poem:

_Furu-ike ya

_An ancient pond

_kawazu tobi-komu

_A frog jumps in

_mizu-no-oto

_The sound of water.

These deceptively simple lines capture an intersection of the timeless and the ephemeral. The poem is said to have described an actual occurrence, an evening broken by a splash. The poet immediately spoke the last two lines of the poem, the ephemeral portion, and much time was then devoted to creating the remaining static and timeless part. This was as it should be, for the inspiration of a Haiku must be genuine and suggest its own lines at the moment it occurs. Zen eschews deliberation and rational analysis; nothing must come between object and perception at the critical moment.

With this poem Basho invented a new form of Zen literary art, and Haiku was never the same afterward. To write this kind of poem, the artist must completely disengage--if only for an instant--all his interpretive faculties. His mind becomes one with the world around him, allowing his craft to operate instinctively in recording the image he perceives. For a moment he is privy to the inexpressible truth of Zen--that the transient is merely part of the eternal--and this instantaneous perception moves directly from his senses to his innermost understanding, without having to travel through his interpretive faculties. Earlier Zen writings in both Japan and China had described this process, but none had captured the phenomenon itself. By catching the momentary at the very instant of its collision with the eternal, Basho could produce a high-speed snapshot of the trigger mechanism of Zen enlightenment. In a modern metaphor, the Haiku became a Zen hologram, in which all the information necessary to re-create a large three-dimensional phenomenon was coded into a minuscule key. Any interpretation of the phenomenon would be redundant to a Zen adept, since the philosophical significance would re-create itself spontaneously from the critical images recorded in the poem. Thus a perfect Haiku is not about the moment of Zen enlightenment; it is that moment frozen in time and ready to be released in the listener's mind.

Haiku is the most dehumanized of all poetry. Instead of the artist's sensations and feelings, we get simply the names of things. By Western standards they are hardly poems at all, merely a rather abbreviated list. As the critic-poet Kenneth Yasuda has pointed out, a Haiku poet does not give us meaning, he gives us objects that have meaning; he does not describe, he presents.7 And unlike the poetry of the No, Haiku seems a form strangely devoid of symbolism. The tone seems matter-of- fact, even when touching upon the most potentially emotional of subjects. Take, for example, Basho's poem composed at the grave of one of his beloved pupils.

_Tsuka mo ugoke

_Grave mound, shake too!

_waga naku koe wa

_My wailing voice--

_aki-no-kaze

_the autumn wind.8

No betrayal of emotion here, simply a comparison of his grief- ridden voice, a transient thing, with the eternal autumn wind. It is a Zen moment of recognition, devoid of emotion or self-pity, and yet somehow our sympathies spring alive, touching us in a way that the early classical poems on the passage of time never could.

Love in Haiku is directed toward nature as much as toward man or woman. Part of the reason may be the stylistic requirement that every Haiku tell the reader the season. This is done by the so-called season word, which can either be an outright naming of the season (such as the "autumn" wind above) or some mention of a season-dependent natural phenomenon, such as a blossom, a colored leaf (green or brown), a summer bird or insect, snow, and so on. The tone is always loving, never accusatory (a tribute to the nature reverence of ancient Japan), and it can be either light or solemn. Chirps of insects, songs of birds, scents of blossoms, usually serve as the transient element in a Haiku, whereas water, wind, sunshine, and the season itself are the eternal elements.

_Ume-ga-ka ni

_With the scent of plums

_notto hi-no deru

_on the mountain road--suddenly,

_yama-ji kana

_ sunrise comes!9

This is nature poetry at its finest, full of all the detached reverence and affection of Zen. It is also impassive and accepting: nature is there to be enjoyed and to teach the lessons of Zen. Basho's Haiku discover an instant of heightened awareness and pass it on unaltered and without comment. The poem is as uncolored with emotion as is the world it so dispassionately describes. It is up to the reader to know the proper response.

It hardly needs to be said that Basho's poems must be interpreted on several levels: not only do they describe a moment in the life of the world, they are also symbols or metaphors for deeper truths, which cannot be stated explicitly. Underneath a vivid image of a physical phenomenon is a Zen code pointing toward the nonphysical. Not only was Basho Japan's finest lyric poet, he was also among the finest interpreters of Zen.

Basho left a large following. The Haiku was established as Japan's foremost poetic form, and to touch upon every Haiku poet would require an encylopedia. However, three other Haiku masters were outstanding. The first is Buson (1715-1783), also a well-known painter, whose blithe if somewhat mannered style reflected the gradual dissolution of severe Zen ideals in favor of the lighter touch preferred by the prosperous merchant class.

Buson was also master of the classical double entendre so beloved by the aristocratic poets of the classical era. The first example given here is a subtle reference to the theme of transience, set in the context of an exchange of love poems, while the second is a somewhat ribald jest about the one-night stand.

_Hen-ka naki

_No poem you send

_ao-nyobo yo

_in answer--Oh, young lady!

_kure-no haru

_Springtime nears its end.10

_Mijika yo ya

_The short night is through:

_kemushi-no ue ni

_on the hairy caterpillar,

_tsuyu-no-tama

_little beads of dew.11

Buson could also be serious and moving when he tried, as with the following, one of his most admired works.

_Mi-ni-shimu ya

_The piercing chill I feel:

_bo-sai-no kushi

_my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,

_neya ni fumu

_under my heel . . .12

Buson clearly had less Zen about him than Basho, but his verses suited the temper of his age, and he strongly influenced both students and contemporaries, although not the next great Haiku master, Issa (1762- 1826), who was a romantic provincial through and through, immune to the fancy phrasing of the sophisticated Buson school.

Issa is the sentimental favorite in the canons of Japanese Haiku. He used simple, even colloquial language, and he brought heartfelt love to all things he touched, great and small. Although he was not immersed in the heavier aspects of Zen, his lighthearted approach to life was well in accord with the latter clays of the Zen revival. His Haiku style seems the literary equivalent of the comic Zen drawings of Hakuin (1685--1768) or Sengai (1751-1837). There is also a Zen quality to his rejection of the literary conventions of the time. Yet Issa was not consciously a rebel; rather, he was a simple, sincere man who wrote sincerely of simple things. His approach to nature was as honest in its own way as Basho's, but Issa was happy to let his own personality and response shine through, while Basho deliberately circumvented his own emotions.

Orphaned at an early age and seeing to the grave all the children born during his lifetime (as well as two of his three wives), Issa seems to have known little but hardship. Much of his life was spent as an itinerant poet-priest, an occupation that allowed him to learn the life of the people while also keeping him close to the earth. A compendium of his life's experiences and a fine sampling of his Haiku were recorded in his famous book The Year of My Life, which seems to have been his answer to Basho's travel diaries. However, his humanity was far distant from Basho's lonely sabi. For condensed effect, compare the following with Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper."

_Yabu-kage ya

_In the thicket's shade,

_tatta hitori-no

_and all alone, she's singing--

_ta-ue-uta

_the rice-planting maid.13

Perhaps his most touching poem, which shames into oblivion all the "transient dew" posturing of a thousand years of classical Japanese verse, is the famous Haiku written on the death of one of his children.

_Tsuyu-no-yo wa

_The world of dew

_tsuyu-no-yo nagara

_Is the world of dew

_sari nagara

_And yet . . . And yet . . .14

Issa's rustic, personal voice was not a style to be copied, even if the city poets had wished to do so, and Haiku seems to have fallen into the hands of formula versifiers during the mid- nineteenth century. In the waning years of the century, the last of the four great Haiku masters rose to prominence: Shiki (1867-1902), whose life of constantly failing health was as adversity-plagued as Issa's, but who actively took up the fight against the insincere parlor versifiers then ruling Haiku. No wandering poet-priest, Shiki was a newspaperman, critic, and editor of various Haiku "little magazines." The Zen influence that ruled Basho's later poetry is missing in Shiki, but the objective imagery is there-- only in a tough, modern guise. Shiki's verse is an interesting example of how similar in external appearance the godless austerity of Zen is to the existential atheism of our own century. (This superficial similarity is undoubtedly the reason so much of Zen art seems "modern" to us today--it is at odds with both classical and romantic ideals.) Thus a completely secular poet like Shiki could revolutionize Haiku as a form of art-for-art's-sake without having to acknowledge openly his debt to Zen.

_Hira-hira to

_A single butterfly

_Kaze ni nigarete

_Fluttering and drifting

_Cho hitotsu

_In the wind.15

With the poems of Shiki, the influence of Zen had so permeated Haiku that it was taken for granted. Much the same had occurred with all the Zen arts; as the dynamic aspects of the faith faded away, all that was left were the art forms and aesthetic ideals of Zen culture. The rules of the ancient Zen masters were there as a theme for the modern arts, but mainly as a theme on which there could be variations. Zen culture as an entity was slowly dissolving, becoming in modern times merely a part of a larger cultural heritage.