As I read through 250 of Basho’s haiku as chosen by translator Sam Hamill for Narrow Road to the Interior, I began to realize why I like haibun and haiga.

Simply put, they isolate a haiku from other haiku. And, to be most effective, I think I haiku must stand alone. Read as a group, they tend to lose their effectiveness.

In fact, I think the perfect way to present haiku might be as a screensaver, when a single haiku would show up for a whole day, allowing the reader enough time to really meditate on what has been said.

Alternatively, of course, despite what Arete might say, haiku might serve as the perfect cross-stichery project.

With that disclaimer, I’ll list a few of may favorite Basho haiku, from Hamill’s selection, keeping in mind that I might well choose entirely different selections if I were to read them later.

This one, makes me long for high mountain ridges still inaccessible because of snow cover:

Your song caresses
the depths of loneliness,
high mountain bird.

as does this one

Traveling this high
mountain trail, delighted
by wild violets.

Of course, anyone who knows my loves would not be surprised to learn that discovering this haiku was worth the price of the entire work:

It seems ironic to me that a book like John M. Rosenfield’s Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson can simultaneously symbolize the internet’s strength and weakness. After reading some recent comments on Buson in an earlier blog entry, I decided to find a book that would cover both Buson’s haiku and art. Thanks to the internet, I found Rosenfield’s book. After receiving it, though, I realized that if I had had the chance to browse it I wouldn’t have purchased it, for nearly half this short book (96 pages) is devoted to footnotes and glossaries, leaving far too little actual content to justify the thirty six dollars I paid for it.

The greatest strength, and, perhaps, weakness, of this book is its in-depth coverage of Buson’s art and the author’s attempts to place Buson’s art and poetry in a particular context.

If I hadn’t read this book I doubt I would have ever learned:

Buson and the Scholar-Amateur School

Ironically, by adopting techniques of the Nagasaki school (especially its quasi-realism and its use of expensive materials), Buson violated fundamental precepts of the Scholar-Amateur movement with which he had become increasingly identified. This was not, however, the only such ease. Buson was interested in the Zhe school, the most active of the later “Northern” schools of Chinese painting, and often emulated works by artists such as Zhang Lu [fig. 13] 42 Admittedly Buson nowhere referred to himself as a Southern School painter, but - as seen in his essay translated in Appendix A - he was fully aware of the school’s basic principles and, on occasion (as I show below), proudly demonstrated his mastery. Those principles can be summarized as follows:”

Throughout their history Scholar-Amateur painters sought to convey not the surface appearance of a subject but its essence or inner meaning, its vital spirit. Artists avoided rich materials and bright colors; they shunned finesse in brushwork and composition. Decorative opulence and displays of virtuoso technique were signs of vulgarity, because silk and colors could be bought and technique could be acquired through practice.

Superficial visual appeal distracted both artist and viewer from penetrating into the moral and metaphysical heart of a subject. Painters and calligraphers were urged to strive for the aesthetic quality called pingdan tianzhi’n (J: heitan tensliin), which may be loosely translated as ease, naturalness, innocence, and blandness - qualities thought to reflect the Scholar-Amateurs’ nobility of mind and character. Paintings were often small in scale, deceptively simple, and even artless; calligraphies were often self-consciously awkward or distorted.

This kind of background information obviously gives a depth to Buson’s haiku that I had previously been unaware of, leading to an even greater appreciation of his poetry.

Ironically, while providing a more complete background for Buson’s poems, Rosenfield also makes it clear that it is probably impossible for this western reader to ever fully appreciate Japanese haiku because I lack the cultural context these compact poems are written in:

If Matsuo Basho brought haiga to its mature prominence, Yosa Buson wrought his own powerful changes. A classic example by Buson is a seemingly cheerful and uncomplicated picture of a mountain cuckoo (hototogisu) soaring over a flowering hydrangea (ajisal) [plate 2]6 The verse, however, adds a scenario that darkens the scene:

Iwakura no kyco -
Koi seyo
Hototogisu
BS 463;BZ-1 1052


Mad woman of Iwakura
Make love!
Hototogisu.

When this poem was published in an anthology in 1777, Buson added a brief headnote explaining that madness could be cured by bathing in a waterfall at a Buddhist temple at Iwakura (then some distance from the northern outskirts of Kvoto). Further checking reveals that the temple was called Daiun-ji, that its monks cultivated hydrangeas, and that in popular legend the consort of Emperor Reizei (950-1011) was cured of mental illness by drinking from a waterfall there. Buson’s verse thus wove a complex network of topics into a seemingly simple picture: the cuckoo, which Japanese poets often considered a messenger of love;’ a crazed woman, with the implication that she was lovelorn; the hydrangea, symbol of the temple where madness was cured; and the and cultural context evoked by the single word ‘Iwakura.’ The highly literate people for whom he painted this work probably recognized the allusion; those who did not missed the full range of Buson’s meaning.

It’s a little disheartening to realize I will probably always miss “the full range of Buson’s meaning” because I will never acquire this kind of cultural context.

Of course this doesn’t come as a complete revelation. Previous reading has made me realize that I did not fully understand or appreciate concepts like “season words” or understand why recognizing them should be critical to appreciating haiku. Worse, my relatively superficial understanding of Zen Buddhism, while perhaps more extensive than the average American’s understanding, probably also causes me to miss much of the meaning in these poems.

In other words, my appreciation of these poems probably reveals more about me and my current feelings about poetry than it does about the quality of the poems themselves.

I finally finished Rosenfield’s Mynah Birds and Flying Rocks: Word and Image in the Art of Yosa Buson, today, and I’ll have to admit that the chapter on “Rock Motifs and Reductive Symbols,” despite the title, was probably my favorite chapter in the book because it came the closest to showing the relationship between Buson’s art and Buson’s haiku, the main reason I bought the book in the first place.

Buson’s scroll entitled “Stones Scattered Here and There” contains three famous poems, one of his own, one by Basho, and one by Saigyo, and as Rosenfield notes:

Buson’s ltsu Museum rock painting thus connects himself, Basho, and Su Shi; it is an eloquent example of East Asian cultural memory in action, of poets and artists building on admired works of the past-not through imitation but through highly expressive variations on the older works. Basho and Saigyo had described a pleasant, welcoming spot (crystal waters, the sheltering willow), but for Buson ” characteristically - the tree was leafless and the crystal waters had dried up, leaving only rocks in the stream bed. This stark interpretation may well have been Buson’s own, though it had also appeared in a medieval No drama about the Traveller’s Willow, which described the tree as withered, its branches desolate, and the stream bed dry. 23 Regardless, Buson had darkened what earlier poets had made light and gracious. For him, as for T. S. Eliot, there is “only rock and no water”-the epitome of desolation.

A similar somber tone appears in other of Buson’s poems about rocks, all set in winter:

Originally, I was mostly interested in seeing the relationship between Buson’s pictures and his haiku, but it was interesting seeing the relationship between these three famous poets, and it is certainly a connection I would never have made without having it pointed out by Rosenfield.

Truthfully, though, if I had had more faith in the internet and had taken the time to research Buson’s art on-line I doubt that I would have purchased this book and, instead, would have focused on a better collection of Buson’s haiku, a book that I will have to purchase some time in the near future.

When I buy the work, I will try to relate these poems to a number of interesting Buson artworks I found on the web, all worth checking out on their own if you’re at all interested in Buson’s artwork:

The more I read Japanese poetry the more I find myself looking back at Chinese influences in order to understand the underlying ideas. For that reason, recent purchases include not only translations of Basho and Buson, but translations of much earlier Chinese writers like Meng Hao-jan, Cold Mountain and Stonehouse.

Before beginning to read these works, though, I felt a need to go back and review some of the material I covered in my grad classes on Chinese literature. In particular, I felt a need to review the ideas in the Tao Teh Ching, that seminal work of Chinese Taoism. It is a work that nearly stunned me with its radical concepts, at least radical to my western mind, when I first read it twenty years ago, and it still seems almost startlingly new as I re-read it today because it expresses a mindset diametrically opposed to much of what is found in western philosophy.

Although I prefer the poetic presentation of the Tao found in Sebastian de Grazia’s Masters of Chinese Political Thought, I decided to also consider the prose translation offered by Raymond Van Over in Chinese Mystics, because it is, after all, the meaning of the idea behind the words that it is most important.

I still remember being struck by the striking metaphors found in Chapter 11. Grazia translates it:

Thirty spokes are united around the hub to make the wheel,
But it is on the non-being [the area of the circle] that the utility of the wheel depends.
Clay is molded to form a utensil,
But it is on the non-being [its hollowness] that the utility of the utensil depends.
Doors and windows are cut to make a room,
But it is on the non-being [its empty space] that the utility of the room depends.
Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.

Van Over translates it:

The Use of What Has no Substantive Existence

The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The doors and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that it’s use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness.

In one sense, at least, this made perfect sense to me because when it comes to architecture it always seemed to me that in the best work “form followed function.” The best design is the simplest design that effectively fulfills the object’s function. Eliminate the clutter and you have Shaker or Danish modern furniture, personal favorites.

That may also explain why my favorite cooking utensils are still an old-fashioned carbon-steel Chinese wok, without a non-stick surface, thank you, and a simple carbon steel, medium-weight cleaver that is carefully honed before each use.

On a more important level, of course, such lines establish the philosophical basis for meditation, a form of non-thinking generally neglected or rejected in the Western world. After all, what could be a greater waste of time than sitting around thinking about nothing? If you’re going to be wasting time, you at least need to be out and about doing something, spending money on a hyperactive video game (which I, unfortunately, do happen to be fond of) or, better yet, roaring across the water on the latest, greatest version of a Skidoo, which, perhaps, irony of ironies, generally seems to be a product of the Far-East rather than the West.

Too often even when meditation is endorsed, it is endorsed because it refreshes the individual enabling him to think more clearly and accomplish more in the future. The ultimate goal still remains to “get things done.”

What would happen if we turned the western world on end and argued that the greatest value of having money is simply to allow the individual time to meditate, to allow the individual to escape worry long enough to find the inner silence that is at the heart of true wisdom? Perhaps the greatest value of money isn’t the ability to acquire things, but, instead, to free man from the need to acquire things, to allow the individual to simply “be” free.