Gabriel Rosenstock
Copyright©: Gabriel Rosenstock
Copyright©: The authors quoted
Dogen
‘Every day is a good day.’
Ummon
World-wide praise for Haiku Enlightenment:
Gabriel Rosenstock offers us a marvelous path into the essence of haiku
and the state of being in harmony with the laws of the universe. Take this
path. It is a real spiritual gift!
Ion
A learned, imaginative and profound commentary on haiku with many
outstanding examples from around the globe, demonstrating the form’s universal
appeal. Persons with little knowledge of haiku will be captivated, while those
with expertise will feel renewed …
George Swede,
There is no better ambassador for haiku! Through workshops, reviews, translations and, now, in
this book, Rosenstock offers enlightenment to an increasing number of people in
a most humanistic way – ‘soft energy paths’ (A. Lovins) that stream through the
heart and brain.
Heinz
Bossert,
If you believe, as Rosenstock certainly does, that the best way to
start along a new path is to be swept off your feet, this is the kind of book
to read. Rosenstock is an excellent teacher, wise enough to realise that in
describing haiku (as in so many other things) examples are worth a million
words. He spreads before us a variegated tapestry of haiku, by poets in all
places and at all times since haiku began, as well as from his own ingenious
pen, in which ‘the spirit of play and the play of spirit are simultaneous and
one’.
David Cobb,
From the wealth of his experience, Rosenstock gives profound advice and
useful tips for the wanderer on the haiku path, showing us how sudden
enlightenment can happen in our ordinary life.
Ruth Franke,
With edifying purpose, the author subtly introduces examples of haiku’s
apocalyptic potential of transfiguration, known in haiku and Zen as ‘spiritual
interpenetration’ and, by so doing, offers the reader an opportunity to witness
– through numinous haiku moments – the entwining of the Universal Spirit with
Its Self.
I salute Gabriel’s literary skill and applaud his spiritual discernment. Haiku Enlightenment is an altogether admirable work: one that reveals an astounding ascent of soul.
James W.
Contents
Haiku Enlightenment …………….00
Stabs at Nothing…………………...00
haiku and senryu
by Gabriel Rosenstock
Conclusion………………………. . ...00
Writing Haiku: Useful
Tips…………00
Glossary of Useful Terms
……………00
Key Quotes …………………………..00
Index……………………………………00
The dynamic pause … In haiku, we pause for a few concentrated seconds.
Not to escape from the helter-skelter – or tedium – of existence but to allow
ourselves seep into the life of things in a dynamic way. Haiku is a good
way of coming to a stop. A full stop!
Time has stopped for that horseman. Does he even know who he is
anymore? An Indian sage, Poonjaji, says: ‘Enlightenment does not happen
in time. It happens when time stops.’ We will see many instances of haiku as a
time-stopping device in the course of this book. Keep a sharp look out! Get
ready to stop. What we view may well be minute or minuscule but will contain a cosmos.
Opening the casements of perception … These intimate
haiku-pauses ground us in the mystery of being as we open ourselves, time and
time again, to new vistas and to keener insights into the living, changing
universe we inhabit. They allow us to be attuned to the rhythm, colour, sound,
scent, movement and stillness of life, from season to season, whoever, whatever
or wherever we are.
Haiku may be used as a
technique which facilitates an instant flooding of the mind. No known side-effects.
More about that – much more – as we go on.
autumn –
now
the slow bee allows
stroking
of fur
how reluctantly
the bee emerges
from deep
within the peony
(The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa and Other Poets
by Sam Hamill, Shambhala Centaur Editions)
In both of these haiku we are with the bee, fully with the bee, one
with the ‘bee-havior’ of a bee at one particular time and also, with the nature
of all bees. Where the bee sucks there
What about the bee that plods on and makes it
to see the winter? Does it not excite our compassion?
in vain a winter bee
went on
tottering
for a place to die
Murakami
Kijo 1865 –1930
(Classic Haiku: A Master’s Selection, selected and translated by
Yuzuru Miura, Tuttle Publishing 1991)
You may utter this one as slowly as you like:
5. 4. 3.
2.1.0.
the naked tree
(Takazawa Akiko (1951 - ), Trans. Hiroaki Sato in White
Dew, Dreams & This World, North Point Press, 2003)
There’s quite a modern feel to those bare numbers; it’s a haiku possibly influenced by concrete poetry. We will encounter many styles and many moods in the course of Haiku Enlightenment, the modern and the classic.
Zing! Not all of the haiku chosen here are going to work for you: some will only truly come alive when re-read later, when your transmitters and receivers are more finely tuned.
Haiku moves us because we move in its movement and are moved by its stillness:
a crust of bread
jumps with the sparrows
round the
courtyard
(Dina Franin, Zaklonjen mjesec/The Sheltered Moon,
Croatian Haiku Association, Samobore, 1999)
We can jump with haiku, crawl with haiku, soar with haiku, fall with
haiku, be still with haiku.
Soul-awakening … The French
say that we cannot know heaven if we haven’t known earth.
In the autumn haiku, above, the shift of
attention is to the bee. It is as if the bee slows down, for our sake, so that
we can appreciate it – see it – in a new mood, a new light. Its summer of
antics is all over. We are invited to experience and be part of another
dynamic, one as real as that which went before and that which is yet to come.
All of nature, and our own nature, comes alive.
The microscopic focus of the haiku reveals
the inner order and beauty of existence, over and over again. All things come
alive – including a crust of bread!
awakened
when the ice
bursts the waterjar
Basho
This can be read, simply, as a sound that wakes us from sleep but is it not also waking from everyday drowsy consciousness, the somnambulist state many of us are in? Haiku is a quickening of the inner life, in sympathetic correspondence to ordinary phenomena.
The naturalness of it all … Our last pause will be death. For the haikuist, death is another perfectly natural phenomenon, not
something divorced from life or signifying its end:
necklace
of bone …
ants
have finished
with
the snake
Margaret
Manson
‘Necklace’ is a lovely choice of word. But it is not an invention. It
was what was seen at the time.
Many haikuists have written
until their very last breath. Death-bed haiku of haijin (masters) – such as Shiki
– are justly famous.
We can be in awe of
anything, even our own demise. Everything is of cosmic magnitude, here and now.
F Scott Fitzgerald ruminates in The Great Gatsby: ‘Life is much more
successfully looked at from a single window …’ The haikuist would not argue
with that, even the haikuist who takes to the roads.
A forensic scientist
examining the bodies of certain newly departed haijin might wonder at an odd gesture of the hand common to many of
them, the hand as a claw, almost: their last act was to count syllables.
There are all sorts of
death. The death of a language, the death of a culture:
snowflakes fill
the eye of the
eagle -
fallen totem
pole
Winona Baker
(Moss-Hung
Trees, Reflections Press, 1992)
Death has many faces. And life? Life exists in such mind-boggling
diversity that it well behoves us to take it all in, in small doses - beagán ar bheagán mar a itheann an cat an
scadán, as the Irish proverb has it, ‘little by little, as the cat eats the
herring’:
the hills
release the
summer clouds
one by one by
one
John Wills
(Reed Shadows, Black Moss
Press and BLP, Canada, 1987)
Ten thousand gifts … ‘Release’ is a well-chosen verb. We receive all these words, these
insights and illuminations as gifts, mediated by individuals, from the common
pool of humanity’s experience. In an average day, about how many free gifts can
we expect on the haiku path? A thousand? That may be a conservative estimate.
After all, Dogen
assures us, ‘When
the self withdraws, the ten thousand things advance!’ On the haiku path, the
constant intrusion of the self becomes less and less persistent – moments arise that flood us with
their ‘itness’ before our cognitive, judgemental self is given a chance to, as
it were, interfere.
The use of ‘path’, above, must be qualified.
Irish-born Wei
Wu Wei says,
‘There is no path to Satori. It cannot be attained … all the Masters tell us
that we cannot seize Reality: it is Reality that seizes us.’ True. But the
chances of Reality seizing us, and sweeping away our pre-judgemental mind in
the process, are increased by the dutiful practice of haiku:
hearing
cockroach
feet;
the
Michael McClintock
(Light Run, Shiloh Press, Los Angeles,
1971)
Effortless attunement … By working at haiku and by
living haiku – through reading and composition and through acquiring the haiku
instinct, or knack – effortless attunement is the natural and inevitable
result. This ability then becomes the unfailing groundwork for sudden
enlightenment. It can repeat itself - over days, over centuries. David Burleigh published this haiku in
1998:
trapped
inside a pot
at
the bottom of the sea
the
octopus dreams
Basho wrote the
following in May, 1688:
octopus
traps –
fleeting
dreams beneath
a
summer moon
This may be mere coincidence, or it may be evidence of the cosmic mind
at work, or it could be an example of honkadori,
allusive variation. If so, hunkey dorey!
Mr Burleigh kindly responded to an enquiry by
stating that it did, in fact, allude to Basho’s
verse in the Travel-Worn Satchel but
that his own haiku was inspired by the confined space of urban living.
Sudden breath of freedom … Confined no more! Each
successful haiku is a breath of freedom. The seventeen-syllable, traditional
form was adjudged to be a breath span. And, just as Keats said that poetry should come as naturally as foliage to a
tree, or not at all, so we say that haiku is an exhalation, a breath of
freedom, of exultation, a sigh.
You may polish your haiku, once it has come
to you, or come through you. Honing the shape, improving the choice of
words, or the rhythm – these are the wrapping on the gift. But there need be
nothing laborious about the strange appearance of the first draft. ‘Haiku
should be written as swiftly as a woodcutter fells a tree or a swordsman leaps
at a dangerous enemy.’ So said Basho, born into an impoverished samurai
clan. This suddenness, indeed, is what allows for the possibility of
enlightenment. No time to think!
T
H
I
N
K
They say that
characters were engraven on the bathing tub of
King Tching
Thang to this effect: ‘Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and
again, and forever again.’ I can understand that.
Thoreau, Walden
A
B
O
U
T
I
T
It is a plunge … On the
way of haiku, we cannot possibly know what next will be revealed. We are not
soothsayers. Nor do we dabble in magic. What will be the next haiku moment?
Anticipation is foolish. Each moment is as unique as your fingerprints, your
iris, each second as fleeting as your breath. And a haiku moment can happen at
any time. But it will not happen without you. You must be there for it to
happen. You must be there, before you disappear. It takes two to haiku, you and
the witnessed phenomenon in a unifying embrace. It can occur in such an
intense, pure form that it appears to have happened without you. That brief,
piercing insight, that moment of haiku enlightenment, strips you of the
thousand and one items that are the jig-saw of your ego, the patchwork of your
identity. Then we’re simply jumbled back again into the duality of the world,
its conflicts, routines and distractions. But we know that another pure
surprise awaits around the corner, whatever it may be. The wellsprings of the
haiku moment are infinite, bottomless, inexhaustible.
The glimpse … The haiku moment can occur in a glimpse. A glimpse
of the beloved. The glowing, two-way,
time-stopping intensity of that glimpse! To put the words of a contemporary
Western sage, Gangaji, to our own uses here: ‘The glimpse and the
surrender into that glimpse, the surrender of the mind into what is glimpsed,
gives rise to everything we are seeking …’ (Gangaji News,
Rebirth in the pure self … On the haiku
path, you can dissolve and change into your purer self. Many haiku poets take a
nom de plume or haigo. It’s a bit like Saul becoming Paul, is it not?
The avant-garde haikuist Ban’ya
Natsuishi explains his new name, a name which he has carried for over
quarter of a century. Ban is ‘fit’
and ya is ‘arrow’. So, his identity
is now shaped by the purpose and the skill of fitting an arrow to a bowstring.
Cool! This coolness is balanced by the passion he has for haiku. Natsu means ‘summer’ and ishi means ‘stone’. Hot!
The first entry in Haiku, This Other World, by Richard
Wright, reads as follows:
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name
away
This is profoundly moving, coming as it does from a writer
passionately concerned with questions of identity and negritude and for
whom a harsh
The surprise of unity … Everything about
our existence seems fractured from the time our umbilical cord is cut. Haiku offers us a direct route towards unity.
It is put well by Jonathan Clemens
in The Moon in the Pines (Frances
Lincoln Limited, 2000):
‘Haiku seeks, in a handful of words, to
crystallise an instant in all its fullness, encouraging through the experience
of the moment the union of the reader with all existence. The reader side-steps
conventional perception, startled into a momentary but full understanding of
the poet’s experience. By locking reader and poet into the same reality, haiku
helps us perceive the ultimate unity of all realities…’
Alive alive-o! The aliveness of haiku is one of its most remarkable
gifts. Did not Thomas Traherne say that you will not be able to enjoy the world as you
should ‘until the sea itself floweth in your veins …’:
everything I
pick up
is alive -
ebb tide
(Chiyo-ni: Woman Haiku Master,
Patricia Donegan et al, Tuttle 1998)
Yes, more and more free gifts! Good haiku fulfils the Emersonian
dictum, every time: Emerson said
that poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
Newness and aliveness … Haiku practice
leads to a feeling of newness and aliveness. No, it’s more than a feeling. It
is an actual, existential discovery of newness. In all things. Haiku is a
vehicle for regeneration. Can one feel enlightenment? Let us be a little
inscrutable about this and say that feelings may or may not be part of the experience.
Sudden enlightenment is a liberation - from feelings, from cognition. Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary
lists enlightenment as ‘the state of being in harmony with the laws of the
universe’ (Taoism) and also ‘the realisation of ultimate universal truth’
(Buddhism). Haiku practise is not at variance with these goals. Indeed, the
haiku way is the goal itself, not a path to something else.
And here is a lovely Christian manifestation
of haiku truth:
April snow-
the lightness
of the Host
in my hand
Adele Kenny
(Frogpond, No. 3, 1998)
A metaphysical gift! This particular haikuist is a member of the
Secular Franciscan order and believes that writing haiku ‘means using words
reverently to express the sacredness of God’s universe - in moments of
isolation, in moments of communion - alone and yet united with the Creator and
with all creation…’(ibid.).The mood
of haiku changes, from moments of isolation to moments of intense communion.
‘Achieve enlightenment, then return to this world of ordinary humanity…’ Thus
spoke Basho. Indeed, seeing into the life of things seemed to be enough
for Basho as enlightenment-seeking in itself may not be the most
enlightening of pursuits:
How very noble!
one who finds no satori
in the lightning flash
And this creation, this created world, that we speak of is everything, not just mountains, rivers and deserts:
I sleep… I
wake…
how wide
the bed with
none beside
Chiyo
(The Classic Tradition of Haiku:
An Anthology, ed. Faubion Bowers,
Dover 1996)
Creation is presence - and
absence too …
Autumn - I look
at the moon
without a child
on my knee
Onitsura
They’ve cut down the
willow –
the
kingfishers
don’t
come anymore
Shiki
(Trans.
It is meeting, and parting …
I have got to
know
the scarecrow
but now we must
part
Izen
It is music older than time … It is not any one thing, but
many things together in strange harmonic fusion which the haikuist intuits,
‘the music of things that happen’, as we read in classical Irish legend:
night
disappears
behind the
mountain -
deer’s
bellowing
Kyokusi
It is fierce …
the autumn
squall
blows the eagle
over the edge
of the crag
Ryota
It is gentle …
mist about the
grass,
rain silent,
evening calm
Buson
It is holy …
putting
his hands together -
frog
reciting
a poem
Sokan
Hopeful, graceful,
determined …
wet
morning
an
uplifted skirt glides
through
tall brush
anya
It can be found everywhere …
We should note what Mircea Eliade says in his Diary:
‘In his book, Zen in Japanese Art, Hasumi noticed that art
represents the way to the Absolute. Tea ceremony, as well as the other “ways”
(dō) – painting, poetry, ikebana, calligraphy, archery – form a spiritual
technique, as its aim is obtaining “the Nirvana experience” in everyday life.’
Good! Haiku is part of everyday life.
Nothing, apart from a little notebook, distinguishes the haikuist from anybody
else you may pass on the street. He or she may have had a Nirvana experience
that morning – or is about to have one now, this instant! But no alarms are
going of; there is nothing untoward. Everything is normal.
The haiku highwayman … he will stop us
again and again on the road, take our clothes, our money, our watch, our
identity papers, leaving us dumbfounded, looking around like a naked waif. He
gives us time to wonder at our nakedness, at the universe, to look at the sky,
at the moon, for the first time. Then he throws everything back at us again,
laughingly. And as we pick ourselves together, we know the world has changed.
We smile. We, too, have changed.
Yes, it can be like that. Generally speaking,
however, the Nirvana experience can be as perfectly ordinary as opening or
closing one’s umbrella, as undramatic as stepping over a snail on a footpath.
The Heraclitean truth … ‘You never step
into the same river twice,’ is a truth lived each day by the haikuist, one that
is essential to the aesthetics of haiku consciousness:
the
autumn wind -
letters
emerging one by one
on
the wet gravestone
Yamazaki Hisao
On one level, any unexpected
revelation, however ordinary, can be the stuff of enlightenment. On another
level, our readiness to absorb the revelation, our ability to be struck by some
‘epiphany’ (as James Joyce used the
word) becomes the real stuff of enlightenment. There are no steps to
enlightenment. Steps lead to further steps and so on. There is only the
laughing plunge, the sober awakening. No ashram or yoga needed here, no prayer
or mediation. The garden is your ashram, the public park, the highway - and the
haiku is your prayer, your meditation. You can make the plunge any hour of the
day or night. You won’t hear the splash, but the ripples are real. They will
change you and the world.
Instant enlightenment … Many haikuists, but not
all, are familiar with Zen which got its first mention in the West from Madame
Blavatsky and its first exposition in 1927 by D.T. Suzuki..
‘Familiar’ is not the best word, as part of the Zen thing is the shock of the
familiar seen in unfamiliar light, and vice versa. Caroline Gourlay, one-time editor of Blyth Spirit, Journal of the British Haiku Society, recalls how
deeply impressed she was with these lines found in The World of Zen, an anthology edited by Nancy Wilson Ross:
‘The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection.
The water has no mind to
receive their image…’
Haiku happens in this world of daily miracles and is a perfect prism
through which Nature herself enlightens us. But, instant enlightenment? Surely
not! How many people have spent their lives – many lives – in such a quest!
This book is a plea to lower your sights, somewhat, to focus your vision.
Thousands set themselves such an impossible task that they inevitably lose
sight of their goal, blaming themselves needlessly.
This little book, containing haiku by
practitioners from all over the world, ancient and new - and the new are as
ancient as the ancient are new - this book will open up a universal path which
you may have been walking already, as it happens, without knowing it! Page
after page, you will notice what little adjustment is needed – if any – to our
antenna in order to receive frequent sprinklings of enlightenment, leading to
an acquired receptivity which allows us to be sprinkled and purified more and
more – until nothing is left in the world which is not truly, in itself, a
vehicle of liberation.
Freedom now … One is reminded, in this regard, of the students of
Ayurveda in ancient
The haikuist is that blessed third student –
always looking, not with bleary-eyed concentration, merely looking, intuiting
the molecules of liberating grace.
Our tendency towards self-aggrandisement will
diminish the more delicately we respond to the spirit of haiku, until it is
with a smile of recognition that we realise why Tarao Kobayashi changed his name to Issa, meaning a single bubble in a teacup – gone before you have
raised the cup to your lips.
old pear tree
now laden only
with
raindrops
Philip D. Noble
This haiku (from the 1998 Mainichi Haiku Contest) is not concerned with
some grand, amorphous or Romantic concept of Nature. In Haiku, we discover, see
and breathe, for a moment, those interstices, those fleeting moments of reality
which are as substantial or as insubstantial as a rock, as ourselves. The haiku
bears witness to the non-judgemental aspect of our humanity, that instinct for
self-expression which drove the ancients to illuminate their caves with
spectacular representations of those animals with which they shared this earth,
long before philosophy, theology and economics became possible. An instinct to
share in the life of things, partake in the life of things - their simple
grandeur -and be blessed by them, an instinct there since the dawn of
consciousness.
Primitive enlightenment … Yes, haiku
enlightenment is a primitive form of enlightenment, tempered by a sensitivity
that comes with practising the form. And history shows us that sensitivity is
not a recent acquirement. The Chauvet cave in
by a winter
river
forsaken,
a dog’s
carcass
Buson
Many in the West – and, now, increasingly elsewhere – live in a
cosseted, sanitized, cosmeticized environment. Haiku allows us to experience
the shock of primal experience so that something flows within us again, by
virtue of haiku-seeing:
winter stars
a
wild goose tucks its head
under
a wing
Kirsty
Karkow
T
H
I
N
K
When you express gentleness and precision
in your environment, then real brilliance and power can descend onto that
situation. If you try to manufacture that presence out of your own ego, it will
never happen. You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It is
always available, but it does not belong to anyone.
Chögyam
Trungpa
A
B
O
U
T
I
T
It was Ruskin (1819 1900) who, perhaps, first saw the blindness inflicted on us by the modern world. Addressing his students at the Working Men’s College he is reported as having said: ‘Now, remember, gentlemen, that I have not been trying to teach you to draw, only to see.’ He then went on to describe two men going through a market. One emerges none the wiser. The other ‘notices a bit of parsley hanging over the edge of a butter-woman’s basket.’ Had he known about haiku, Ruskin might have said, ‘And there, gentlemen, is the haiku moment … yeah, the birth of a haiku. In the seeing.’
And after that? What
comes then? Well …
Morning. The haiku
are writing
themselves
Tom
McGrath
(Atoms of Delight: an anthology of Scottish haiku and short poems,
Ed. Alec Finlay, Morning Star Publications, 2000).
Seeing with the heart … the spirit …
It is more than seeing with the eye. We read in the preface to the
tenth-century royal collection of poems, Kokinshu: 'The poetry of
As a
literary device, haiku has endless sophistication. But literature is not our
main concern here. We are talking first and foremost about a delightful
awareness-tool:
only the staffs
of pilgrims passing -
the
summer fields
Ishu
Followers of the mystic traditions of East and
West, devotees of Krishnamurti, Osho, Meister Eckhart or Rumi, etc., can and should follow the haiku
path. This path does not contradict Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam,
Judaism, nor can it in any way detract from the core of these or any other
religions. This path is not a religion or a cult, though some neo-pagans and
pantheists may be more initially attracted to it than, let us say,
fundamentalists of the kill-joy variety. Haiku can be pleasurably pursued by
atheist, sceptic and believer alike. It can adapt to any language, any culture.
Someone once asked the former Zen teacher, Toni Packer, ‘Can a leaf
swirling to the ground be my teacher?’ Her answer is what every haikuist should
know. ‘Yes! Of course! This instant of seeing is the timeless teacher, the
leaves are just what they are …’
summer
drought –
the
dazzling stars
all
become pale
Marijan Cekolj
summer fog
moonlight blowing
from tree to tree-
Dave Sutter
R. H. Blyth describes Haiku no Michi, the Way of Haiku, as
‘the purely poetical (non-emotional, non-intellectual, non-moral,
non-aesthetic) life in relation to nature.’ (The Genius of Haiku,
‘ The wind blows and a seagull flies over the
roof’ is a run-on. There is no energising pause, that split-second on the
diving board, to propel us anywhere. Quite often we need a suggestion of a
pause in one-breath haiku – the kire - setting one thing off the next.
But, like all rules, the no run-on rule can be broken:
Come, children,
let’s go out
and run
in the hail!
Basho
(Trans. Makoto
Ueda)
Opening the channels of energy … And when you
enter the haiku moment, in a flash, whether you lose yourself or whether you
still retain a notion of the “I”, one thing is certain – there occurs a, a
blissful, and also a sobering new energy which comes from letting go. Some
traditional musicians experience this, as do certain jazz musicians, slipping
into an extemporising mode and momentarily entering a universe in which normal
constraints are shattered. After all, if we look at the word ‘extemporise’,
does it not mean to be outside of time? Enter!
I’m in it
everywhere
what a miracle
trees lakes clouds even dust
(Ikkyu: Crow with no Mouth, versions by Stephen Berg,
watching the pond -
still finding
new depths
Eric I. Houck, Jnr
(in Sparrow, Croatian Haiku
Association, 1999-2000)
Haiku lets go of concepts, of thoughts, of presuppositions, of opinions, prejudices and all the burden of the mind:
in
the waters of spring
a
certain thought
flowed
away
Sekishi Takagi
Of course, haiku does not erase or eliminate any of those elements that
make up our consciousness or personality traits. On the contrary, it brings
consciousness to the fore - by letting go. We can bring our moods with us into
the haiku world, or allow our mood to be coloured by our surroundings, the
weather, the season, the interpenetrating sounds, odours, textures, light and
shade.
Enter into them all, at once! Our natural
reaction to all these elements is much truer than anything we might fantasise
about. And if memory is part of living in the witnessing present, then memory,
too, can feature in a haiku:
Der Wintermond stand
heute über Hesses Grab.
Weite Erinn’rung
The winter moon
over
faraway
memories…
Günter Klinge
(
Sparrow, 1999 - 2000)
(Trans.
G. R.)
True sensitivity to the present does not erase the past; far from it.
The present may be enriched by a conscious or unconscious invoking of the past.
From
evening sun
shadows line
the old school
yard
Gail H. Goto
Some of the above haiku allude to seasons. Seasonal allusion was, until
recently, a necessary ingredient in Japanese haiku. A word that places you in a
particular season is called kigo.
Thus
the skylark or the activity of
tea-picking are associated, in
It is quite enough that we absorb the spirit
of haiku from reading the best of the old and new and sharpen our technique so
that it fulfils the promise offered here in all sincerity – haiku
enlightenment!
Right here and now … The German-Jewish
poet, Heinrich Heine, claimed that
the best songs of summer are composed in front of a roaring fire in winter;
what may be true of poetry is not true for haiku. Generally speaking, those
haiku dealing with a particular season are written in that season, are
experienced in that season and belong to that season. In this respect, haiku
enlightenment is a very grounding experience, in place and in time.
Sand-castles in the sky? A noble occupation, but don’t use haiku if that’s your
game. There is absolutely no need to fantasise. The haiku moment is as exactly
as it should be, right here and now, its contours awaiting you in the emptiness
of a timeless glimpse. The task is not to extract its ingredients, somehow, but
to become part of its molecular structure, its essence, colour, sound, sharing
its invisible nature, melding into that moment which is the summation of all of
existence now, the core of creation. This is its time and place, no other. Its
expression may, indeed, be coloured by past fantasies and experiences but its
realm is the eternal now.
Jung’s idea of synchronicity, the drawing of Tarot cards, astrological
configuration, the law of universal correspondence … as above so below … some
of these notions may be connected to the haiku moment. Let us live with these
mysteries.
I stop to listen;
the cricket
has done the same
(A Pale Leaf, New
York, 1981)
Haiku will change your behaviour patterns!
after Christmas
a flock of sparrows
in the unsold trees
Dee Evetts
(Endgrain, Red Moon
Press, 1997)
Haiku will change the way you see – how you see and what you see.
In the haiku moment, time is
frozen, melding, suspended, yet bursting with life. We are primordial once
again, innocent, all senses alive, truly at one with our surroundings, truly
human, strong and vulnerable, in a state of grace:
looking
together
across the frozen lake
the
heron and I
Jan van den Pol
Openness to openness … Haiku encounters
the truth in an open, natural state of mind and that openness and humility is
rewarded by enlightenment. ‘Deep answereth unto deep, love respondeth unto
love…’ and, let us add, openness to openness. Because enlightenment is an
opening up to see the light. The haikuist is a seer. Though he be blind, the
haikuist still sees. It is the spirit that sees.
The reward of trust … While often
seeming to concentrate on - or probe - the almost imperceptible, haiku is a
flowering, an opening up to the world and this trust is rewarded from day to
day. The haiku is a returning to the world, a returning to reality, a ‘teshuva’
wrongly translated as ‘repent’. Let us relish the wisdom in the following:
“To return to things themselves is to return to that world which
precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always, and in relation to which every
scientific schematisation is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is
geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand
what a forest, a prairie or a river is …”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, Humanities Press, 1962)
What is the shape of today? Does that sound like a
riddle, a koan? Let’s see. So …
you think you know what a mountain looks like, what a summer stream sounds
like? Or is it merely an idea of a mountain or a stream that you are
entertaining? Seishi (1901 –1994) transmits the genuine haiku experience
beautifully:
dunes in a cold
wind –
the shape they
take before me,
the
shape of today …
Robert
Bebek
The enlightenment pool … As the initiate
becomes accustomed to reading, writing and recognising good haiku, there arises
an intimate sharing of the haiku moments of others. Enlightenment becomes
pooled. French poet Yves Bonnefoy
said, ‘At its most intense, reading is empathy, shared existence.
’
sickle moon -
reaping
emptiness
GR
T
H
I
N
K
Between two thoughts there is an interval of no thought. That interval
is the Self, the Atman. It is pure awareness.
Jnana
Vashistha
A
B
O
U
T
I
T
Gifts
and works … “We should learn to see God in all gifts and
works,” said Meister Eckhart, “neither resting content with
anything nor becoming attached to anything…” This means that we mustn’t become
too attached to haiku!
How rich
the haiku harvest is once we become poor in spirit. Walk this lonely,
companionable way with us:
wet west Muskerry –
moonlight
drying
the clothes
Seán Mac Mathúna
Yes, that is a little bit crazy. But let’s not forget that haiku was
once dubbed kyóku, crazy verse! The
rational mind - given that it might be able to compose such a haiku - would
have rejected it instantly, depositing it deep in the waste-paper basket, in
the hope that no neighbour or colleague might fish it out. But there is nothing
crazy about it, or sane, nothing good, nothing bad about it, nothing right or
wrong about it. It is simply what it is.
Consider, now, the words of Chuang Tzu: “When we look at things in
the light of Tao, nothing is best, nothing is worst. Each thing, seen in its
own light, stands out in its own way.”
Learning selfhood … The magic of the Mac Mathúna haiku is that it appears to
happen without the interference of human agency. But it only appears that way.
The human imagination is actively at work, transforming one reality into
another. The human spirit is at work, language is at work, as effortlessly as
the trained Inuit shaman travels silently to the moon.
“Learning the way of enlightenment is learning selfhood.
Learning selfhood is forgetting oneself.
Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things…” Dogen
(Quoted in Introduction to Kensho,
The Heart of Zen by Thomas Cleary,
Shambhala, 1997).
Forgetting oneself is not a retreat to some
Elysian passivity! It is not absent-mindedness. If you are competitive in
sports or in business, 'forgetting oneself’ is the key to spontaneous action
and initiative. Who has ever crossed the winning line in a hundred metre dash,
or hit the bull’s eye in a game of darts, by thinking of himself? Or for that
matter, who has ever truly loved another by thinking of himself?
When you are old and grey …
and nodding by the fire … Traditional societies respected their elders. Some
even worshipped them. The concept of ageism, the neglect of the elderly,
prejudice against the elderly – are these the bitter harvest of a youth culture
which came to the fore in the 1960s, or products of a society which evaluates
our usefulness as mere worker-bees?
The haikuist sees beauty in the aged person -
or thing - in the gnarled:
dangerous
pavements,
but I
face the ice this year
with
my father’s stick
Seamus Heaney
side by side on the
couch –
wearing each other’s
glasses
Lee Gurga
Ask
yourself, would ‘facing’ be better than ‘I face’ in Heaney’s haiku; ask yourself could one safely drop ‘my’; ask yourself is Gurga’s equally charming piece a haiku or a
senryu. It is only by questioning that you
develop your own aesthetic standards.
It is
perfectly acceptable to use ‘my’ as in the haiku by Kenny and Onitsura in this book:
on the scale
my bathed and steaming body
this night of snow
Katsura Nobuko
(Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese
Women,
Makoto Ueda,
This, too, will pass … Estrangement,
alienation, displacement, these are some of the pathologies of the 21st
century. But living haiku does not suffer estrangement. In joy or in
wistfulness, in sadness, pain, or in sorrow, the haikuist is at one with
friends, family, strangers, lizards, the stars above, seeing the mutability and
vulnerability of all beings, and of ourselves. This oneness is an all-redeeming
illumination:
in
the old temple
even the snake has shed
his
worldly skin
Issa
(The Spring of my Life and
Selected Haiku, Kobayashi Issa, Trans. by Sam Hamill, Shambhala 1997).
This oneness bestows extraordinary vision and a compatibility with all
life forms. Nothing will ever be the same again. (Nothing was ever the same;
nothing is ever what it seems):
August heat
the old orange cat sits up and licks
the sun from its tail
(Almost
Unseen, Selected Haiku of George Swede,
Brooks Books, 2000)
Constant renewal … Crafts people and artists in all disciplines go to Nature, not to copy Nature, but to find something new:
‘Nature is the eternal creator where each art
comes to be renewed, where the eye of every thinker and artist reads a
different poem…’ Emile Gallé
(Quoted in Masterworks of Louis
Comfort Tiffany, Duncan, Eidelberg,
Harris, Thames and Hudson, 1998).
The haiku path reconnects us. To everything.
Not just, say, to the full moon. That would be too easy. No, to the moon in all
its phases, life in all its phases:
Fourteenth day moon -
the distant cry of a
child
somehow
familiar
(Tsuru by Yoshiko Yoshino, translated by Lee Gurga & Emiko Miyashita, Deep North Press, 2001)
In haiku, each fleeting moment of the day becomes precious:
just
before sunrise
a crow’s cawing is
bright and sober
over
fragrant woods
Marko Hudnik
(Samobor Haiku
Meeting, 2000)
What an excellent start the Slovenian haikuist has made to the day,
combining sight, sound and smell to share his pure, connecting experience with
us. Or is there too much going on in this haiku? Too many adjectives? Be
critical about what you read and write. Has too much been said? Has too little
been said? Getting the balance right takes time. After a while, we recognise
good haiku, flawless haiku. And so, we
who venture on this path become connected, in wonderment, to the great body of
haiku itself:
I rub my nose
over and over -
how skilful
are
Kyoshi’s haiku
Yoshiko Yoshino (ibid.)
after
the divorce
she
sleeps on his side
of the bed
Stuart Quine
Does Quine’s senryu (named
after Karai Senryu, 1718 -1790) mean
that she misses him, partakes as it were of his absent warmth? Or might it mean
that she preferred his side of the bed and now has the freedom to enjoy it?
The way of haiku welcomes ambiguities, the
shadows and blurs of life, the spoors of existence, be they vivid or faint:
cloud
shadows
on
silent cliffs
where
condors nested
Jerry
Kilbride
An ornithologist? No, a
after
months of rain
surprised
by
my shadow
Ken H. Jones
The
Japanese term ada means that mood,
that style which suggests we can be surprised. Few qualities are more treasured
by great achievers in life, be they artists or scientists, philosophers or
gardeners. By practising and living haiku, we recover the lost innocence of
childhood and ada colours the way we
view the world anew:
spring rain falls
–
and
grins of earth break out
all
over the fields
Chiyojo
(Traditional Japanese Poetry, An
Anthology, Trans. Steven D. Carter,
Stanford 1991)
omokage
ya
oba
hitori naku
tsuki
no tomo
now I
see her face,
the
old woman, abandoned,
the
moon her only companion
This haiku, by the incomparable Basho,
is quoted in the introduction to a book devoted to another Japanese form, the
tanka.(Only Companion, Japanese Poems of
Love and Longing, translated by Sam
Hamill, Shambhala 1992).
Walk this path, this compassionate path, not
with strident certainty; walk the haiku path, tread softly.
Issa wrote the
following haiku on the death of his daughter, Sato-jo. She was the poet’s
second of four children to die:
this
world of dew –
a
world of dew indeed,
and
yet, and yet …
It’s worth repeating … In haiku, some things are worth repeating.
Beating one’s breast once is not always enough:
Riding
on the waves.
riding
on the waves,
the
cormorant’s loneliness
Had Seishi said, ‘the lonely cormorant’, the effect would be
almost trite and sentimental. But ‘the cormorant’s loneliness’ carries with it
every aching heart in creation, bobbing on the ocean of life.
Face to face … Haiku is about living, about
life and death. It is about being intensely alive. We engage with life, confront
demons, in haiku. With haiku, there is nothing to shirk.
Luke-warm haiku will enlighten nobody. To
espouse a philosophical, ethic or religious creed that has compassion at its
heart is next to useless if the body-mind is not alert to the occasions that
elicit and arouse our compassion. Thus, the haiku path triggers the salvation
mechanism within us all, bankers, prisoners, generals, civil servants, actors,
poets, plumbers, whatever our station in life.
Rabindranath Tagore expressed it
well when he said, ‘There is no higher religion than that of sympathy for all
that lives.’ This sympathy - without which we dare not call ourselves truly
human - is constantly born and regenerated along the haiku path.
A Muslim mystic, Ahmad Ibn Ata’Allah, gives out to us, and rightly so:
‘Encompass with your mercy and compassion all animals and creatures. Do
not say, “this is inanimate and has no awareness.” Indeed, it does; it is you
yourself who have no awareness!’
What are we like today? How keen is our
awareness of reality? Are we much more aware than our grandparents ever were?
It’s debatable.
‘No longer can
man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face.
Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity
increases. Instead of dealing with the things themselves, man is in a sense
constantly conversing with himself…’
( Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944).
If this be the disease, how effective is the cure:
the
pursued beetle
just
led the other into
an
empty snail shell
J
Twenty years after the publication of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, the following winning
entry was one of over a staggering 41,000 haiku received by the Japan Air
Lines-sponsored contest in
a bitter
morning:
sparrows
sitting together
without any
necks
The author? J W Hackett, the
first American master.
What would Cassirer have to
say – well over half a century later – of our age of virtual reality. Would he
not say that we are in need of the following anonymous Japanese haiku as a form
of therapy?
how
refreshing –
the
whinny of a packhorse
unloaded
of everything!
And what would Cassier have
to say about the cult of personality and stardom? How refreshing that the above
haiku is perfectly anonymous!
Innocent play … Pornography
degrades men, women and children. But when haiku touches on the erotic, the
experience is usually one of innocence, surprise, awakening:
looking for
eggs inside the barn…
but I’ve found
instead
my cousin’s
breasts!
José Rubén Romero
Haiku and senryu have many moods and playfulness is one of them. H F Noyes, the American haikuist
domiciled in
‘With the
Mahayana Buddhist teachings that spread in the first century to
(Ko, 1998, Spring/Summer)
a sprinkle of
lights
across a dark
mountainside –
the
goose-bearing wind
Suzuki Setsuko
Essentially, it is everywhere. As the 10th century collection
of Japanese poems, Kokinshú,
declares:
‘Listening to the
voices of the warbler that sings in the flowers or the frog that lives in the
water, we ask, what of all living things does not create poetry…?’*
---------
*(Quoted in Traces of Dreams,
Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho, Haruo Shirane, Stanford University Press, 1998)
Sanity, health, salvation … The haikuist,
like the shaman, the druid, the eco-warrior, is convinced that our relationship
with Nature is essential to sanity, health and salvation. By this we do not
mean that we must make a retreat in the wilderness. In the classic haiku of Issa, the Japanese master demonstrates
extraordinary fellow-feeling for the lowliest of creatures, even the flea.
Issa’s heart and spirit live on:
waiting
for crumbs
the
blackbird’s gold-rimmed eye
on my
freezing fingers
Ruth Robinson
Before and after
enlightenment… In the 9th.century an anonymous Irish monk wrote with the
regaling freshness and pure awareness that we associate with haiku:
Small bird
from your little yellow
beak
a whistle dashed
out over Loch Lao*
blackbird
from a branch all
yellow-splashed
(Trans.
GR. *
late-summernight
a
sheep seeks something to drink
deep
in the bucket
Marcel Smets
And good fun too:
bowing
slightly
to a
snowman:
a
drunkard
Ikuyo Yoshimura
composedly,
he sits,
contemplating
the mountains –
the
worthy frog!
Issa
Meditative observation… Prettification is not at the heart of haiku.
Haiku is of much sterner stuff. The haiku way of living is more than simply
observing the minutiae of natural, terrestrial phenomena in all weathers and
moods and it is much more than snapshots of flora and fauna. In meditative
observation, the haikuist peers into the life of things, ‘sees eternity in a
grain of sand’ and is transmuted by the encounter:
the
reservoir
passes
its whole night
gargling
stars
Francisco Mendez
These insights are, as it were, spontaneous gifts exchanged between
humans and creation, glimpses of cosmic consciousness, illuminating flashes
when earth and sky, heaven and the world are one and the heart is at peace:
the sun leaves
one cloud dropped
in the lake
Tadao Okazaki
la vasta noche
no es
ahora otra cosa
que
una fragrancia
the vast night
-
now
no more
than
a fragrance
Jorge Luis Borges
(trans. Noel
lodo
mañana
polvo
bailando
en el camino
mud
in a still puddle:
tomorrow’s
dust
dancing
on the roadway
Octavio Paz
(trans. Noel
It is the fullness of emptiness!
that
cormorant’s my
favourite
who surfaces
with
an empty beak
Issa *
*( The Spring of My Life and
Selected Haiku, Kobayashi Issa,
Trans. Sam Hamill, Shambhala 1997)
Breath of attunement… Not everyone is capable of writing – or even reading – conventional poetry. It is
a minority pursuit, in most so-called civilised nations. But the haiku is
within everyone’s compass. Anyone – even a child, especially a child – can
write haiku, once the principle of the haiku moment is grasped. Thereafter it’s
a question of practising the seventeen-syllable structure in three-line
configuration until it becomes second nature, and later experimenting with
free-style haiku of a dozen or so syllables:
the
fleeing sandpipers
turn
about suddenly
and
chase back the sea!
J
old pond
frog jumps in
sound of water
Basho
In one breath, Matsuo Basho
expresses perfect attunement. How utterly real it is! No illusion here, no
doubt, no anxiety, no self-absorption, no dreaming, no showing off, no
distraction, no longing, no loathing, no desire, no self-deception, no self. It
is unalloyed awareness, active absorption, the pure breath of the here and now
(and how that moment still rings out centuries later). Enlightenment is only a
breath away… listen!
over
the dishes
goes
the sound of rat clatter –
ah, how cold it is!
Buson
(Version: GR & NG)
-------
* (Traditional Japanese Poetry,
An Anthology, Trans. Steven D.
Carter, Stanford, 1991)
Issa knew that haiku-
poetry can be a path to enlightenment: ‘He believed that one part of that path
is shikan, a meditative state in
which perception is utterly free of discrimination between mind and matter,
self and object; where the only permanence is impermanence and change, whether
subtle or violent, remains the essence of being…’
(The Spring of my Life)
Haiku creates a silent revolution, deepening our understanding of these
truths: change is life itself and all life-cycles, governing all living
organisms, including ostracised forms of life so beloved of haikuists:
quenching
its thirst
with
bitter ice –
a
sewer rat
Basho
Basho spoke of fueki ryúko, that which is unchanging
and that which is ever-changing. Haiku is born in the energies of this rich
paradox.
Croatian haikuist and haiku
theorist Marijan Cekolj puts it this
way: ‘When the interior awareness knows that the exterior awareness is waiting
in a state of readiness, there is a good possibility of their interweaving in
the present moment in which the Ego has never existed…’
(Smijeh Sazanja/The Laughter of
Cognition, Samobor, 1998, The Croatian Haiku Association).
Learning from the pine…
Basho’s advice, ‘Learn of the pine from a pine …’ is so often quoted in haiku
circles as to become a shibboleth. Like all great, simple truths, it needs commentary to help us grasp the
original meaning. Isoji Asâ comments
thus:
‘The way is not to divorce oneself from the
pine and to see it with one’s own feeling, but to divorce the self and to enter
the pine with a selfless interest. Then a real insight into the pine arises.
Thus will it become a pine into which the human heart has entered…It will
become sentient, instead of remaining a natural object, viewed through the five
senses objectively. And furthermore contemplating the human feeling infused
into the object, the poet expresses it through the illumination of his insight,
and when that feeling finds its expression, it becomes the art of haiku…’
(Quoted in The Japanese Haiku
by Kenneth Yasuda, Charles E. Tuttle
Company, 1957).
Embracing the ‘itness’ of the pine … This is how
the art critic Bernard Berenson (1865 – 1954) described a
defining moment of consciousness: ‘I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly
immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It
and I were one …’ (Sketch from a Self-Portrait, Pantheon Books, 1949).
Some psychologists may say that this is nothing more than our longing to return
to the undifferentiated world of the womb. But it is not so. Not really. We are
mammals, yes, not robots. But the haiku moment does not project us forwards or
backwards, in time or space, to the security of an environment we have lost.
(Though, interestingly enough, one does encounter the occasional Japanese haiku
which revolves on seeing one’s preserved umbilicus in later life, as an adult!)
Who knows what remains of the subconscious after the haiku moment has tussled us into an awakened awareness of the
here and now?
Perhaps the most meaningful arts
are those which fuse the factual with the sublime, the earthly with the
unearthly, the paintings of Chagall
and Gaugin, the poetry of Yeats and Lorca, the Lieder of Schubert, the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, haiku such as
this:
wild geese,
wild geese
sleeting
through
the
ebbing stars
Seán Mac Mathúna
A life of connection… We propose, therefore,
in this book, that the haiku way of living is one of connectedness. For too
long the intellectual fashion was to be the outsider, the wry observer of a
world of mayhem, cruelty and meaninglessness. Haiku challenges this
dehumanising legacy of disenchantment. Writing in A Heart as Wide as the World: Living with Mindfulness, Wisdom,
Compassion (Shambhala, 1997) Sharon
Salzberg claims that ‘a life of connection and authenticity can come
completely alive in us now.’ This claim we make for haiku today, without fear
of contradiction.. Test its validity for yourself. The haiku moment is real. It
is not a fata morgana. It is not a
vision in the clouds. The haiku path is a path through this world, a path of
tolerance, compassion and fearless engagement, not one of complacency.
Issa, the tenderest
of poets and author of 20,000 haiku, could be critical of society when he saw
fit:
don’t
mention people –
even
the very scarecrows,
crooked,
every one! *
And, elsewhere, he complains:
not
all of the nightingales
visiting
my humble hedge
sing
that well
Is he really complaining though? Remember his favourite cormorant
earlier on, the one that caught nothing!
-----
* (The Autumn Wind, A Selection
from the Poems of Issa, Translated and Introduced by Lewis Mackenzie, Kodansha 1957)
What is it about a feckless cormorant, a less than perfect nightingale, an orphaned sparrow that warms the heart of Issa?
hey,
don’t hit him!
the
fly rubs his hands,
rubs
his legs
Issa
We quoted R. H. Blyth earlier as saying that the haiku path is non-emotional.
This may or may not be true. Issa,
above, shows love for the fly, does he not? Indeed Yoshiko Yoshino is bold enough to state: ‘When making haiku, mere
observation, however detailed and precise, is just not enough. Once love is
sent towards the object, the object responds…’ (Quoted in Tsuru, Yoshiko Yoshino,
Trans. Lee Gurga & Emiko Miyashita, Deep North Press, 2001)
Is this too insignificant to record?
Nothing is insignificant on the haiku path! Consider this: ‘That which fleets
by has great significance. The most delicate things are the ones that in the
end prove strongest.’ (Seamus Heaney,
just a minnow
the
granite mountain wobbles
on
the lake
Christopher
Herold
snail’s horns
(A Zen Harvest, Japanese Folk Zen
Sayings, Ed. Soiku Shigematsu,
North Point Press, San Francisco, 1988)
An invitation to play…Think of what
might happen if children all over the world had the opportunity to enjoy and
explore the spirit of haiku for half an
hour each week, in sessions devoted to reading, composition, quiet reflection
and discussion. Might we create a better world, a less violent world, a world
more loved than it is now?
january
storm
the
bamboo loves
to
thrash about
Robert
Gibson *
*
(Children of the Sparrow: HAIKU, Seattle, 1999)
Do we exclude the spirit of haiku from the curriculum in our
efforts to ‘create’ ‘successful’, efficient people who will ‘grasp’ whatever
opportunities they can in later life and ‘control’ the world they live in?
in the silence
after snow
a wren’s faint
chirp
Rich Krivcher *
(Fallen Leaves, Ed. John
Leonard,
my little
sparrows,
you too are now
motherless –
come play with
me!
Merging, the ultimate
sacrament …To be slightly technical for a moment, this beautiful haiku contains ada, the freshness of child-like vision.
It also contains what you will find in some of the best haiku, what the
Japanese call butsuga ichinyo, the
identification of the poet with his subject. In much of conventional
literature, we praise the author’s ‘distance’, as the French have it. In haiku,
self merges with object. In this very merging is the sacrament, the dynamics of
enlightenment.
Haiku is a complete, universal, effortless
path in itself. At the core of the flurry, flux and excitement of life is
ineffable stillness and imperturbability, the ‘Be still and know I am thy God’
attested to by mystics of all creeds and none.
The haikuist comes to the
haiku moment unburdened by prejudice and doctrine. ‘If thine eye causeth thee
to sin, pluck it out!’ Such masochistic advice is foreign to the nature of the
haikuist’s vision. Closer would be the advice from the Candamaharoshana-tantra:
When you see
form, look!
Similarly, listen to sounds,
Inhale
scents,
Taste
delicious flavours,
And
feel textures…
The New Testament tells us, ‘Unless ye be like children, ye cannot
enter the
Supplying the words… Ultimately, the haiku
path is not a didactic one. Life itself offers us an eternal, textless sermon
for which we merely supply the words and
that which reverberates behind the word:
autumn wind:
gods, Buddha –
lies,
lies, lies
Shiki
if
the rain falls
from
the far sky, let it rain!
if
the wind blows, let it blow!
Ryokan (1758 –1831)
(Traditional Japanese Poetry,
Trans. Steven D. Carter, Stanford,
1991)
In haiku, we take our enlightenment in smaller, more manageable doses
as we experience the dissolving of ego, its coming and going:
in
the river reflection
he
watches himself
watch
the sunset
Alan J. Summers
(in
paper wasp,
growing
old –
more
haiku,
more
turnip soup
Kyoshi
little by little
the odours of medicines fade Dakotsu
The Afro- American writer Richard
Wright wrote thousands of haiku during his self-exile in
(Haiku, This Other World by
Richard Wright, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1998)
Takahama Kyoshi (1874 –1959)
composed thousands of haiku in the course of a long life:
a woman bathing
in a tub –
stared at by a
crow
Not something one sees everyday, an ogling crow, and yet what a
haunting image it is.
Fukio (1903 –1930) had
a much shorter life but also wrote riveting haiku:
mid-winter
– a crow
alights
on
its own shadow
This has the quality of sabi
or loneliness. . It is the opposite of the flowery, the showy. Haiku does not
close its eyes to drabness, bareness, raggedness, homelessness.
What a shame it would be to live a life,
short or long, happy or sad, without knowing one has witnessed unique, haunting
moments.
The haikuist is alive to the world and open
to a host of impressions that may never quite penetrate those of duller or
jaded senses. What are our senses for but to make our way in this world as
fulfilled, enlightened human beings?
I’m leaving –
now
you can make love,
my
flies
Issa
Confrontation… To this day,
hundreds of thousands of Japanese enjoy composing haiku, and travel in
bus-loads to view cherry blossoms, plum blossoms… a harmless activity, one
might say. But it would be a mistake to see the haiku path as one of charming
innocence, respite, or mere escapisms in a world still ravaged by war,
starvation, poverty, disease and suppression.
Haiku does not shirk conflict, as was illustrated in a remarkable,
confrontational collection of war haiku published in
a
fallen soldier.
how loud the ticking
of
the watch
Enes Kišević
a body falls
dissolving the snow
into a red ice
Ivica Jembrih
We are not spared the horrors of war in this unflinching testimony
since it is the haikuist’s vocation to look at, not look away:
in
the burned-out village
a
wounded stray dog
sniffing charred
bones
Vladimir Devidé
a
red poppy
between the rails stops the trains
Smiljka
Bilankov
a spider mended
the demolished roof
Luko Paljetak
These haiku restore some sense, even some dignity, to an apocalyptic
situation; they display the versatility of haiku in handling the most extreme
vicissitudes of life. A sane, resilient response to insanity. Silence in the
face of exploding shells. Enlightenment dawning through the ghostly smoke
rising from the rubble.
During the Sino-Japanese war, many haiku were
found on the dead bodies of soldiers:
on foreign
soil,
oh violets,
neither your colour
nor your
fragrance has changed!
There’s a saying in Irish, beatha an
tsaighdiúra, beatha na muice – ‘the life of a soldier, the life of a pig’.
Both are fed for the slaughter! Haiku consciousness emphasises the fragility of
life, the futility of war:
lilacs
by the bridge –
soldier
after soldier
catching
the scent
Ernest Sherman
(Modern Haiku, 31.3, Fall 2000)
a
tide-cluttered beach;
this
clear chunk of jellyfish
magnifies
the sand
R. Christopher Thorsen
Haiku and health … Might haiku be actually good for our health? If the haiku moment is a
form of meditation, then why not? People in the healing professions should try
to use haiku as a therapeutic tool with no known side-effects.
the fragrance
of the forest
on
their shoe soles,
father and son
sleeping on the train
Ikuyo Yoshimura
in our room my dead wife’s
comb, underfoot
Buson
The haikuist’s relationships extend to all the living and the dead,
embracing and being embraced at the same moment:
wintry
day,
on
my horse
a
frozen shadow
Basho
Haiku enlightenment – living the life of haiku – changes the way we
behave, subtly refining our actions:
leaving
a patch
unmowed,
wild
strawberries
Elizabeth Searle Lamb
Flawed creatures that we are, abstract notions of virtue, ideals of ahimsa (non-violence) and the usual
moral precepts, or commandments, do not always transfer to daily life. Living
according to the spirit of haiku is to be aware. In this awareness, our higher
nature is allowed to express itself naturally, in word and deed:
come
on then, beetle,
walking
over my foot –
-
you go first!
The ripple effect of such words and deeds is immeasurable and
criss-crosses the world. As Kenneth Yasuda
observed (and as we will have gathered already):
‘A haiku moment is a kind of aesthetic moment – a moment in which the
words which created the experience and the experience itself can become one.
The nature of a haiku moment is anti-temporal and its quality is eternal, for
in this state man and his environment are one unified whole, in which there is
no sense of time…’
(The Japanese Haiku by Kenneth
Yasuda, Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957).
Preparing for the haiku moment – or not …You may ask, how
does one prepare for the hai ku
moment? Conscious preparation may lead us nowhere. An ancient Zen scripture
admonishes us as follows: ‘Don’t dwell on anything, yet enliven the mind.’
(Quoted in Zen Antics, translated and
edited by Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, 1993). It is best not to prepare for the haiku
moment, while keeping the above precept on the back-burner. The outrageousness
of Zen – grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and putting you standing on
your head – is one way towards gaining an insight into the spontaneity of haiku
enlightenment; but it could also be a dead end. If it doesn’t work for you,
drop it – and be quick about it! Having said that, many would argue that Zen
has proved to have universal application. ‘Among the diverse roots of Japanese
civilisation,’ claims Thomas Cleary, ‘Buddhism is pre-eminent in
providing an intellectual outlook that can transcend national cultures and
sustain a genuine egalitarian global vision…’(Rational Zen, Shambhala, 1992).
Zen Buddhism may or not be a
suitable introduction towards preparing for the experience of haiku
enlightenment. Here is another way to look at the problem. It comes from Dutch
author Cees Nooteboom in a book about
‘Sternstunde,
a wonderful word in German, defining a particular moment in life, a “starry
hour” that has been or will be so important that it will change life’s course.
The notion presupposes a stroke of enlightenment, a sublime flash of insight, a
shock of recognition, and I am much too intractable a character to believe in
that kind of thing. Surely whatever it is that has suddenly required
illumination must have been there already, in a state of latency. How else
could you recognise the moment.’
A Zen master or a haiku practitioner
might not disagree.
Side-stepping regret and
remorse… Too many lives are steeped in regret and remorse. Too many of us know
the meaning of Tennyson’s ‘tears
from the depth of some divine despair’. Haiku can step in before regret is
possible, confronting reality so that the shocks and upheavals of life do not
unbalance us. By facing the exigencies of daily life in the spirit of haiku,
how can things catch up on us unawares?
my ailing
father
listening
to the crickets
last
day of August
F M Black
As we have pointed out previously, death itself need not catch us
unawares. Jisei, death poems,
could be said to be a genre all of its own. Here from Blithe Spirit, June 1988, is Norman
Barraclough’s ‘death poem’:
on
the moor
wind-chased
ripples run
into
still water
Albrecht Dürer said a long time ago: ‘For verily, art is embedded
in Nature; he who can extract it, has it…’
Channelling natural wisdom …Whatever about
this century, the 20th century will not be described as an Age of Faith. Uncertainty
seems to be the order of the day and conspiracy theories have cult-like
popularity. Those who tenaciously cling to doctrinal tenets are deemed
fundamentalists, extremists, ‘unlettered’ peasants, Flat Earthists, Luddites
and the like. Society seems to need scapegoats.
Such are the complexities of modern life that artists search for a
voice to convincingly handle a variation on the theme of ‘we do not know’ and
quite a few resort to shock tactics. Haiku stands out in this world by
confidently proclaiming that there is quite a lot we know, a lot we can intuit,
much we can learn, by channelling our own natural wisdom:
coming
to a marsh
to cool their hooves
autumn
deer
Keiko Akamatsu
Because of its compactness, haiku says just what it wants to say while
containing more than it appears to say. Elaboration would be gilding the lily,
smothering the stark truth of the haiku moment:
stillborn
–
only
the mother’s cry
echoes
down the hall
Peter Duppenthaler
Enlightenment on the haiku path is not synonymous with bubbling
happiness. It can be chilling. But where there’s life there’s a promise of
warmth:
standing
side by side
two
bucks lick ice and frost
from
each other’s skin
Issa
warm rain before dawn
my milk flows into her
unseen
Ruth Yarrow
What may be an exotic image to one person may be quite everyday to
another, as in these two examples from Haiku
Moment:
the dugs of the
old cow
shrivelled –
late autumn
wind
Joe Nutt
spot of sunlight –
on a blade of grass the
dragonfly
changes its grip
Lee Gurga
The nature of the image is not important; what matters is the moment of
perception. Perception is more than seeing. Chambers
Twentieth Century Dictionary defines ‘perception’ as: ‘act or power of
perceiving: discernment: apprehension of any modification of consciousness: the
combining of sensations into a recognition of an object…’ In Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
one of the uses of ‘perceive’ is given in an illustrative sentence by
Norbert Muehlen:… ‘people have become so used to the sights of ruins that they
hardly perceive them any more.’
Precisely! Perceived by the haikuist, the ordinary becomes
extraordinary. As Jim Kacian reminds
us:… ‘If haiku affords us moments of vision, it is not so much that we are
visionaries, as that up to that moment we have been blind…’ (Frogpond, 1998, Vol. XXI, No. 2, Haiku
Society of America).
Haiku and the city …Can one write
haiku in towns and cities? Of course! Rain falls on cities too. And snow. The
sun shines, or does not shine. Cities have gardens and parks. There’s always
the zoo … why not visit your nearest zoo and compose zoo-ku!
Some cities have urban foxes,
urban monkeys and, for all one knows, alligators in the sewers. Cities have
men, women and children, insects, markets, flower stalls, aromas and textures:
moonlight
reducing the
city
to ruins
Seán Mac Mathúna
Nature’s ability to manifest itself amid the hubbub
of urban life can add poignancy to haiku as in the following American and
Japanese vignettes:
the
city bus stops –
a
caw of a winter crow
through
the opened door
Robert
Spiess
expiring
in
front of one hundred towers
the
winter butterfly
Yasumasa
Soda
(Haiku
Troubadours 2000, Ginyu Press, 2000)
Unique and alone … Each one of us is
unique and we are alone. We may enjoy the love of family, the conviviality of
friends and the esteem of colleagues, but – whether we do or not – ultimately
we are alone. For all that, we are intimately linked to everything in the
universe, animate and inanimate, and to each other. Our relationships change,
inevitably, since change is the nature of growth. Haiku moments vividly capture
the vulnerability of our shared existence:
orphaned
duckling
sticking
close
to
the water lily
David Mills
This is something the haikuist once saw and may never see again. ‘If an
event is unrepeatable, that is beauty…’ says Soen Nakagawa in Endless Vow
(Shambhala, 1996).
Easter evening –
the old woman gathers
her unsold flowers
Ion Codrescu
(The use of a seasonal topic is known as kidai. Kigo is the actual
word, or phrase, that conveys kidai. We can have our own seasonal, cultural or
religious festivals to replace the traditional 5 seasons in the Japanese haiku
tradition – spring, summer, autumn, winter, New Year).
in
my dream my father
talks about summer projects
not knowing he’s dead
Alain Kervern
(This has the quality of makoto,
honesty, sincerity, unaffectedness).
Relics and rubbish … The more haiku
you read and write, the more you are likely to discard. One in ten will satisfy
you at first. Later, maybe only one in a hundred. This is as it should be.
The very notion of haiku enlightenment itself should be consigned to
the rubbish heap, for a period, lest it become an obsession! Krishnamurti says in Thoughts on Living, ‘Truth is a pathless
land. There is no guide, no law, no tradition which will lead you to it but
your own constant and intelligent awareness.’
father presses
olives,
we dip our
bread
in the first
oil
Marinko
Kovacevic
Committed to the
Road (The Association of
On the haiku path (or pathlessness), blink and you miss it! Bruce Ross, editor of Haiku Moment, An Anthology of Contemporary
North American Haiku (Tuttle, 1993) offers the apprentice some hope,
however:
‘Underlying this
emphasis on the given moment of time is the Buddhist idea that the world is
made anew each moment. A kind of divine spontaneity thus inheres in each
moment…’
In the West, we are rapidly losing a sense of the sacred, of the temenos, the holy place. We regard with
some amusement the Japanese belief that after 99 years, cooking utensils take
on the significance of holy relics.
Constant regeneration … Defining
ultimate reality is not the business of haiku. What is ultimate reality? A
mathematical formula? Our realities are coloured by our moods, our temperament,
our language, our culture, our beliefs and so on – throw in the weather, the
contents of our stomach, our ailments, and the list becomes surreal. The
haikuist can only claim to capture a moment of reality – and a succession of
such moments. These moments are intuited and caught in all their transience and
uniqueness and are streamlined with the constant regeneration of the world:
she
brings a snowflake inside
saying
look
how big it is
Sean
Burn
Haiku is simply seeing. Seeing, simply:
yellow
dandelion
head
above
the
young nettles
Zoran Dederović
Aloneness predicates the possibility of oneness:
evening feeding –
old
farmer’s breath
smokes
out to his cows
Randy M. Brooks
Children of the gods …In his Record of the Little Garden, Masaoka Shiki wrote:
‘Just
then a yellow butterfly came flying by and as I watched it forage among the
flowers in the hedge, my soul began to move out to it as though by instinct.
Together we visited the flowers, searched out fragrances, and alit in the buds
of things. Just as I thought to rest my wings for a moment, it crossed over the
low cryptomeria hedge and circled the neighbouring garden and again came
wheeling back to flutter in the pine tops and over the water basin. Then, blown
off by a gust of wind, it soared high and away. By the time it was hidden by
the roof across the way, I was beside myself, lost in ecstasy. Suddenly coming
to my senses, I noticed that I was feverish and feeling rather unwell. I came
indoors, closed the paper sliding door, and pulled the quilt over me; yet in
true reality I was dancing madly with the butterfly, now flown off over a
broad, boundless plain. In the midst of my dancing, several hundred butterflies
gathered from somewhere, and as I gazed at them playing I realised that what
seemed butterflies were all little children of the gods …
(Masaoka Shiki by Janine Beichman, Kodansha
International, 1986)
All art forms have therapeutic uses. Haiku is particularly effective in
coming to terms with loss, with grief, submerged memories, old wounds. Chiyo-ni
grieves for her lost son:
My dragon-fly hunter:
where has he
wandered today
I
wonder?
(Quoted in Haiku – one breath poetry by Naomi Wakan,
Heian International, Inc., 1997)
Allow old desires, old sorrows,
disappointments, pangs, attachments to flow into the light of the now in a
mature spirit of acceptance:
autumn
wind –
in
the attic
love
letters yellowing
Sylvia Forges-Ryan
If you placed a book such as this in the library of the nearest prison,
hospital, nursing home or school, might it change lives? It might – it might
even change the way we view our pets, not to mention our neighbours:
our
dog licks
my
reflection
in
the cold puddle
Scott Hall
Way of the gentle warrior … If the
traditional martial arts of the East are said to bring us to a state of
balance, poise, flexibility and readiness, a state in which we anticipate a
blow to the body, or, indeed, deliver a blow, the way of haiku could be
described as the way of the gentle warrior:
struck
by a
raindrop, snail
closes up
Buson
How immediate this is! The author lived between 1716-1783 – but this
haiku is ever-new.
Rain is common enough in
world poetry - where rain occurs. In the poetry of
The word zenkan could be
applied to many haiku in this book. The word means, simply, pure seeing,
momentary, instant enlightenment:
in a
pool of stars
a
frog is hopping
from
one to the other
Robert Bebek
This is a charming example of the effectiveness of Dogen’s dictum in action - ‘forgetting oneself is being enlightened
by all things’. We cannot forget ourselves by a mere act of will and
determination. We can go into a stupor with the aid of narcotics or induce a
comatose state by hammering our heads with a mallet… Forgetting ourselves while
still remaining conscious - more conscious than ever - this is what we sow and
reap simultaneously in the field of haiku enlightenment. Haiku does not seek to
obliterate our consciousness of who we are. Au contraire, it sharpens our sense
of who and what we really are, as Seishi
observed, dramatically:
With
every cry
of the shrike
I know who I am
T
H
I
N
K
Seeing truly is not merely a change in the direction of seeing, but a
change at its very centre, in which the seer himself disappears.
Ramesh S Balsekar
A
B
O
U
T
I
T
Jim Norton, an Irish haijin, writing in redthread,
Newsletter of the Haiku Sangha (February 2002) admonishes us to hear with
the whole body! This is what Seishi (above) was doing. It is what Ikkyu
was doing, in his boat on
Cricket chirp –
now
my life is
clear
Hakuu
(1911 –1936)
Trans.
Lucien Stryk
Norton gives us an apt
quote, reminding us how essential to the haiku path is the aural dimension:
‘If our listening is partial, there is still an I who is listening, and
our listening is tainted by this. Simply listen. It is only when listening is
complete that the enlightened mind appears. But we are always listening. We are
listening now. We listen with our ears; with our eyes; with our nose … we
listen with every cell and pore of our body …’
(Going Beyond Buddha: The Awakening Practice of Listening, Dae
Gak, Tuttle, 1997)
This is an electrifying insight. Walking the haiku path can create
goose-pimples – and, listen, they are listening!
First thing to catch my
ear –
stream
of my
native village
Hosha
(1885 – 1954)
(Cage of Fireflies, translated by Lucien Stryk, Swallow
Press, 1993)
Wake up … We can take a communal , compositional stroll, or ginko,
creating and then comparing haiku with like-minded friends; or, in this age of
increased mobility, we can take our haiku notebooks with us on our travels:
first
the cockerel
now
the donkey
(Flamingo Shapes by John Barlow, Snapshot Press 2001)
The promise of haiku … R H Blyth, whose 4-volume Haiku (Hokuseido Press, 1949) is
essential reading for all who wish to follow this path, believed that writing
(and reading) haiku is a spiritual exercise in which we instantly blossom into
a state of mind, ‘in which we are not separated from other things, are indeed
identical with them, and yet retain our own individuality…’ This is true. This
is the promise of haiku. The non-appearance of the personal pronoun throughout
this book, and in most of the haiku examples given, does not imply any
diminution of the individuality or personality.
Sympathetic vibrations … A haiku may zoom
in on one particular object of clear-eyed scrutiny:
take care
grasshopper –
you
become one with the leaf
only when you’re still
Robert Bebek
This is known as ichibutsu
shitate. A haiku may also combine two distinct images, or happenings, which
exchange a sympathetic timbre:
fish-vendor
testing
the
knife’s edge –
cry
of seagulls
GR
This type of resonance or combination is known as toriawase. The dash with which the second line ends is the Western
equivalent of the kireji or cutting
word.
So much can be encapsulated in this smallest of literary forms. The
wren’s nest is a perfect fit. It is sufficient to the wren, as the Irish
proverb has it (Is leor don dreoilín a
nead). A hazel nut is the size it should be. Why should it be as big as a
turnip? The genetic engineer who comes up with a turnip the size of a hazelnut
should go and get his head examined. To quote (or misquote) William of Occam:
‘It is a sin to do with more what can be done with less!’ The cultivation of
haiku can deepen our
day-to-day understanding of the mountains of needless waste in the world
A ten-line haiku would not be a haiku. It
would be unable to hold the energies of a haiku, it would become diffuse, a
reflective, discursive or descriptive poem. Roland Barthes, the insightful French critic, writes: ‘Haiku
brevity is not formal; haiku is not a complex thought reduced to a short form
but a short event which finds its right form in a touch .’ (L’empiere des signes, Flammarion, Paris,
1970).
Simply mastering the haiku form will not
bring sudden enlightenment. It is the spirit of haiku which matters and this
has been eloquently attested to by Humberto
Senegal, President of the Colombian Haiku Society:
‘Erudition and intellectual wisdom, the paths
of the egotistic poet, are not adequate for one who seriously wishes to draw
near to haiku. The path of intuition, of the non-being of being, leads directly
to haiku…’
And he goes on to warn potential haikuists:
‘In the West, few
cultivators of the haiku go beyond form. They focus on this part of the legacy
from the masters because it seems easier to count syllables or to tie
themselves to the seasons than to present themselves, and their wonder, to that
same astonishment which Basho must have experienced at the trees in bloom, at
the sound of the birds and at the sound of the rain…’
The word ‘astonishment’ is apt and Goethe suggests it as a
vehicle towards ‘the highest summit to which the human spirit can ascend’:
linking
heaven
and
this world,
a
spider’s filament
Hoshino
Tsubaki
(Version by ST in World
Haiku Review, March 2003)
But let’s return to
‘Spirit is not discovering through
intelligence, manipulation of literary data, academic disciplines,
memorisations of literary techniques, nor through the study of complicated
books and the analysis of theory and content. Spirit is only discovered through
the grace of wonder and amazement …’
Unless you recognise the truth of
‘Every haiku, when authentic, is satori, an ecstasy of the observed and
the observer in union and manifestation, thanks to the simplicity and
impersonality of the poet…’
Finally,
‘To understand
Basho, his poetry, his work and his literary aesthetics is to uncover the here
and now, the spirit of being, within ourselves and the world around us. And
this spirit which exists in millions of forms does not belong to any culture,
man, literary school, philosophy or any one religion …’
(Round the Pond, ed. Ion Codrescu, Editura Muntenia,
Constanta, Romania, 1994).
The severed link … A Breton scholar
of Japanese studies, Alain Kervern,
writing in the same Romanian publication, suggests that nomadism may still form
part of our consciousness, a nomadism replaced ‘by the Neolithic revolution,
with fixed settlements, thanks to cattle breeding and lands to plough.
Considering the long presence of men on earth, which can be estimated at
hundreds of thousands of years, the Neolithic period is a recent one, and the sedentary
way of life is a very new phenomenon, by comparison…’
The haiku way of life reconnects us with this
severed link to Nature and will do so even when we live, or holiday, in outer
space. Basho referred to Nature as zoka, meaning creation and transformation.
Deena Metzger (Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, Fawcett
Columbine, 1998) sees the modern reaction to Darwin as ‘a terrified lunge away from the reality of our animal
natures’ while Seyyed Hossein (Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford
University Press, 1996) calls for ‘a resacralisation of nature’.
In effect, what many insightful ecologists
and philosophers are telling us today is that we should feel we belong to this
earth, that the colonial phase of extending mankind’s influence to far-flung
corners of the earth – and into outer space – must be replaced by a new
concept, namely the colonist becoming native. Haikuists already feel that they
are ‘natives’ of this earth and never before has our planet been in need of
such caring wisdom.
The way of haiku is a way of relating to species older than ourselves,
even to often abhorred species such as the rat, said to be as numerous as
ourselves:
July afternoon
-
a couple of
river rats
grooming their
whiskers
C M Buckaway
(Haiku Moment)
In some haiku, the vision seems to penetrate beyond the normal reach of
vision, into the secret heart of Nature herself. This, by Basho:
at
night, quietly
a
worm in the moonlight
digs
into a chestnut
(*Matsuo Basho, The Master
Haiku Poet, by Makoto Ueda, Kodansha,
1982).
While classical Japanese haiku often shows a subtle blend of religious
influences – Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism as well as various
literary influences, Nature herself often wins out against formal codes and
beliefs:
please wait a
minute!
do not ring the
temple bell,
lest blossoms
should fall
Shigeyori, 1603 –1680
Consciousness of evanescence opens the doors of wisdom:
our life is
thinner
than a piece of
paper:
snow in
springtime
Shiki Matsudaira
(Let us Write Haiku by Sakuzô
Takada (Toranomon Haiku Group, no date)
T
H
I
N
K
The less you have the more
you are – it is accumulation
A that robs you
of being.
B
Karl Marx
O
U
T
IT
As we grow older, life seems to offer fewer surprises for us. We’ve
seen it all and the latest headlines only confirm our suspicions. On the haiku
path, however, we remain surprised. The universe is never drained of mystery.
Perhaps this is its greatest gift:
I plucked in
the dark
the scent of
white flowers, then
Yayu Yokoi, 1702 –1783
(Excellent Haiku of Japan in the
Edo Period by Nakimaro Hirose
& Sakuzo Takada, published
privately, no date).
The haiku path offers this eternal renewal of the spirit, It is
constant, effortless work. In 1693, then aged fifty, Basho declared, ‘I write to discipline myself …’
All that glistens … Those who seek
Enlightenment are often duped by the word itself, as if the word promises
brilliance, a world and a mind awash in pure light. It can be so, but not
necessarily so. In Instant Zen, Waking Up
in the Present (North Atlantic Books, 1994), Thomas Cleary has translated general lectures on Zen by Foyan (1067 –1120) in which Foyan’s master tells him:
‘Learning Zen is called a gold and dung
phenomenon. Before you understand it, it’s like gold; when understood, it’s
like dung .’
If you intuit the wisdom of this, you already know what haiku
enlightenment is all about.
nobly,
the great priest
deposits
his daily stool
in
bleak winter fields
Buson
(The Sound of Water, Sam Hamill, Shambhala, 1995).
Of course, more than dung is on offer. The haiku path promises this much
to the dedicated haiku initiate: freedom-through-engagement – freedom from the
myriad distractions that assault us from every side, from without and from
within, the flowering of a dynamic, ethical consciousness and a return to the
roots of our innate Buddha-nature. Haiku is a perfect vehicle for this on-going
process, bypassing cognition and intellectualisation, intuitively sublimating
the duality of our existence, momentarily finding ourselves nowhere,
everywhere, here on the boundless path:
‘Just like the empty sky that does not
increase or decrease – so with our mind – what need could there be to augment
or amend it?’
(A Man of Zen, The Recorded
Sayings of Layman P’ang, translated by Ruth
Fuller Sasaki, Yoshitake Iriya
& Dana Fraser, Weatherhill/Inklings,
1992)
settling,
white dew
does
not discriminate,
each
drop its home
Soin (1604-1682)
A glimpse of timelessness … We are in time -
in haiku time – and in time-stopping time -
and haiku time gives us an insight into the mysterious fluidity of time:
speal mo sheanathar
ag meirgiú sa scioból -
clapsholas fómhair
Cathal Ó Searcaigh
my grandfather’s scythe
rusting in the barn -
autumn
twilight
(Trans.GR)
This is a perfect example of the quality of oldness and loneliness
that is called sabi (from the
verb sabiru, ‘to rust’!)
Haiku can give us, too, a glimpse of timelessness:
En el espacio
esa forma sin tiempo:
la luna nueva
Jorge Luis Borges
(quoted in Haiku International
Anthology, Ed. Zoe Savina,
In space
that timeless
form:
the new moon
(trans. G. R.)
im
frühlingssturm
tanzen
alte blätter vom herbst
Georg Gisi
(ibid.)
in the spring
storm
old autumn
leaves
are dancing
(trans.
G. R.)
Haiku time is time now, time past, time future, time continuous:
the sunset glow
-
as if still
burning
Yasuhiko Shigemoto
(ibid.)
It is time suspended:
with his golden
eyes
glittering, a sleeping snake
in hibernation
Makoto Tamaki
(ibid.)
It is time and space, recreating themselves in the cosmic dance, always
taking on old-new forms, old-new shapes, old-new sounds:
A hum
from the north
grows into
swans above me
Tsunehiko Hoshino
(ibid.)
Diligence and awareness come with haiku and
are necessary virtues along the true haiku path if we are to avoid the
delusions of false enlightenment. After all, in his lofty Bavarian retreat,
Hitler would stare at the mountains and when the moon appeared he used to say
that his mind would fill with brightness… Clearly, therefore, a balmy suffusion
of light is hardly sufficient to transform our hearts and minds. Thankfully,
the discipline of haiku is on the side of life and inner light:
pregnant
again…
the
fluttering of moths
against
the window
Janice. M. Bostok
(ibid.)
Haiku is the promise of new life, hope and regeneration, albeit
in a world of impermanence:
frost
on the grass:
elusive
form
there
and not there
Zaishiki
The Baal Shem Tov reminded his followers that the primordial spark exists in all things. We discover that spark in haiku:
heat shimmers:
the stone’s soul
still alive
Shiki
(Emiko Miyashita, Shiki Haiku Calendar 2003)
Do you know what haiku is
now? Hopefully, if this is your first encounter,
you will have a feeling for it by now. Don’t lose that feeling! Who would have
thought that something so apparently simple could be so elusive, so full of
contradictoriness? R H
Look again … Look through some of the haiku in this book. It may well be that you
missed out on a few and that their full impact still awaits you. Do this now. Flick
through the book again and keep the states of mind mentioned by
Simple acts … To write a haiku
is a simple act. ‘A real haiku’s gotta
be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing,’ we read in Jack
Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. ‘As simple as porridge.’ That’s good.
evening coming
–
the
office girl
unloosing
her scarf
Jack
Kerouac
It is becoming increasingly
difficult in our cluttered world to perform acts of utter simplicity. In
‘It is hard to even begin to gauge how much a
complication of possessions, the notions of “my and mine”, stand between us and
a true, clear, liberated way of seeing the world. To live lightly on the earth,
to be aware and alive, to be free of egotism, to be in contact with plants and
animals, starts with simple concrete acts …’
What could be simpler than the act of haiku?
water
trough .
a
horse
drinking
the sky
ai li
(Blythe Spirit, Vol. 8, No.
3, 1998)
Come, butter, come! This was a Celtic
mantra, said when churning butter. How do we encourage the haiku moment, or our
recognition of that concatenation of events that will give birth to a haiku? Robert
Spiess gave stimulating advice to his many readers in
‘As haiku poets we should keep our sense perceptions open and relaxed,
not using them forcefully to grasp experiences.’ This is a wise observation,
ignored at our peril. He goes on to say, ‘With this almost detached way we do
not block our inner awareness and intuition. Simultaneously we are then
perceiving both inside and outside ourselves, so that these two conditions
become a unity.’
(Modern Haiku, Vol. 33. 3, Autumn 2002, Robert Spiess Memorial
Issue)
Grateful for small mercies …
We are nearing the end of this journey – hopefully,
for you, the beginning – on the haiku path. If nothing else, you will be,
henceforth, grateful for small mercies:
Laying
down chopsticks –
enough.
I’m
grateful
(Santoka (1882 –1940)
in Cage of Fireflies, Lucien Stryk, Swallow Press, 1993)
T
H
I
N
K
Try to be
mindful and let things take
their natural course. Then
your mind will become still in any surroundings. Like a clear forest pool. All
kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will
clearly see the nature of all things.
Achaan Chah
A
B
O
U
T
I
T
Versatility … it’s endless… To the
uninitiated, all haiku may appear the same. Let us remind ourselves of what
anthologist Cor van den Heuvel has
to say in the third edition of The Haiku
Anthology (1999 W.W. Norton & Company):
“The writing of variations
on certain subjects in haiku, sometimes using the same or similar phrases (or
even changing a few words of a previous haiku), is one of the most interesting
challenges the genre offers a poet and can result in refreshingly different
ways of ‘seeing anew’ for the reader. This is an aspect of traditional Japanese
haiku which is hard for many Westerners, with their ideas of uniqueness and
Romantic individualism, to accept …”
The range of haiku is wider than we may
think. Janine Beichman (Masaoka Shiki, Kodansha International,
1986)
describes the characteristics of Basho
and Buson, as Shiki saw them:
In the case of Basho, “such ideals as classical grace (koga), mystery and depth (yugen),
pathos (hisan), tranquility (chinsei), simplicity (hei-i), subdued elegance (sabi) and thinness (hosomi). Buson’s
characteristics “tended towards the positive traits of virility (
I
powder the baby
after
her bath –
she
truly owns nothing
(Selected Haiku, Takaha Shugyo,
Furansudo, 2003)
In haiku, we always come back to silence, to
nothingness, ‘the atoms and the void’ as Democritus
said. The universe is a pulsing riddle and full of staggering phenomena; it
allows us, it beckons us to learn how to appreciate its gifts more and more,
simply for what they are. Haiku re-aligns us with creation, sharpening our
receptivity so that everything yields its strange beauty and meaning to us:
washing
the yellow-green
stems
of leeks:
mud
runs like Chinese ink
Keith J. Coleman
Our link with creation … Haiku is a tapping in to the eternal life of the universe. Why are so many people blind to the dance of the
universe, deaf to its music? We must restore a living link with the living
universe or our lives are only partly lived; and the universe is always
prepared to make this link with us, to fill us with glimpses of its wonders, if
we ready ourselves, in loving surrender. The advocate of scientific pantheism, Paul Harrison,
proposes something to which most haikuists will nod in agreement: ‘If we empty
our mind of all thought and allow ourselves to enter into the motion of things,
and the motion to enter into us, we can literally swim in the ocean of
existence and burn with its fire …’
The music of a kiss …We referred earlier on to the music of things that happen. What is that pulse, that music? It is memorably expressed by Vladimir Devidé, the Croatian master, writing in Ginyu No. 17, 2003:
‘The
flight of a butterfly from one flower to another, is the song of that
butterfly’s life. The singing of a bird at dawn or at dusk, in its nest or on
the ground or in the air is the song of that bird’s life. The scent of a rose,
when its bud is opening and a breeze carries its perfume around, is the song of
the rose’s life …’ Devidé says that we can receive the kiss of this song. But, be careful! In
haiku, he claims, ‘there is no place for reflection, deduction, education,
analysis, philosophy etc. since otherwise what is being written down would not
be a record of a kiss of a life’s song, but merely a record about
a kiss of a life’s song.’ That nicely separates the sheep from the goats!
:
Sincerity and total
attention … Nothing else is required on the haiku path. Dogen, instructing the
cook, Tenzo, said: ‘If there is sincerity in your cooking and everyday actions,
whatever you do is an act of nourishing the sacred body …’
the master sleeps –
from
their hooks marionettes
stare
into moonlight
Patricia Neubauer
Welcome, then, to the world of haiku in which marionettes, too, can
become enlightened!
Gabriel
Rosenstock, poet, haikuist, playwright, writing in Irish and English, is the
author/translator of over 100 books. He is a member of Aosdána, the
He has worked in theatre, radio, television, print
journalism and book publishing.
Some
titles of note include his selected poems (from the Irish) Portrait of the Artist as an Abominable Snowman, from Domhan Books, New York; Forgotten
Whispers, haiku and senryu (Anam Press, Cork); Signs of Rain: Irish Weather Wisdom (Appletree Press, Belfast); Irish Proverbs: in Irish and English
(Mercier Press, Cork & Dublin) and the compilation A Treasury of Irish Love from Hippocrene Books, New York. Recent
volumes of poems in Irish are Syójó (Cló
Iar-Chonnachta) and Eachtraí Krishnamurphy (Coiscéim). A forthcoming
volume of poems in English, Uttering Her Name, consists of love poems in
the classical tradition of spiritual longing.
A former Chairman of Poetry Ireland/ Éigse Éireann, he is a member of The World Haiku Club, The World Haiku Association, The British Haiku Society, The Haiku Society of America, The Irish Writers’ Union and is an Hon. Life Member of the Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association.
He has translated thousands of haiku and poems into
Irish, including the selected poems of Heaney, Grass, Michele Ranchetti, Said,
F X Alarcón, J
Rosenstock has read his poetry and haiku in Ireland,
Britain, US, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan,
A handful of haiku and senryu
G R
the shape
of real trees
deepening dusk:
some trees are whispering
others hold their counsel
a bagpipe’s dying notes
singly and in groups
swallows disappear
watering the magnolia –
ah, that’s where your’re hiding!
pesky midges
sheep-droppings
-
a baker’s dozen
each one the same
Church bells –
where are they all going?
myriads of ants
ah! mounting each other
with such gentleness
August evening clouds
knowing its name:
the lungwort
appearing in every cranny
faces
in the flaming coals
these, too, will change
magpie
sipping
beakfuls
of its own image
where is the hedgehog
tonight
has she found some leaves
a resting place?
flowers in a vase
a cat prowls
the bare garden
foghorn at dusk …
little
by little
the
world disappears
shining one!
again
and again
the
seagull’s sun-flushed breast
passing a laundrette
this spinning world
becoming still
was its spirit released?
burning limbs
of an old tree
flicking their tails
out of habit
cows
in the chill of autumn
flea market in
a
German helmet
eaten by rust
empty
circus field
one
lonesome
elephant
turd
sunshower
flowers, weeds, stones,
drenched in enlightenment
did her eyes watch
that little danse macabre?
decapitated hen
three
stabs at nothing!
the heron shakes its head
in disbelief
slipping over morning fields
a sunray
catches the hare’s urine*
*( Joint Second Prize,
Mainichi Haiku Contest, 2003)
island
post box
the empty thud
of a letter
oyster catchers
gawping
at tourists
black black the night
what
does the hedgehog dream
does
she dream in colour?
wolf-whistle!
the
unintended girl
turns
her head
matching the moss it explores
the green
on the pigeon’s neck
all that’s left of the night
two
crows
on
a branch
drizzly morning …
a pigeon savours
a drunk’s
vomit
a shrunken bent old woman
the
hedgehog with her snout
in
young grass
past and future lives
in
the unblinking eyes
of
a king cobra
rags on a pavement
a body stirs in them
sun over the
my mule drinks
from the
dark morning
a
crow
looking down a chimney
nothing left
but the gates -
temple of air
all day … and every day
unseen rays
streaming from the sunflower
our daughter
two
hearts beating in her now
how
strange
grey November strand
lugworms burrowing
for secrets
frosty morning
a
robin bares his breast
to
the whole world
news of a death
a fruit-bat suspended
in slumber
an egret stands in a lagoon
the sound of clothes
washed on stones
blossomless
but
not unloved
the old magnolia
harvest moon –
burying
the short-lived hedgehog
where
she snuffled for worms
the pigeon’s mate has flown
still
he struts
chest
puffed out
how relaxed
the
seaweed-covered boulder
massaged
by waves
how noble!
the
horse on a coin
no
longer in use
the March air
tendrils
escaping
from
a broken pot
two magpies
in flight: one
the soul of the other
at the foot of the Cross
a blood-stained snail
becomes a buddha
standing up
to the morning haar –
seldom-blooming magnolia
nipple-pink
the unripe raspberries–
do not touch!
not that we had forgotten!
the
yellow furze
again
with his one good hand
the
scarecrow
points
at the moon
beer
left out for snails
tomorrow’s
buddhas
a pigeon cooing to himself
until
he no longer
has
a self
baby frog! who was your mother
where
is she now
this autumn day
bathroom spider
sent out into the great world …
God go with you
there! wiggling in the light –
but
what are they in shade?
crazy
tadpoles …
honeysuckle!
lift high your chalice now
for all sentient beings
strains of Vivaldi
late into the night
are they listening? earthworms
was that your ghost
softly among fallen leaves
dead hedgehog
shield and sword intact
the grinning Viking raider
never made it home
their first full moon –
all the tadpoles
eerily quiet
evening sunshine –
graveyard midges
Christ, how they bite!
pale yellow sound -
putting out the
candle
a second
moth spared
jumping back into the pond
what
only yesterday
was
a tadpole
dying notes of a bagpipe –
singly
and in groups
swallows disappear
Gunsaku
Farrera: April in the Catalonian
dying winds
faint
mountain path
to
a disused church
surrounded
by so
many buttercups
how
sober – the horse
with each call
the cuckoo
melts the snow
somewhere in the fog
the
little bell
around
the horse’s neck
feeding time
the old man
singing
to the rabbits
when the haiku moment is going to manifest
itself. A pencil for notes, say, and a pen for your first draft. As was noted
in the beginning of this book, we do not seize Reality: Reality seizes us. Be
prepared!
· Keep your eyes
and your ears open – but not too intently, not fanatically! Look! Listen!
Strike while the iron is hot!
Or you’ll miss it.
The pond reflects
a
flying squirrel
over
the wisteria
Kikaku
(from A haiku menagerie)
Have
all the senses at the ready. On the haiku path,
if your sight doesn’t actually improve, your percipience will. You will
notice new things in a new way:
A cricket –
look
at his face …
that
headstrong face!
Yamaguchi Syuson
· As in the above
haiku, you might prefer to avoid using capital letters except, perhaps, for the
first word. Note also that titles are not used for individual haiku but a
sequence, or gunsaku, may be named if we wish to identify the locus of
the haiku.
· Revise at
leisure. Be ruthless! When your notebook is full, select the very best haiku
and write them out again, carefully, in a fancier notebook. Keep copies on your
PC, if you use one. Now, which ones are the best? Those moments of pure
awareness, not created or imagined by you; moments of grace that happened to
you in intimate commune with nature. Again, you cannot go wrong if you listen
to the advice of Basho. Imbibe every word: ‘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 …’ And
again: ‘Submerge yourself into the object until its intrinsic nature becomes
apparent, stimulating poetic impulse …’ There are hundreds of haikuists who
ignore this advice and their work suffers as a consequence, lacking in depth,
spontaneity, atmosphere and resonance. If you remember nothing else, you have
more than enough in this to succeed.
· Try writing a
haiku sequence – a particular place at a particular time of the year. It will
concentrate the mind on the notion of a thematic unity and diversity which
exists within any given season and locale, the everyday miracles waiting for
your contemplation. Nothing should be beneath you. On the haiku path, nothing
is trite if conceived in the haiku moment.
· Keep your haiku
in the present tense. The haiku moment is here and now – though it may be
coloured by our past lives and memories, even by fantasies. Of course, once you
have mastered this all-important rule – but only then - are you
to write the occasional fictional haiku, such as this stunning example
from Buson:
this piercing cold –
in the bedroom, I have
stepped
on my dead wife’s comb
It’s a classic, never mind that his wife outlived
him!
· Avoid the use of
“I” and “me” and “mine” as much as possible. (Obviously, Buson gets away
with it above). When the interior and exterior landscapes merge as one –
enlightenment - there is little room for the “I”.
· The three-line,
beginners. You may wish to stick with it. In
time, however, you may be more at home with the free-style haiku of a dozen or
so syllables.
· Read your haiku
aloud, over and over again. If the rhythm is not natural, try varying the
lines. Maybe line 3 should be line 1 or vice versa? It often happens that a
haiku sounds best if the second line is the longest of the three, followed by a
break (such as a dash) and a lift in the third line. The pause (after the
first, or second, line) is called a kire and may be denoted by ellipsis
(three dots), a dash, a comma or a colon. The word ‘caesura’, meaning a pause
in verse, means to ‘cut off’. You will also see haiku in this book, and
elsewhere, which discard punctuation when the caesura is deemed obvious.
· Try to eliminate
connective tissue, words such as “like” or the definite and indefinite articles
- “the” and “a” - without going overboard or being cryptically telegrammatic.
Be sparing with adjectives and adverbs. Listen to your haiku –
if it contains two or more words ending in
“ing” then some surgery may be needed.
· When is a haiku
finished? How long does the haiku moment last? Interesting questions? Maybe
this haiku answers them:
a camellia flower
fell;
a
cock crowed;
some
more fell
Baishitsu
· Haiku is a
spiritual path. Without the spiritual dimension, the cultivation of haiku may
become frivolous or dilettantish. Much of it was hollow before Basho
arrived on the scene. When the spirit is alive in the haiku moment, resonances
can be intuited, without the use of simile, as in Basho’s:
lightning gleams
and
a night heron’s squawk
travels
into the darkness
See the note on toriawase in the
Glossary. Try to find haiku in this book, or in any other, which contain toriawase
or any of the other qualities explained in the Glossary. This will help your
attentiveness as a reader of haiku, your own and others. Curiously enough, the
example of toriawase given in the Glossary has lightning in it as well.
Remember, with or without toriawase, a good haiku retains a mystery and
a freshness for all time. Go through this book again and see if some haiku have
a different impact on you at a second or third reading.
· If you do not
have a formal spiritual practice such as chanting, meditation, tai chi or
prayer, being alone with Nature is enough. Contemplate trees, grasses, the sky
– let go, enter, intermingle with creation. Lose the head! Look at what
happened to D.E. Harding: ‘What actually happened was something absurdly
simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of
alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental
chatter died down … Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was,
my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had
been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There
existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To
look was enough’. (On Having No Head, 1961) And so it should be with us.
· Use plain
language. Anglo-Saxon words (if you write in English) tend to be more concrete
and simpler than their Latinate brothers and sisters.
· Occasional
internal rhyme or half-rhyme is fine but end rhyme is thought to be inappropriate.
· If you are lucky
enough to have a garden – with a pond – find out what you should plant to
attract interesting visitors throughout the year. Buddleia for butterflies, for
instance, berries for birds. Plan your garden so that there is something to enliven
the senses all year round. Relax in your garden with a good book, say A
haiku garden by Stephen Addiss (Weatherhill, 1996) or A haiku
menagerie by the same author (Weatherhill 1992), with their respective
themes of flora and fauna, culled from Japanese classics.
· Increase your nature vocabulary in as many
realms as possible – birds, insects, plants, animals, rocks, the weather and so
on. From time to time, try to use a kigo or season word that is
associated with your country or region.
· Read the haiku
classics, over and over again, and read the best of the moderns. Cultivate
reverence in your haiku work and seek out silence. Remember, each one of us is
unique and we all find ourselves, daily, in unique situations. Be brave enough
to express your own visions and the textures of life as you apprehend them.
Haiku is about everything and nothing:
a flash of lightning!
the sound of
drops
falling
among the bamboos
Buson
(R . H. Blyth Haiku, Volume 1,
Eastern Culture, The Hokuseido Press, 1981)
T
H
I
N
K
The bargain that intuition seems to drive is that
it will serve you if you serve it. You must obey your intuition to cultivate
it, to develop it, and to retain the use of it. This is a voluntary act. In
colloquial language, you have a hunch, and the hunch is an involuntary
experience. Whether or not you obey it is up to you. If it is a real hunch, an
intuition, you will inevitably regret it if you do not. These experiences will
increase in frequency if you obey them, and if you don’t they will cease altogether.
Joseph Sadony
A
B
O
U
T
I
T
· Celebrate aspects
of your own culture and topography
Look for found haiku or hidden haiku in your favourite writers. With a
little editing, even passages of prose can unearth found haiku.
· Cultivate
sentiment, avoid sentimentality. Remind yourself to be passively aware, each
waking hour of the day, and use as many of your senses as you can. The
over-active brain may come between you and the haiku moment. From time to time,
consciously avoid overstimulation. Try pacifying the mind, naturally. Drink
green tea or herbal fusions that have been tried and tested in your clime.
· If you have a
second or third language at your command,
write translations or versions of haiku that
have impressed you. This will cultivate your haiku style and sensibility. Try
translating some of your own haiku as well: this could lead to a
back-translation – revising the original.
· Keep a very open mind! Haiku possibilities are
everywhere. The haiku spirit is limitless:
autumn wind
everything
I see
is
haiku
Kyoshi
(Trans. L. Stryk)
· Submit previously
unpublished haiku, or haiku in translation, to a haiku journal or poetry
magazine. Subscribe to one or two journals such as Frogpond (
· You have seen many beautiful haiku in this
book, one hopes. However, it is well to ponder
J W Hackett’s advice: ‘Remember that lifefulness, not beauty, is
the real quality of haiku’. An extreme example of Hackett’s dictum might be the following by Nagata
Koi (1900 – 1997), a frightening haiku from his A dream like this world (Japan
2000, trs. Naruta Nana & Mitsutani Margaret):
an old cat, straining, shits –
in such a pose
my mother dies in winter
Repulsive? It might be best to forget haiku
if your inclinations tend towards mere prettification. Take up flower
arrangement instead! (Though this, too, is a rigorous path when properly
pursued). Ultimately, haiku is about fearless engagement with life and death, a
close encounter with the world - shorn of illusion. It’s about being more
honest than you ever thought possible. Honest, yes, but not dourly serious all
the time. Light touches of self-effacing humour are perfectly acceptable as in Issa’s
like
some of us
he
looks very important –
this
snail
Conclusion
A life-long encountering … Through habitual reading and writing of
haiku we can experience temporal states of non-differentiation, of union with
natural phenomena. Many people, if they think of this possibility at all,
relegate such events to the lives of nature mystics and highly evolved
spiritual poets. It need not be so. Along the haiku path, we encounter our own
peculiar destiny. Compassion, intelligence, awareness, intuition, perspicacity
and creativity are all fused and enlivened on the haiku path.
With
frequent practice of haiku, our senses sharpen one another: as we watch and see
more closely, the keener becomes our hearing, our sense of smell, until we are
wordlessly brought into the great silence, the womb of creation where the haiku
moment is born and reborn, spring, summer, autumn and winter. We acquire that
‘singular state of mind’, as French-language poet and critic, Phillippe
Jaccottet, describes it, which leads us to ‘the peak of limpidity’ and to
‘the full and luminous life to which everybody aspires’. (In a review of the
work of R. H. Blyth, English translation David Quin). This
‘singular state of mind’ is acquired through purifying consciousness,
repeatedly, in haiku engagement:
the empty rock pool –
till
the mind clears,
then
a thousand little things
Jim
Norton
Tagore wrote a letter
in which he described a sensual union with all of creation: ‘I felt that once
upon a time I was at one with the rest of the earth, that grass grew green upon
me, that the autumn sun fell on me and under its rays the warm scent of youth
wafted from every pore of my far-flung evergreen body ... ’ The haiku path
restores that sense of unity and non-duality which we all once enjoyed as our
birthright; don’t interpret this as a
regression to infantile certainties, however. Tagore continues in
the same vein: ‘The current of my consciousness streams through each blade of
grass, each sucking root, each sappy vein, and breaks out in the waving fields
of corn and in the rustling leaves of the palms …’ (Rabindranath Tagore,
Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson, Rupa 2003).
The death of negative emotions … The haikuist lives the life
of an ordinary man and woman; most haikuists experience more or less the same
joy, sorrow, disappointment, anger, anxiety, pleasure, ecstasy, boredom, etc.
as is the common lot though it must be said that the active haikuist, aware of
the potential of this self-validating technique, manages to slough off negative
emotions more often than indulging in them. Fear, estrangement, selfishness,
distraction … these and other negative states can cease to haunt us: the haiku
technique begins to equip us with
everything that’s needed need to allow us glimpses of surprising oneness with creation. More than
mere glimpses, in fact: rather, an interpenetration in which time is temporarily
suspended, and clarity is restored to our lives.
In haiku, little details explode into life:
the
sparrow hops
along
the veranda
with
wet feet
Shiki
(Trans.
R H
An aura … Good haiku have
an aura, a shimmer, a glint. Apples on the table are just apples. When they
become part of a still life by Cézanne they acquire life, an aura. What
brings the aura to the apples – or what enhances their own aura – is the poet’s
glance.
Non-striving awareness … Haiku is an open-eyed engagement with the
word and with the world. It is not so much what paints itself on the retina as
what resonates – through one or more of the senses – with the human spirit.
Haiku moments, in all their purity, surprise us when – and only when – we have
achieved passive, non-striving awareness:
the
moon
above
the snow-capped mountain
dropped
hailstones
Sekitei
Hara, 1889 –1951
An old Zen adage goes as follows: ‘Before enlightenment, hewing wood,
drawing water … after enlightenment, hewing wood, drawing water …’ It is not
enough to understand these words. You can and should experience the truth, for
yourself, on the haiku path.
Neither pro nor anti … It is worth familiarising yourself with
Chinese and Japanese classics, particularly the poetry of the T’ang Dynasty and
the countless fables, parables, koans and poems that form part of the Zen
tradition. Do not start on the haiku path with a pro-Zen or anti-Zen mentality.
After all, Zen may be nothing more than a happy accident. It seems there were
tremendous difficulties in translating Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit to
Chinese. In many cases one was left with riddles, what appeared to be nothing
more than runic rubbish. Meditating on these dark, sacred texts revealed no
logic, no wisdom, no great revelation – thus the mind transcended meaning and
therein found enlightenment in No-Mind! (One can look further into this theory
in Kogen Mizuno’s Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission,
Tokyo: Kosei, 1982).
Seng-ts’an (known as Sosan
in Japanese) was the Third Chinese Patriarch. He admonishes us, wisely: ‘If you
wish to know the truth, hold to no opinions – neither for nor against. Setting
what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind.’
Treasure this insight. If you can live by it, a thousand vistas will open up
for you on the flowering haiku path.
Do not be alarmed by the possibility of
ego-loss on this path. Do not be afraid!
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, the German- American philosopher, reminds us
that God is invisible; so, to be made in God’s image is to be invisible! Don’t
be afraid of that either! The haiku is small enough – there isn’t space in it
for your ego. Leave your ego outside. You may return to it later (if you must!)
The conditioned mind … Focussing on the here-and-nowness of the haiku
moment, being in that moment, simply means
that we facilitate the dissolving of the conditioned mind. (For more on
the conditioned mind, try to get your hands on a book, or books, by Raymond
Karczewski).
Haiku discipline
results in our appreciation of a
dazzling concatenation of events which otherwise might have remained
beyond our ken:
as it’s swallowed
a frog
blinks
in
a snake’s mouth
Itaru
Ina
(Modern Haiku, Vol.
34.2, Summer 2003)
Glossary of Useful Terms
(It is not
necessary to be familiar with all of these terms but, in themselves, they are
pointers towards certain qualities or potentialities worth looking out for when
reading haiku or revising one’s own work)
Chiri: in
season-word lists this covers the wide geography of mountains, rivers,
hills etc.
Dubutsu: in season-word
lists this covers animals, birds and insects
Shokubutsu: in season-word
lists this covers all types of plants peculiar to your own environment
Tenmon: in season-word
lists this covers meteorological observations, i.e. the weather and the
appearance of heavenly bodies
Gunsaku: a sequence of
haiku written more or less around the same time and place
Sono mama: more or less factual observation of natural
phenomena without any emotional adornment
Gyuji: the name in a
season-list for holidays and festivals, Hallowe’en etc
Hokku: the opening
stanza of a linked verse composition (renku) and the immediate
antecedent of the modern haiku
Renku: also called renga. Linked verse, from the 14th.centurt
to the present day, often composed at renku parties, with a distinguished poet
giving the Hokku, setting the tone or season and out of which subsequent verses evolve. The
couplet (7-7 syllables) following the three-line hokku is the wakiku
Haibun: prose written in
a style which allows the inclusion of haiku, very often involving travel or
pilgrimage
Furyu: restrained
elegance
Kanjaku: Serenity in
desolation
Hosomi: Understatement
or modesty
Haigo: a pen-name used
by haijin. Basho was the pen-name used by Matsuo Munefusa
(1644-94). It means a banana tree, a type that doesn’t bear fruit in
Haijin: accomplished writers
or masters of haiku
Karumi: a lightness of
touch in haiku style
Haiga: illustrated
haiku, often filling in details that might be missing from the actual haiku
itself. Today it extends to non-traditional forms, such as photo-haiga with
calligraphy or contemporary type. You can find haiga sites on the Internet
Zen: a Japanese
development of Chan, Chinese Buddhism
Buddhism: The teachings
and culture of Gautama the Buddha
Christianity: the teachings
and culture of Jesus the Christ
Shintoism: traditional Japanese
belief system, involving the spirits of Nature and ancestor worship.(
Shintoists have shrines, Zennists have temples)
Jiku: a name in a
season-word list for climatic and atmospheric conditions
Sabi: loneliness in
haiku, quiet elegance, undefined longing
Wabi: beauty found in
austerity
Shiori: loneliness in
haiku coupled with an acceptance of fate or note of ambiguity
Senryu: a lighter form
of haiku, concentrating more on people than on nature
Ginko: a compositional
stroll
Honkadori: literary allusion,
a haiku that echoes a previous well-known haiku, or part of it
Shibumi: beauty found in
undramatic images, the half-hidden, toned down
Seikatsu: in season-word
lists, this covers ordinary, traditional human activity portrayed in senryu and
haiku – blackberry picking, seaweed gathering, for example
Makoto: appealing honesty, openness in haiku
At a flash/of
lightning, the sound of dew/falling from a bamboo*
Koga: classical grace,
often influenced by Chinese aesthetics. It’s not a bad idea for haikuists to
read the T’ang Dynasty poets, for instance, as well as the classics of our own
culture
Yugen: this is a
quality of depth and mystery. Hidden beauty. This elegance and other qualities
may emerge unbidden in our work as we grow older and wiser with haiku!
Hisan: a word for
pathos. Our haiku will be devoid of hisan if we do not develop
compassion in our daily lives. Santoka tells us that ‘anything that has
not really taken place in someone’s heart cannot be haiku poetry’.
Kado: the Way of
Poetry, thinking like a poet, feeling like a poet, being like a poet, through
thick and thin
Chinsei: Tranquillity. In
his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth says: ‘Poetry
is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity’. The haikuist can often do without
recollection, finding tranquillity in the scene before us, here and now, as
with Buson:
Pear blossoms -
/reading a letter by moonlight/ a woman*
*(Ueda, Makoto. The
path of flowering thorn: the life and poetry of Yosa Buson.
Hosomi: this describes
thinness or slenderness. It’s the opposite to opulence. In our oversaturated
world, it is a quality that is becoming rare
Jisei: death haiku,
one-breath poems written with one’s last breath
Ukiyo: this term is
used to describe the impermanence and fragility of our mortal lives: das
Leben ein Traum, life is a dream
Kanjaku: A mood or
quality in haiku of utmost tranquility
Nioi: interpenetration
of fragrances
Zappai: Superficial
senryu or pseudohaiku of no literary merit or spiritual content.
KEY QUOTES
When the self
withdraws, the ten thousand things advance.
Dogen
If you wish to
know the truth, hold to no opinions – neither for nor against. Setting what you
like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind.
Seng-ts’an
Haiku should be
written as swiftly as a woodcutter fells a tree or a swordsman leaps at a
dangerous enemy.
Basho
Basho ……………………………………………………..00
Buson
..……………………………………………………00
Etc.
Gabriel Rosenstock
e-mail: grosenstock@forasnagaeilge.ie
Phone:
(day, Mon. –
Thurs. only)
(nights,
weekends)