4 Papers from 2002 part 2

The World Haiku Festival 2002

Yuwa-town, Akita 20-22 September

Blyth had foresight

The Internet and e-mail make it possible to contact people all over the world in a moment. Haiku is no exception. English-language haiku are sent to me by computer almost every day from all areas of the world. Artistically, haiku seems to take various forms, literally adopting haiku poets’ cultural backgrounds as well as expanding beyond the borders of their regions through the rapid development of telecommunication systems. Who would have expected so broad an international expanse of haiku? Only Blyth predicted world haiku, forty years ago.

Reginald Horace Blyth was twenty-four years old in 1924 when he left England, and he never returned home afterward. He soon became a believer in Zen Buddhism. After 1924, he spent forty years between Chosun (Korea), then under Japanese colonial occupation, and Japan. A Professor of English at Gakushuin University, Blyth was a haiku researcher who contributed to the establishment of haiku beyond Japan to overseas after World War II through his work in translation.

More than half century passed after “Zen and English Literature,” his first publication, was published in 1942. This book has been published in several editions to date, and it has a large readership around the world as a basic book on haiku. Almost all his forty-two books, including a textbook for students, are written in English. His introduction of Japanese haiku in the English language has resulted in a large readership in foreign countries, becoming a great catalyst of the spread of haiku outside Japan.

On the other hand, we can see negative opinions about Blyth’s view of haiku, although critics admit the value of his contribution to the propagation of haiku beyond Japan. Such criticisms include his view that haiku has a background of Zen Buddhism, i.e., that ‘haiku is synonymous with Zen.’ This has both advantages and disadvantages; in spite of those opinions, his books and career yet attract us. In one instance, there a person who has become so intrigued by Blyth that he has made a website about him. Considering Blyth’s attraction, we realize his personal view of haiku, and his indication of the way to world haiku.

Diplomats and foreign scholars employed by the Japanese government, such as Paul-Louis Couchoud, Basil Hall Chamberlain, and Lafcadio Hearn, each of whom were interested in Japanese culture and literature, translated Japanese haiku in the Meiji Era (1869-1912). There were, at that time, only a few examples of haiku translations in English by Yonejiro Noguchi (The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, 1914) and Asataro Miyamori (An Anthology of Haiku: ancient and modern, 1932). But haiku was not so positively introduced by the Japanese, themselves, as it was by foreigners who had been exposed to Japanese culture. Therefore, the spread of haiku outside Japan has depended greatly on Blyth’s works. Without Blyth it would not really have been possible, after World WarⅡ,even to talk about haiku in the West.

In the last chapter of “A History of Haiku” (1964), published just before his death, Blyth states the premise of ‘world haiku’ as follows:

The latest development in the history of haiku is one which nobody foresaw, --the writing of haiku outside Japan, not in the Japanese language. We may now assert with some confidence that the day is coming when haiku will be written in Russia, in the Celebes, in Sardinia. What a pleasing prospect, what an Earthly Paradise it will be, the Esquimaux blowing on their fingers as they write haiku about the sun that never sets or rises, the pygmies composing jungle haiku on the gorilla and the python, the nomads of the Sahara and Gobi deserts seeing a grain of sand in a world!

His prediction comes true -- and haiku poets are now born in Mongolia and Africa. Yes, forty years ago, Blyth predicted what world haiku would be like.

Explanation of haiku by Blyth

Blyth’s four-volume “Haiku” is still an indispensable guidebook for poets around the world who write haiku. Blyth was a master in introducing haiku outside Japan. He once said haiku was Japan’s greatest gift to the world, and in that light, he spread his view of Japanese culture worldwide through his translations of Japanese haiku and senryu.

As stated previously, Blyth was a believer in Zen Buddhism. For him, haiku was Zen itself. In the magazine, “The Cultural East” he said spoke of the relationship between haiku and Zen as follows:

In haiku, we have an expression of the Zen state of mind. Without some understanding of what is meant by that rather repulsive word, 'Zen’ it is difficult to see what haiku are aiming at.

He concludes that haiku is nearly synonymous of Zen. Professor Emeritus, Koichi Sembokuya, of Musashi University, spoke of this relationship as follows:

Zen, haiku, and Blyth, himself, formed the Trinity to him. He did not admit an essential difference between Zen and haiku. Blyth may rebuke the viewpoint that Zen is one of the religion forms and haiku is one of the art genres for its non-Zen point of view.

For Blyth, haiku was Zen and his way of life itself.

In “The Eastern Buddhist” magazine, eulogising the late R. H. Blyth, his mentor, Daisetz Suzuki, stated that Blyth’s thoughts were closely connected with Zen, though not always in the orthodox tradition. However, it is clear that Daisetz Suzuki appreciated Blyth’s view of haiku, as he cited it in “Zen and Japanese Culture.”

Blyth was trying to express his own internal world through translation and explanation of haiku and senryu, his explanation of Zen, under influence of Daisetz Suzuki, and through his writing of English literature textbooks. His self-expression was not through haiku composition, but rather, through analogy of English poetry to Japanese haiku, in addition to translating and explaining Japanese haiku. In other words, it might be possible to say that he challenged this difficult work by trying to express his internal world through the Japanese culture. Overseas, this element attracted the his readers to Blyth.

Only two of Blyth’s own haiku are actually known, today, one composed in his Kyongsong (Seoul) Imperial University days:

A snail

Dreams a blue dream

On the back of a leaf.

and,

Going forth…

Leaving my thoughts

In a sasanqua flower.

The latter is known his farewell haiku. This shows that he did not have strong intention of composing his haiku. Practically, he was not a creative haiku writer. Therefore, when we read his translations and explanations of Japanese haiku, we have to consider that a lot of his personal opinions and arbitrary interpretation are included. However, it is true that we are attracted to his unique viewpoints of haiku.

Haiku is world literature

Blyth understood haiku as one of the greatest phenomena in the Oriental culture. There was no one who understood Japanese haiku like he did. Even Basil Hall Chamberlain introduced Japanese haiku as a witty epigram. Lafcadio Hearn’s understanding of haiku was almost the same as Chamberlain’s. Blyth spoke of his own view on haiku in his “Zen and Haiku”, that is:

All the deep thoughts and experiences of the Indian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese races flower in them. In spite of their deceptive simplicity, (or because of it) haiku are as profound as the music of Bach, as deeply concerned with the mind of man as the plays of Shakespeare, as great a contribution to world-culture as the Commedia dell’arte or Don Quixote.

In addition, he held the high opinion that haiku is the flower of all the Oriental culture, representing the peak of it, and that in the Oriental culture, haiku occupies a position which is the same which Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe occupy in the Western culture. Thus, he regarded haiku as world literature as well as the flower of the Oriental culture.

A Renaissance of the works of R.H. Blyth

As above-mentioned, since from 1924, Blyth spent 40 years between Chosun (Korea) under the Japanese colonial occupation, and Japan, few people knew him in his homeland. “The Genius of Haiku,” composed as a biographical sketch of Blyth, and extracts from his works, were published by the British Haiku Society in 1994 to commemorate both the three hundred year anniversary of Basho’s death and thirty year anniversary of Blyth’s death. The British Haiku Society had only a small, limited information about him in 1994. Even the reference library of the University of London, from which Blyth graduated, had only the list of his works and some obituary articles. I am very glad that the British Haiku Society garnered so much information and new facts in order to publish “The Genius of Haiku.” This book is, so to speak, a Renaissance of the works of R. H. Blyth. In addition, I am very happy to help the BHS in researching information on him.

Haiku poets outside Japan have been greatly influenced by Blyth, but they are now divided in their evaluation of his works. What are both opinions? I conducted a questionnaire-survey of those poets who attended the World Haiku Club's World Haiku Festival 2000 in London/Oxford, and the World Haiku Association's Inaugural Meeting in Tolmin, Slovenia.

Some affirmative opinions are as follows:

• Blyth emphasises Zen thought, insight, and wisdom rather than Zen practice. His presentation may be inaccurate, but it is stimulating reading.
• I like the connection between Zen and haiku.
• Blyth’s haiku books keep strong impact on the haiku poets and, in fact, this impact should be even stronger. Unfortunately, his books are very expensive in the UK.
• I think most senior haiku poets have a respect for the influence of Blyth on a Western writer.
• I think he is still the No.1 Western haiku scholar, and still the best place to start your haiku education.
• Blyth’s influence on world haiku is very important. Without Blyth’s books, we, [as Westerners], would not have known haiku poetry.

On the other hand, some of the negative opinions are as follows:

• I do not agree at all with Blyth’s thought about haiku and Zen.
• About impact, in the past—yes, now less and less.
• I think that Blyth did not give an exact image of Japanese haiku abroad.
• I have never been influenced by Blyth’s thought that haiku is embodiment of Zen Buddhism. I write haiku, which reflect my cultural underground from orthodox religion, the space of European civilization, and Romanian cultures and traditions.

Earl Miner, in “The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature”, writes about the influence of Japanese literature in the West, and while showing the influence of haiku up to the Imagist poets, he makes no reference to Blyth. This may be due to Blyth’s view of haiku, that 'haiku is synonymous with Zen'; in other words, because of Blyth's understanding of haiku as a literary form of Zen, religious bias may keep scholars, researchers of literature and poets at a distance from him.

We can also expect divided evaluations of Blyth’s works because, as mentioned previously, many of his personal opinions and arbitrary interpretations are included in his translations and explanations of haiku. Blyth introduced Japanese culture to the Western world, made great contributions to the East-West intercultural exchange and had a great influence on many poets in the world. However, it seems that primary purpose was to express his own internal world through translation and explanation of haiku and senryu.

ｃ：Ikuyo Yoshimura: A Gift from R.H.Blyth: R.H.Blyth and the World Haiku

The World Haiku Festival 2002

Yuwa-town, Akita 20-22 September

I am very pleased to be here to celebrate and honor the life and works of R.H. Blyth, my esteemed mentor and friend. Our relationship coincided with the period when Dr. Blyth was tutor to Prince Akihito, and our correspondence continued for some five years until his passing in 1964, when Blyth was in Japan, and I was in California.

My first introduction to Reginald Horace Blyth was in the early 1950s. When I was a university student in philosophy, keenly interested in metaphysics and spiritual inquiry. It was through Blyth's monumental volumes of Japanese haiku and the Essays on Zen Buddhism by his close friend D. T. Suzuki (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki), that I became interested in Tao and Zen philosophy, and their influence upon haiku and other Zen arts.

My studies in Zen philosophy, while serious, remained largely intellectual and academic until after my graduation in the 1950s. For at this time, I suffered a life-threatening injury that profoundly changed my values and direction. This trauma was an apocalyptic experience in which I met death with each breath, and every live moment was an epiphany. In a baptism of blood I became directly aware that the Way of Zen and Tao was ever present, in a NOW that is Eternal. Having survived, I sought redemption for taking life for granted. I resolved to somehow express my new-found love of life, and to honor the omnipresent miracle of Creation.

Certainly, I owe my decision to create haiku poetry in English to Dr. Blyth's Zen view of haiku. Through his profound and insightful writings I realized that haiku poetry offered the best means to express my reverence for this present of life. I was deeply influenced by Blyth's and Nyogen Roshi's revelation that Zen methodology focused on selflessness (muga) and the immediacy (imma) of the Tao. I realized how Zen could center the poet's consciousness upon this Eternal Now: the very nave 'round which Creation's wheel of life revolves, and this established beyond question that haiku's destiny included its spiritual capability to be a high art of Zen.

Significantly, it was not Blyth's awesome erudition or his intellectual genius that caused me to contact him. I did so out of respect for his spiritual-aesthetic approach to the haiku experience. Blyth possessed an acuity and spiritual understanding I found in no other translator.

Blyth's and Suzuki's writings became my scriptures, and composing haiku in English my passion -- and my very reason for living. My spirit was on fire with enthusiasm, dedicated to expressing my reverence for Creation's miracle through haiku poetry and the spirit of Zen. Hence my use of the term "Zen haiku."

After some six months of writing, I sent a collection of my haiku poems in English to Dr. Blyth, and in a cover letter told him that an unusual, Zen-revealing sentence in one of his books caused me to seek his counsel. His sentence read:

There's more significance in the sound of the nib I'm now writing with than anything I could say.

(I imagined the sound of Blyth's old-fashioned pen, dipped in the ink jar, then 'speaking' as it wrote.) This demonstrated to me Blyth's transcendent awareness of Zen.

Blyth's subsequent reply was more than I could have dreamed. It was a long letter, full of suggestions, praise and encouragement. (During a recent visit with Blyth's elder daughter, Harumi, she recalled that when Dr. Blyth received my poems, he excitedly told the family he found a poet who could write English language haiku! (How I treasure this recollection!)

I was aware of only translations of Japanese haiku in the 1950s. My life was devoted to Zazen (meditation), and to living and writing haiku poetry; this in a society dominated by values completely antithetical to my own. However, Blyth's enthusiastic support kept me writing. I know I would not have continued to write haiku but for Dr. Blyth's warm encouragement and respect -- which, by the way, extended to my Zen practice, along with a kind regard for my personal life, as well.

It was Blyth's enlightened, independent spirit that drew me to him. His writings deepened my soul, and greatly clarified and focused what I had suffered to learn through my accident.

I was able to syncretize haiku and Zen through the inspiriting influence of "Blyth's Zen." R. H. Blyth was more than a scholar: his deep spirit came from experiential realization -- as did my own. As dedicated, independent spirits, we bonded and shared a non-religious Way of Zen to serve what is truly beyond category.

Incidentally, I first heard the term "Blyth's Zen" from my Roshi friend, Soen Nakagawa. We were taxiing through Tokyo traffic when Roshi asked,

Who was your Zen teacher?

I told Soen Roshi that I was deeply influenced by D T. Suzuki and Nyogen Senzaki, but as for incorporating Zen values in my haiku, I was a disciple of R. H. Blyth. To this, Roshi murmured a long

Hmmmmmmm.....

then said,

Blyth's Zen, eh?

(Most significantly, Soen Roshi respected the transcendent ['beyond borders'] Way of Zen and haiku which had "chosen" Blyth, and myself.)

As I focused on living the Way of Zen, a compassionate identification with natural subjects developed. Blyth discerned this in my writing and believed it characterized my haiku. As he wrote in his foreword to my first book of haiku:

To attain this ability, to express the immediate sensation, to pour all of one's self into the thing, and let the thing penetrate every part of one's self, needs much travail of mind and body.

Indeed, it is this "That Art Thou" spiritual interpenetration with all things that has inspired my life and Way of Haiku.

The following excerpt of "Spiritual Penetration" (from my essay That Art Thou: A Spiritual Way of Haiku) is presented out of respect for Dr. Blyth's inspiring influence, and for the ken of an ever evolving Way of Zen:

Blyth's Haiku Approach

The following opinions are, like the snow on the poet Kikaku's hat, easy to hold -- being my own. However, I freely and most gratefully acknowledge that not a few of my views are derived from the writings and correspondence of my mentor and friend, R. H. Blyth. Despite his influence and indeed because of it (Blyth being a paradigm of Bodhisattva courage), I too remain an independent spirit ... albeit one deeply indebted to history's masters of reality: those whose vision and spiritual depth provided insights of incalculable value.

The suggestions offered here are born of living and writing haiku and Tao/Zen poetry for some 50 years: a time concurrently devoted to the study of Far Eastern art and philosophy. Persuaded by the truth and depth found there, I have tried to make my writings serve the enlightened goals of this philosophy. I am more than aware however, that a spiritual approach to haiku is not common (save for Zen's influence upon the later Basho). And some may find such a spiritual Way of haiku too alien or abstruse. So be it. As in Japan, there are in the world today many approaches to haiku: one for virtually every level of consciousness and taste -- given the genre's aesthetic anarchy. Yet whatever the approach, the writer (and the reader as well) should not mistake the simplicity of haiku for the trivial. As R. H. Blyth discerned:

Haiku have a simplicity that is deceptive both with regard to their depth of content and to their origins... (Blyth 5:iii)

and,

" ... haiku require our purest and most profound spiritual appreciation, for they represent a whole world, the Eastern World, of religious and poetic experience. Haiku is the final flower of all Eastern culture; it is also a way of living." (Blyth 5:iii)

In regard to the spiritual Way I believe haiku can be, I wrote the following in a letter to Blyth in 1963:

For haiku is ultimately more than a form or even kind of poetry: it is a Way -- one of living awareness. This, together with its rendering of the Suchness of things gives haiku a supra-literary mission, One of moment. (This was included in his History of Haiku, volume II: J.W.H. in Blyth 6:352)

The definitive aim of haiku is beyond wit, ideology, didacticism, or even beauty. Rather, it seeks to share, through suggestion, those special moments in which we see into, and experience the life of "things."

Haiku does not ... aim at beauty. Like the music of Bach, it aims at significance. (Blyth 2:x)

So saying, I know of no better Way into the mystical landscape of Tao/Zen haiku, than the spiritual Way presented here. The Way suggested is not a geographic trek, nor does it emulate any other Way, save for the following:

[The Buddha says] "'I have seen the ancient Way, the Old Road that was taken by the formerly All-awakened, and that is the path I follow ..." (Ananda Coomaraswamy 11:45-46)

As Blyth remarks:

There is no miracle, for all is miracle. (Blyth 9:182)

And from Roshi Nyogen Senzaki:

Carry your meditation as the eternal present and saturate your everyday life with it. (Nyogen Senzaki 17:62)

Having acquired a reverence for life, I was inspired by the Tao/Zen spirit of tradition haiku to compose such poems in English. It wasn't long before haiku became my Way of living awareness, and spiritual realization.

The spiritual Way of haiku presented here may seem rather more steep than some. For it is preeminently a Way of awareness and compassion: one that reflects a spiritual approach to reality. Certainly the terrain encountered is as metaphysical as it is literary. For this transcendent Way of haiku leads beyond poetry. When practiced as an adjunct to centering meditation, haiku can be a spiritual art: one whose centering focus reveals the miraculous continuum of Creation manifest in this Eternal Now . . . in whose imminence the causal Spirit abides.

I believe if haiku poetry is to achieve eminence in the world (and not just popularity), its unique spiritual-aesthetic needs to be realized by poets, critics, and readers.

"That Art Thou," the quality of Spiritual Interpenetration in haiku poetry

The Way of haiku requires ... a perpetual sinking of oneself into things. (Blyth 2:330)

The aim of Zen, the aim of the poetical life, is to reach and remain in that undifferentiated state where subject and object are one. (Blyth: 000)

Haiku is a kind of satori, or enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things. (Blyth 2:VII)

A bitter morning:

sparrows sitting together

without any necks.

....................by JWH

It was the spiritual potential of haiku that initially caused me to write and develop this unique poetry in English, and which continues to command my respect and creativity.

Preeminent among the potential Zen qualities of the haiku experience is spiritual interpenetration: a transcendent (numinous) state of being in which a sense of identity is intuited between what we usually think of as ourselves and other things. In haiku this can occur when an immediate sense of empathic union prevails between poet and the subject of moment: a direct intuition often experienced (and even expressed) unconsciously. As such, spiritual interpenetration is a non-cognitive experience whose spiritual antecedents Blyth describes as:

... the [East] Indian (and the Ancient Taoist) view of the world is mutually interpenetrative, each thing containing all things, all-things concentrating itself into each thing. (Blyth 00)

Spiritual interpenetration can be traced to ancient Hindu scriptures (the Vedas), whose very theme -- the Spiritual Oneness of all things -- is 'That Art Thou.' So brief a statement, yet upon reflection how very profound

For encapsulated in those few words is a spiritual insight of cosmic proportions. A

Ghandian view of Oneness -- namely, that

the true disciple knows another's suffering (and joys) as his own.

The same spiritual interpenetration is found in other religions, as seen in the following by Meister Eckhardt, the fifteenth century Christian theologian:

That Art Thou. Behold the One in all things. God within and God without." and, "When a man sees All in all, then a man understands beyond mere understanding. In the Kingdom of Heaven, all is all, all is one, and all is ours. (Eckhardt, in A. Huxley: 56, 76)

Instances of spiritual union in haiku are moments of revelation: an epiphany of oneness common to many religious traditions, as when Lao Tsu, author of the Tao Te Ching, admonished:

Be at one with the dust of the earth. This is primal union. This is the highest state of man.

And from the Original Teachings of Chan Buddhism:

The entire great earth is nothing but yourself.

Roshi Nyogen Senzaki, an early Zen teacher in the United States, is quite explicit:

It is the inherent nature of the Buddha-body that it individualizes itself in myriad manifestations in the phenomenal world. It does not stand alone outside particular existences, but abides in them, animates them, makes them move freely... Its essence is infinite, but its manifestations are finite and limited. (Nyogen Senzaki, Buddhism and Zen, 00)

Such compassionate identification of poet and subject deserves, and indeed warrants, suggestion in the finished haiku poem. Such empathic union is, however, a subtle intuition, all too easily overlooked by the poet. Such intuitions of identity are spiritually significant, and possibly intimate revelation, as we shall see. For however things seem, in an ultimate sense, we are destined to know:

... God is in all things ... Every single creature is full of God... . We must learn to break through things [through interpenetration] if we are to grasp God in them. (Eckhardt 14, 113)

Indeed, such a sense of identity in the haiku experience (whether consciously realized or not) can be a transcendent reflection of the One within All that abides in Becoming. For miraculously, some haiku experiences can be veritable mirrors in which The King of Emptiness momentarily recognizes its Self in things. For as Zen masters well know:

The Buddha eye is everywhere seeing its Self. (in Blyth 00)

Again from the Original Teachings of Chan Buddhism:

Find me on top of a hundred blades of grass, and recognise the King in the market place ... whether an eagle, a mouse, a butterfly, or hairy lion, all of it is you...

Spiritual union is sometimes confused with anthropomorphism, whose attribution of strictly human characteristics to things stems from hubris and sentimentality. The haiku scholar Joan Giroux asserts in her book, The Haiku Form, that spiritual identification in haiku is not merely "cute anthropomorphism" but is:

... an instant in which the mind becomes united to an object, virtually becomes the object, and realizes the eternal, universal truth contained in being. (Giroux p. 00)

Only strong empathic intuitions rising directly from our 'heart of hearts' intimate spiritual union. That Basho held such interpenetrative experience to be an

important principle in haiku is clearly shown by his advocacy of:

...entering into the object, perceiving its delicate life, and feeling its feelings, whereupon a poem speaks for itself. (British Haiku Society, Consensus, n.d.)

Again, in the following, Basho makes clear in no uncertain terms the importance of such identification in haiku creation:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one -- when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if the object and yourself are separate -- then your poetry is not true poetry but a semblance of the real thing. (Yuasa, The Narrow Road: 33)

In analyzing the theme of Oneness, Aldous Huxley explains:

Direct knowledge of the (Spiritual) Ground cannot be had, except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the 'thou' from the 'That'. (A. Huxley: 35, The Perennial Philosophy)

Basho's advice regarding the importance of such interpenetration makes its neglect in contemporary haiku more than enigmatic or ironic: it seems sadly emblematic of the hubris and superficiality of our age. Indeed, serious haiku poets might consider how costly to the genre is the neglect of this profound spiritual principle: one with a long, hallowed history, having evolved from ancient Vedic origins in India, through millennia, to Mahayana Buddhism, to Zen, and now beyond -- to the world, and this very time and place.

If the principle of "That Art Thou" were utilized in haiku poetry, I believe there would be fewer 'snapshot' and 'So What?' verses to sully the name of haiku. The

extent to which haiku is marginalized from the world of Western poetry is surely due to a proliferation of trivial verses, lacking any literary or spiritual attributes. And the suspect practice of omitting the terms "poetry" and "poem" from that of "haiku," has doubtless played a role in vulgarizing the genre.

A harsh assessment? Perhaps. But the major reason for writing this "That Art Thou" text is to renew and reassert the neglected Tao/Zen spirit of haiku. And by so doing, to raise and return haiku's status to not only that of "poetry," but beyond, to the spiritual Way I know haiku can become.

Now before concluding, some mention of the metaphysics responsible for spiritual

interpenetration should be addressed.

The spiritual interpenetration R. H. Blyth discerned in my haiku was an intuitive actualization of the Zen dictum: "Samsara is Nirvana -- Nirvana is Samsara." This enigma relates to one of Buddhism's fundamental queries: "What Am I?" Indian scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy asserts:

The only possible answer to the question 'What am I?' must be 'That Art Thou.'"...."God is an essence without duality ... but this Essence subsists in a twofold nature, as being (Samsara), and as becoming (Nirvana). They call Him many, who is really One. (Coomaraswamy: 10)

Indeed this spiritual revelation is implicit in the dictum: Samsara is Nirvana; Nirvana is Samsara.

How this paradoxical tenet of Zen relates to haiku is profoundly revealing. Spiritual union in haiku is, in actuality, an experiential resolution of the "Samsara is

Nirvana. Nirvana is Samsara" enigma. The seeming dualism between Being (that is, Samsara) and Becoming (that is, Nirvana) is transcended in the poet's interpenetrative experience. This is, by any metaphysical measure, a profound spiritual realization. Such haiku combine the everyday categorical consciousness of Samsara, with intuitions of the all-compassionate heart, resulting in a transcendent experience of union. For to spiritually interpenetrate -- to intuit Oneness within the imminence of Creation, is indeed Nirvanic. This spirit is identified by many terms:

The proverbial "One without a Second"... and "the One before whom all words recoil"; that which a famous Zen koan refers to as 'Your Original Face before you were born.'

The same Universal Spirit known by terms such as 'God,' 'Creator,' 'Lord,' 'the Void,' 'Christ', 'Buddha', or 'Allah'.

Personally, I prefer the Chan patriarchs' designation, the 'King of Emptiness.'

Viewed transcendentally, all terms refer to the metaphorical Masked Actor: the Spirit that manifests Its Self in myriad roles upon Life's eternal stage of Now.

The scholar, Coomaraswamy, declares that ultimately none but One abides, for:

...what we call the world-process and a creation is nothing but a game that the Spirit plays with Itself. (Coomaraswamy: 14)

By whatever names the Creator be known, such refers to the causal ground of reality -- the Infinite Spirit within all ..... that seems to be.

The Hindu Upanishads summarize "That Art Thou" in the following:

The lord is the one life shining forth from every creature." "Whatever ... creatures are, whether lion or a tiger, or a boar, or a worm or a gnat, or a mosquito ... All these have their self in him alone. He is the truth," (and) "... THAT ART THOU. (Upanishads)

May Heaven help us see beyond the divisive cant of nations and religions, whose sanctification of words and concepts constitutes an idolatrous reverence for what is intrinsically relativistic and abstract. Heaven help us be aware of the imminent miracle of Creation NOW, and of the ONE whose Eternal Spirit we share ... and may express through our haiku poetry.

Within this hollow shell

--and all the time around it--

the shape of Emptiness.

....................by JWH

ADDENDUM TO SPIRITUAL INTERPENETRATION

by J W. Hackett

The Relation of Mystical Metaphysics

to Recent Sub-Atomic Speculation in Quantum Physics

In this world not one isolated thing can be seen. (Original Teachings of Chan Buddhism)

Astoundingly enough our ordinary way of categorizing 'things' (indeed our very perception and conception of reality), would now seem only verisimilitude. All the entities and myriad classified phenomena that comprise our everyday consciousness (the multiplicity that life seems), is ultimately illusory.

For according to recent sub atomic theory, the substratum of "matter" (the presumed ground of reality)ultimately resolves to ever-flowing, interrelated fields of pure energy. In short, "things" are not the disparate, solid entities they seem. " This accords with Zen's view that "each particularity (besides being itself) penetrates all other particularities and is in turn penetrated by them."

(Original Teachings of Chan Buddhism)

Indeed, quantum physics posits a continuum metaphysic, one not unlike that intuited millennia ago by Vedic, Taoist, and Chan Buddhist sages: that the reality of Tao (Creation) is a constant Becoming of cosmic energy within a Now that is Eternal.

------------------A SOUL NOTE ----------------------

On recalling Wordsworth's poignant lines "What Man Has Done to Man":

A wondrous world,indeed, but one made hellishly divisive by conceptual 'walls' of mind. Such is the dichotomousa priori world of abstract ideologies before which we genuflect, while

.....ever suffering sacrosanct notions of nation, race, and faith conjured by idolatrous reverence unto bloody sacrifice;

.....all those divisive, jingoistic, racial and religious prejudices which, by precluding higher transcendent levels of consciousness, continue down the ages to brutalize every generation of Eden Now.

"Behold the One in all things. It is the second that leads us astray."

(Kabir, Sufi poet)

SPIRITUAL INTERPENETRATION IN HAIKU

from The Zen Haiku and Other Zen Poems of J. W. Hackett

(Tokyo: Japan Publications @1983 by James W. Hackett)

A tiny spider

has begun to confiscate

this cup's emptiness.

The kitten crouches,

then leaps at the genie

rising from the tea.

Time after time

caterpillar climbs this broken stem

then probes beyond.

With death's arrival,

this present moment alone

becomes known as real.

Grasshopper's game:

to light on a tip of grass

then ride out its sway.

Tiny goldfish,

though cruising with the others,

stay out of their way.

Pavilion empty

the old Shanghai gardener

dances with herself.

Butterfly's wing

barely grazed my cheek, and yet

I felt his surprise!

Parakeet performs

his high wire act, then proudly

puffs up and poops.

Roaring cloud of bees

but trusting butterfly floats

right through the swarm.

This blessed present,

wherever I look I see

nothing -- but Buddha.

Too cold for snow:

the loneliness standing within

each flophouse doorway.

City loneliness ...

dancing with a gusty wind:

yesterday's news.

Never more alone

the eagle, than now surrounded

by screaming crows.

Signaling wildly

for all to take care: the tail

of the pissing cat.

A spider crouches

at the center of this empty web,

trusting his design.

See this fly

that long since met eternity,

his kneeling remains.

A tiny winged bug

crawling his way out of

a forest of hair.

Now centered upon

the flavor of an old bone,

the mind of my dog.

The lone parakeet

nudges his hanging mirror

and watches it move.

Left by the tide

within a shallowing pool:

a frantic minnow.

A bee in a web,

whirring one free wing

in spurts of hope.

Playful kitten,

how calmly it chews the fly's

buzzing misery.

Even while squatting

the puppy diverts herself

by smelling flowers.

Hardy ant, even

heavily burdened you climb

the sheer mountain wall.

Now free in the world

the old parakeet just perches:

his loneliness!

R. H. Blyth and J. W. Hackett is the keynote speech, given by WHC Honourary President, James W. Hackett, for the WHF2002 English-language session.

The World Haiku Festival 2002

Yuwa-town, Akita 20-22 September

Matsuo Bashô was about 45 when he set out on the journey that was to become Oku no hosomichi. What was Shakespeare doing when he was 45? According to Professor Stanley Wells,1

From about 1609 [when he was 45] Shakespeare’s increasing involvement with Stratford along withthe decrease in his output of plays suggests that he was withdrawing from his London responsibilities and spending more time at New Place.

New Place was the house he had bought in 1597 on the proceeds of his highly successful career as a playwright and shareholder in his company, the Chamberlain’s Men; it was the second largest house in Stratford. Like Bashô, Shakespeare had only a few more years to live -- five in Bashô’s case, seven in Shakespeare’s -- although they would have both been ‘old’ for their times. They were both, therefore, past their prime, and yet they both had major, even summative works still to come. Oku no hosomichi is arguably Bashô’s most complete and brilliant statement of what it means to be a haijin. The Tempest, which was probably written in 1610, does something similar for the theatre. Their productivity is still far from exhausted. Bashô’s Sarumino (‘Monkey’s Straw Coat’) was published in 1691, and his fascination with karumi (‘lightness’) suggests that he still had a long way to go on his haiku journey. The contrast between light and dark is also a theme of Shakespeare’s late romance The Winter’s Tale (1611).

It is, of course, almost impossible to compare two writers so distant in space, at least (less so in time), as Bashô and Shakespeare. Perhaps the most meaningful comparison is to be made by looking at their formative influence on their respective cultures. Thus, Bashô is the Shakespeare of Japan, not because he wrote great tragedies, but because of the way that his haiku aesthetic and certain of his poems have become internalised by the shared cultural consciousness. Like the tea ceremony and Mt Fuji, I suppose that Bashô’s haiku are one of a number of cultural phenomena that bring Japanese people together. I want, therefore, to compare the two writers not because of any functional similarity but because they have at various times and places moved me, a reader of Bashô, and nowadays, more of a spectator of Shakespeare.

The plays of Shakespeare are inscribed with the sights, sounds and even smells of the foreign and the foreigner. Like some modern-day holiday documentary, Shakespeare offers us one vision after another of foreign places. From the earliest history plays -- which more often than not include a scene or two from the battlefields of France -- through to Shakespeare’s final collaboration of 1613 with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, which is set in ancient Greece, Shakespeare is clearly fascinated by foreign parts. It was an age of exploration, and although it is quite likely that Shakespeare himself never left English shores, it is equally likely that, living and working in the seaport of London, he met and mingled with explorers who had voyaged as far as the Americas and the East Indies, and it is certain that he read their travelogues. The Tempest, for example, is partly indebted to Sylvester Jourdan’s ‘Discovery of the Bermudas’, a pamphlet published in 1610. Even more tantalising, for our purposes, is the possibility that Elizabethan explorers saw Shakespeare performed live at the Globe Theatre in Southwark, and took their appreciation of Shakespeare along on their travels, but unfortunately, there is no evidence that Will Adams of Shogun fame knew of Shakespeare, although he came from Gillingham, not far from Southwark.

If we include the Roman plays, such as Julius Caesar, about twenty of the plays are set around the Mediterranean. The Verona of Romeo and Juliet and the Venice of The Merchant of Venice were exotic enough to draw the interest of Elizabethan audiences, but not so strange that they did not share a common cultural heritage, Christian and classical. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in ancient Greece. Although it predates recorded English history, the legend of the hero, Theseus, would have been familiar to any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries with an education, and even to some without. Likewise, the Italian setting of Romeo and Julietwould have been associated with the kind of Catholic intrigue which was still a reality in Reformation England. Throughout Shakespeare’s plays, the foreign serves to embody a tension between strangeness and familiarity that underpins an age when the boundaries of knowledge were ever widening and social and cultural identities under constant challenge, and -- fortunately for Shakespeare -- this tension was (and still is) fundamental to the experience of seeing a play.

Shakespeare’s imagination extends also to Asia and the Orient. In Much Ado About Nothing, which is set in Messina (Sicily), Benedick declares with mock gallantry to Don Pedro (2.1.247-55),

Will your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now tothe Antipodes [Australia] that you can devise to send me on; I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard; do you any embassage to the Pygmies; rather than hold three words’ conference with this harpy [Beatrice, whom he eventually marries].

It is possible, given the arrival of the Europeans in Japan in the 1550s, that Shakespeare had heard of Japan and that ‘the furthest inch of Asia’ might therefore refer to Japan. Moreover, when I hear that unusual word ‘toothpicker’, I am reminded of those wooden toothpicks often provided in Japanese noodle restaurants! Prester John has been identified as the Christian emperor ‘of a fabulously rich kingdom in the East.’2 The great Cham is a title of Kublai Khan, emperor of the Mongols, who spent much of his reign trying to unify China and conquer Japan. In 1289, he finally turned his back on Japan when his fleet was destroyed by a typhoon (kamikaze, the divine wind) in the bay of Hakata.

In the context of Much Ado About Nothing, the breadth (and absurdity) of Benedick’s imagination conceal his fear of admitting his true feelings for Beatrice. The desire for a woman is suppressed and sublimated into a desire for the geographically remote in the sense that Benedick’s fears exaggerate the remoteness of Beatrice. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in other contexts the Orient is feminised (as it is in much of colonial discourse). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania argues her right to keep ‘the little Indian boy’ with an evocative recollection of her friendship with the boy’s deceased mother (2.1.123-34):

His mother was a votress of my order;

And in the spiced Indian air, by night,

Full often hath she gossip’d by my side;

And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,

Marking th’embarked traders in the flood:

When we hath laugh’d to see the sails conceive

And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;

Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait

Following (her womb then rich with my young squire),

Would imitate, and sail upon the land

To fetch me trifles, and return again

As from a voyage rich with merchandise.

The East is idealised here a prelapsarian nature in which women oversee and participate in all manners of exchange.

Titania’s imagery seems very remote from the haiku of Bashô, although he might have nodded at the line that immediately follows:

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die

He would surely have appreciated the latent pathos of the fecund scene, its transience and mortality. For, Bashô’s imagination is not ‘big-bellied’ but it is certainly pregnant with suggestion. Shakespeare’s imagination looks forward to New Worlds whereas Bashô looks backward to an idealised past: the medieval Japan of his poetic father Saigyô and the ancient Chinese poets, and it is because he feels so strongly the weight of tradition behind him that he is compelled into journies of the body, and not just the mind. Shakespeare, as far as we know, travelled little outside London and his native Warwickshire. He seems to have been content to sit at his desk and project his own worlds onto the fixed environs of the Elizabethan stage.

Bashô walked several thousand miles around northern and central Japan; this difference of perspective intrigues me. It may be that the internal and external instability of Elizabethan England encouraged a certain conservatism in Shakespeare, the businessman, that was nevertheless released in his imagination. The Tokugawa Shogunate, under which Bashô lived, had forcibly secluded Japan from almost all contact with the outside world, and its authoritarian rule maintained stability. Internal trade and movement were promoted, and the economy flourished. Bashô was only one of many pilgrims, merchants and samurai moving in a constant stream around the country.

Shakespeare is the "word merchant", profiting financially from a human need for language. Bashô comes from a family of low-ranking samurai, and is forced by circumstance to engage in the mercantile exchange of poetry and tuition for as much as he needs to survive. His capital is not the wealth of an ubiquitous present but the wealth of nature and an ubiquitous past, and it is because the past and (by default) nature as well are scattered across the land that Bashô dons his sandals and goes in search of them.

Bashô is always a little uneasy about his relationship with the past. Haruo Shirane has applied Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence to show how Bashô was at times silenced, and at times inspired, by his poetic fathers.3 Just as Shakespeare escapes from the present into the legends and histories of others, Bashô is anxious about becoming a prostitute of the past. This tension between past and present is neatly encapsulated in the following episode from Oku no hosomichi, quoting from the recent translation by Hiroaki Satô.4:

Today, because we had come over the most difficult spots in the North Country, called ParentIgnored, Child Ignored, Dog Going Back and Horse Turned Back, we were tired and, pulling our pillows up close to ourselves, we tried to sleep. From one room beyond, toward the front, however,I heard the voices of young women, two of them I thought. As I listened to them telling their stories, with the voice of an old man interjecting from time to time, the women turned out to be prostitutes of a place called Niigata, in Echigo Province. They were on their way to pay their respects to Ise Shrine, and the man had accompanied them as far as this barrier. They were trying to write letters to be taken back tomorrow to their home to convey some ineffectual messages. As if cast up on the beach by white waves, living lowly lives like those of fishermen’s children, forced to have faithless relationships, we are, to our great misfortune, committing sinful deeds day after day - such was their talk, and while listening to it, I fell asleep. The next morning, as we were preparing to leave, they came to us and said in tears:

'We’re worried about the roads we’re taking from now on; we’re saddened by so much uncertainty.May we follow you - we’ll keep some distance from you. On account of the robe you wear, would you extend Buddha’s compassion to us, so we may enter Buddhahood?' However, I had to tell them:

'We sympathize with your plight, but we stop in many places. You should go along following the others as they go. With the Sun Goddess’s protection, all should go well.'

And so we left. Nevertheless, sadness did not cease for quite some time.

Hitotsuya ni yãjo mo netari hagi to tsuki

In one house prostitutes also slept: bush clover and moon I told this to Sora, and he wrote it down.

As Satô suggests in his note 5, Bashô’s personification of himself and the prostitutes as ‘bush clover and moon’ could be construed as patronising. Yet we know from our reading of Oku no hosomichi, that Bashô deliberately contrasts bland with superior haiku, and his formal transmission of the poem to his companion Sora suggests to me that he is merely conventionalising a formal relationship between priest and prostitute. After all, he knows no more than what he has heard from behind the fusuma,6, and the prostitutes (for their part) judge him by his robe. Moreover, they feel able to affirm each other in their respective journies. Bashô has an auditory imagination that stops and starts with the flow of speech and rustle of the breeze. He thrives on what he hears, and it is remarkable how much of Oku no hosomichi is derived from hearsay and conversation. He steals the words of others but repays in haibun; he is a priest, used to listening to others and sympathising with their plight, while his own speech is faltering, stopping in many places. The prostitutes have a visual imagination, enlightened by the Sun Goddess, and seeing all too clearly the snags ahead, the uncertain roads. They desire that certainty which they see in Bashô’s robe, but the mutual affirmation is made possible by the poet’s sensitivity to their sadness.

The passage is not without a little Shakespearean humour, especially given the concealed allusion to an encounter between Saigyo and a prostitute named Tae.7 The poet-monk wrote her this poem:

Yononaka wo itou made koso katakarame kari no yado wo mo oshimu kimi kana

To spurn this world may be difficult, I know, but you even refuse me temporary lodging.

To which the lady replied:

Yo wo itou hito to shi kikeba kari no yado ni kokoro tomuna to omou bakari zo

Having heard you’ve spurned this world I only hope you won’t think of temporary lodging.

All this talk of prostitutes reminds me of the brothel in Shakespeare’s late romance, Pericles (1608), written when he was forty-four. Pericles’ daughter, Marina, is kidnapped by pirates and sold to a brothel in Mytilene. The virtuous Marina refuses to cooperate, however, and converts several of the customers, including the governor of the city, Lysimachus. He is so impressed by her virtue that he has her released into a more respectable occupation, as singer and embroiderer, and it is as a singer that she is reunited with her long-lost father, Pericles. Pericles’ ship arrives at Mytilene, Pericles seriously out of temper for having been separated for so long from wife and daughter. He first suspects Marina of being a prostitute, but her defiant defence of her virtue reminds him of his wife (5.1.106-13):

My dearest wife

Was like this maid, and such a one

My daughter might have been: my queen’s square brows;

Her stature to an inch; as wand-like straight;

As silver-voic’d; her eyes as jewel-like

And cas’d as richly; in pace another Juno;

Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry

The more she gives them speech. Where do you live?

And so, Pericles, the mariner whose life has been a ceaseless and tempestuous voyage toward safe haven, finds his refuge with Marina, born of the sea and strong enough to withstand all degradation. In Shakespeare’s England, prostitution was a sin, but tolerated as a necessary evil. In feudal Japan, it was bad karma, but never preempted the possibility of redemption through virtuous acts. Two sides of the same coin, perhaps, these double standards are the inevitable result of societies in which tradition and modernity mingle uncomfortably together.

Bashô may be the more prolific traveller, but both writers pay attention to the details of place. Pericles asks Marina, ‘Where do you live?’, and she answers (113-4),

Where I am but a stranger; from the deck

You may discern the place.

Such details establish social identities (stranger and native) and they establish spatial relationships. They can also be used to create the illusion of movement, often in short transitory scenes. In Bashô, the details of place are probably more conspicuous, if only because he is making a journey of many stages and each stage takes him to a new location. The pattern seldom differs. He starts each section with a straightforward map reference, often adding some reason for his plans for the day - often nothing more interesting than that ‘We heard it was nice’. For example.8:

In the domain of Yamagata is a mountain temple called Ryãshaku-ji. Founded by the Great Teacher Jikaku, it is a particularly pure, tranquil place. Because people urged us to take a look at it, we turned back from Obanazawa, the distance between them about seven li. The sun was not down yet.

Quite often, the journey by itself is enough and he will limit himself to describing the severity of the journey or the passing of the scenery, but without pausing to write haiku. At Ryãshaku-ji, however, the stillness and beauty of the place carve a way into his soul, and he ends up writing one of his most famous haiku: 9

Shizukasa ya iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe

Quietness: seeping into the rocks, the cicada’s voice

Every section of Oku no hosomichi has its own artistic equilibrium, and it is the sheer diversity of these separate journies that make Oku no hosomichi a dramatic, as well as a poetic read. One of the shortest sections also contains another of his most famous haiku,10

After leaving Haguro and arriving in the castle town of Tsurugaoka, we were welcomed into the house of a samurai named Shigeyuki, of the Nagayama family, and did a haikai sequence. Sakichicame along with us. We went down to Sakata Port on a riverboat. We stayed in the house of a physician named En’an Fugyoku.

Atsumi-yama ya Fuku-ura kakete ya ãsuzumi

From Mount Atsumi away to Fuku Bay: evening cool

Atsuki hi wo umi ni iretari Mogami-gawa

Pouring the hot sun into the sea, the Mogami River

Bashô is full of it: at the height of summer, he has just climbed Haguro and Gassan, on the top of which he has a mystical experience. One can imagine the relief of descending to sea level and sharing haiku with saner minds.

These contrasting episodes give meaning and dimension to the act of travel, but what gives integrity to the work as a whole are its three high points: Matsushima, Hiraizumi, and Kisakata. Each of these stand for something different in Bashô’s imagination: the classical (smiling) Chinese landscape, the sites of medieval (tragicomic) Japan, and then the native (lonely, resentful) Japanese landscape. One could make a naive correspondence between these three archetypes and the three main genres of Shakespearean drama: comedy, history, and tragedy. Matsushima in a comic idiom, provoking comparison with a mythical past in much the same way that Shakespeare’s comic heroes are reduced to laughter by the antics of their forbears 11:

Matsushima is ineffable, made up like a beauty’s face. All this may have been the doing of the GreatMountain God in the days of rock-smashing deities. The Creator’s heavenly handiwork - who can use his brush or exhaust words to his satisfaction?

At Matsushima, Bashô walks in the sunlight, silent and awestruck. At Hiraizumi, the tone is tragicomic, as the spirits of Yoshitsune and Kanefusa are reincarnated in nature and in the nearby temple the statues of the three Bodhisattvas rise above ‘the coffins of the three generations’.12 As in Shakespeare’s history plays, where kingship is aligned with a Christian cosmology, Bashô’s transformation is a religious one 13:

Natsukusa ya tsuwamono-domo ga yume no ato

Summer grass: where the warriors used to dream

U no hana ni Kanefusa miyuru shiraga kana

In deutzia flowers I see Kanefusa’s white hair [Sora]

Samidare wo furi-nokoshite ya Hikari-do

The May rains, falling, seem to spare the Light Hall

At Kisakata, the tone is more skeptical. He has gone one step further from the confident spirit of Matsushima, and is now in ura Nihon (the back of Japan), looking out onto the Japan Sea, with its threats of winter snow.14

Matsushima wa warau ga gotoku, Kisakata wa uramu ga gotoshi. Sabishisa ni kanashimi wo kuwaete, Chisei tamashii wo nayamasu ni nitari.

As Dorothy Britton translates it,15

While Matsushima had a gay, laughing beauty, Kisakata’s face was full of bitterness and rue. There was a sense of the desolate loneliness and sorrow of a tormented soul. This is a place in which the gods exact their retribution for the pleasures of humanity. Bashô and his companions are drawn to incomplete, pitiful sights.16

In Kisakata’s rain,

Mimosas droop, like fair Hsi-shih

Who languished with love’s pain.

........................[Bashô]

How humbly fishers dwell,

With but a board laid on the sand

To savor evening’s cool.

....................[Teiji, a merchant from Mino Province]

With your nest on a rock,

Have you a truce with the ocean waves,

O trusting sea hawk?

.......................[Sora]

One cannot help feeling that Sora’s poem is directed at Bashô himself, that man of faith.

If Shakespeare finds completion in the generic shifts of Oku no hosomichi, then I think that Bashô finds his match in a character such as Prospero. Like Prospero, Bashô has his books and his staff. He has colonised the island, has walked all over it; his Caliban is Matsushima and Ariel his Kisakata,17 and he frees them from the slavery of ignominy by recreating them in his little book for the Edo public. Hiraizumi is an image of himself, overcoming past defeats by the power of haiku magic. Ferdinand and Miranda are harder to identify, although there is some similarity between Prospero’s isolation at the end of The Tempest in Bashô’s separation from Sora at Yamanaka:18

With the sadness of the one who goes and the grief of the one who is left behind, we were like a pair of wild ducks parted from each other and lost in the clouds. I wrote:

Tears of autumn dew

Will wash off my hat the words

'Travellers two.'

Bashô’s haiku is a ‘rough magic’. He is always conscious of the power of haiku and, at the same time, of its lowly origins; the fates of the poet and his chosen form are intertwined. Unlike Prospero, he does not break his staff in two at the end of the journey. He realises that haiku depends for its survival on its status as a communal, sociable activity; he needs his Sora and all those other haijin friends whom he meets along the way. Sadness at parting draws the poet towards nature, but like the osprey in its rocky nest, Bashô is never quite dragged into the ocean beneath. He remains the companionable hermit. In both Shakespeare and Bashô, people are inscribed with place and place with personality, but like the two writers the twain never quite become one.

References:

1. Stanley Wells, ‘William Shakespeare’, in Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (eds.) The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001), p. 422.

2. A.R. Humphreys (ed.) The Arden Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing, London: Methuen (1984), p. 124. All other quotations from Shakespeare are from The Arden Shakespeare.

3. Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashô, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1998), p. 237. [Shirane (p. 184) contrasts Bloom’s ‘Oedipal struggle’ between the English Romantic poets and their antecedents with the more peaceful dialogue that Bashô pursues with the past, which is not to suggest that it is not without absences; this is just one of many proposals made in this fascinating book. Bloom’s book is The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1st ed. 1973.]

4. Hiroaki Satô (tr./ed.) Bashô’s Narrow Road, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press (1996), pp. 109-13. [Sato’s translation has a rough-hewn texture which appeals to me.]

5. Ibid., p. 149.

6. The sliding door or screen which separates rooms in Japanese houses.

7. Satô, p. 149. See also Makoto Ueda, Bashô and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary,Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (1992), pp. 261-2.

8. Ibid., p. 93.

9. Ibid., p. 95.

10. Ibid., p. 103.

11. Ibid., p. 81.

12. Ibid., p. 87.

13. Ibid., pp. 87-8.

14. Dorothy Britton (tr./ed.) A Haiku Journey: Bashô’s ‘Narrow Road to a Far Province’, Tokyo: Kodansha International, p. 113.

15. Ibid., p. 70. [This is the most refreshing and joyous of the translations I have read.]

16. Ibid., pp. 70-1.

17. [I at first surmised that Ariel was Matsushima and Caliban was Kisakata, but after hearing this paper at Yãwa, Bruce Ross suggested to me that it was the other way round. On reflection, I think that Bruce is right and am grateful for his suggestion.]

18. Britton, p. 85.

*"Shakespeare Bashô" was presented by Daniel Gallimore in the English-language session at the World Haiku Festival 2002, Yuwa Town, Akita, Japan.