Part 16 (1/2)
run its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga.
The _waka_ had been aristocratic, and the best _renga _provincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant cla.s.s. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first called _haikai_, after the first verse of the _renga_, which was called the _hokku_. The term ”Haiku” actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant cla.s.s, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older cla.s.sical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in j.a.panese verse. This was the man now considered j.a.pan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to j.a.panese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694).
Basho was born a _samurai_ in an age when it was little more than an empty t.i.tle, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperous _daimyo_ who transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to s.h.i.+ft for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho ”school,” as well as making him a welcome guest at _renga _gatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors:
Red pepper pods!
Add wings to them,
and they are dragonflies!5
This verse is certainly ”open-ended” insofar as it creates a reverberation of images in the mind, and, what is more, the effect is achieved by the comparison of two concrete images. There is no comment; the images are simply thrown out to give the mind a starting point. But the overall impact remains merely decorative art. It reflects the concept of _aware_, or a pleasing recognition of beauty, rather than _yugen_, the extension of awareness into a region beyond words.
When he was about thirty-five, Basho created a Haiku that began to touch the deeper regions of the mind. This is the famous_
Kare-eda ni
_ On a withered branch
_karasu-no tomari-keri
_a crow has settled--
_aki-no-kure
_autumn nightfall.6
As a simple juxtaposition of images the poem is striking enough, but it also evokes a comparison of the images, each of which enriches the other. The mind is struck as with a hammer, bringing the senses up short and releasing a flood of a.s.sociations. Its only shortcoming is that the scene is static; it is a painting, not a happening of the sort that can sometimes trigger the sudden sense of Zen enlightenment.
Perhaps Basho realized that his art had not yet drunk deeply enough at the well of Zen, for a few years after this poem was written he became a serious Zen student and began to travel around j.a.pan soaking up images. His travel diaries of the last years are a kind of Haiku ”poetics,” in which he extends the idea of _sabi_ to include the aura of loneliness that can surround common objects. Zen detachment entered his verses; all personal emotion was drained away, leaving images objective and devoid of any commentary, even implied.
More important, the Zen idea of transience appeared. Not the transience of falling cherry blossoms but the fleeting instant of Zen enlightenment. Whereas the antilogic _koan _anecdotes were intended to lead up to this moment, Basho's Haiku were the moment of enlightenment itself, as in his best-known poem:
_Furu-ike ya
_An ancient pond
_kawazu tobi-komu
_A frog jumps in
_mizu-no-oto