Part 18 (1/2)

_And yet . . . And yet . . .14

Issa's rustic, personal voice was not a style to be copied, even if the city poets had wished to do so, and Haiku seems to have fallen into the hands of formula versifiers during the mid- nineteenth century. In the waning years of the century, the last of the four great Haiku masters rose to prominence: s.h.i.+ki (1867-1902), whose life of constantly failing health was as adversity-plagued as Issa's, but who actively took up the fight against the insincere parlor versifiers then ruling Haiku. No wandering poet-priest, s.h.i.+ki was a newspaperman, critic, and editor of various Haiku ”little magazines.” The Zen influence that ruled Basho's later poetry is missing in s.h.i.+ki, but the objective imagery is there-- only in a tough, modern guise. s.h.i.+ki's verse is an interesting example of how similar in external appearance the G.o.dless austerity of Zen is to the existential atheism of our own century. (This superficial similarity is undoubtedly the reason so much of Zen art seems ”modern”

to us today--it is at odds with both cla.s.sical and romantic ideals.) Thus a completely secular poet like s.h.i.+ki could revolutionize Haiku as a form of art-for-art's-sake without having to acknowledge openly his debt to Zen.

_Hira-hira to

_A single b.u.t.terfly

_Kaze ni nigarete

_Fluttering and drifting

_Cho hitotsu

_In the wind.15

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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Private Zen: Flowers and Food

_European food--

Every wretched plate

Is round.

_ Traditional j.a.panese poem

THE SPREAD OF ZEN culture from the mansions of the _samurai _to the houses of the bourgeoisie meant ultimately that Zen aesthetics would touch even the most routine features of daily life. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more noticeable than in j.a.panese cuisine and flower arranging. As we have seen, the tea ceremony was the great preserver of higher Zen ideals of art, but this ceremony, for all its pretensions to refined poverty, is essentially the province of the prosperous. It requires s.p.a.ce for a garden, a special--and frequently expensive--house, and utensils whose properly weathered look can be obtained only at a price.

Even a simple Zen garden is hardly available to a modern j.a.panese living in a cinderblock apartment building.

Everyone, however, can practice the cla.s.sical art of arranging flowers in a manner reflecting the precepts of Zen. A flower arrangement is to a large garden what a Haiku is to an epic poem--a symbolic, abbreviated form whose condensed suggestiveness can encapsulate the larger world.

Similarly, the Zen ideals of _wabi_, or deliberate understatement, and _sabi_, the patina of time, can be captured almost as well in the display of food--in both its artistic arrangement on a plate and the tasteful ceramics employed--as in the arts and ceramics of the tea ceremony. Thus a properly conceived serving of seasonal and subtly flavored foods accompanied by a Zen-inspired flower arrangement can be an evervday version of the tea ceremony and its garden, embodying the same aesthetic principles in a surrogate form just as demanding of Zen taste and sensibility.

It will be recalled that Zen itself is said to have originated when the Buddha silently turned a blossom in his hand before a gathering on Vulture Peak. The lotus blossom was one of the foremost symbols of cla.s.sical Buddhism for many centuries; indeed the earliest j.a.panese flower arrangements may have been merely a lotus floating in a water- filled vessel set before a Buddhist altar. To the ancient Buddhists, the flower was a symbol of nature, a momentary explosion of beauty and fragrance embodying all the mysteries of life's cycle of birth and death. The early j.a.panese, who saw in nature the expression of life's spirit, naturally found the flower a congenial symbol for an abstract philosophy like Buddhism. In the years preceding Zen's arrival in j.a.pan, a parallel but essentially secular taste for flowers permeated the aristocratic court civilization of the Heian, where lovers attached sprays of blossoms to letters and eulogized the plum and cherry as symbols of life's transient happiness. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to describe blossoms as the foremost symbol of j.a.pan's great age of love poetry.

Exactly when the j.a.panese began the practice of arranging

flowers in pots for decorative purposes has never been satisfactorily determined. Perhaps not surprisingly, the first well- known exponent of floral art seems to have been the famous Zen aesthete As.h.i.+kaga Yos.h.i.+masa (1435-1490), builder of the Silver Pavilion. However, Yos.h.i.+masa merely popularized an art that was considerably more ancient.

Ikebana, or flower arranging, had for some time been transmitted as a kind of secret cult by a line of priests who had called themselves Iken.o.bo. Just what role Zen and Zen art theory played in this priestly art is questionable, for early styles were florid and decorative. At first glance, it may seem strange that the flower arrangements of the Iken.o.bo priests should have captured the interest of Yos.h.i.+masa and his circle of Zen aesthetes during the high age of Zen culture, since the Ikebana of this period, far from showing the spareness characteristic of Zen garden arts, was an exuberant symbol of the world at large, rather like a complex mandala diagram of some esoteric sect wherein all components of the universe are represented in a structured spatial relations.h.i.+p.