Basho’s “Form” on the Subject of “Emptiness”

Matsuo Basho was the great innovator in haiku poetry in 17th century Japan. He was also a Zen Buddhist, though he seems to have been sometimes a Buddhist priest and at other times a travelling poet, sometimes in a black robe, sometimes not. He was also an innovator in writing prose travel journals: the haibun form, which was a prose journal with haiku poems.

The haiku aesthetic was already well developed. Haiku poems were Buddhist in spirit. They focused on Nature, not human affairs (a separate haiku-like genre called senryu developed for humorous and social poems). Haiku were self-consciously Selfless, Ego-free. Basho would have been excited at the opportunities the haibun form afforded him to use prose for one way of viewing life and culture, and poetry for another. In the contrasting registers of prose and haiku poetry was there a profound relationship to develop between the human world and the natural world? Or the social world and the individual world? The cumulative construction of an argument, a coherent narrative, the fruits of culture, in prose, and the flash of momentary insight in a haiku? Or, more fundamentally, the “form” and the “emptiness” of the Heart Sutra?

Form and Emptiness in haibun

One can approach understanding the “emptiness” of the Heart Sutra from any number of directions (through perceptions, impermanence, causation, interbeing, compassion, or Buddhist theorising – as the Heart Sutra does), but for our purposes as writers using language I offer this working definition drawing on the perceptual process described by the Buddha in his account of the five skandhas: “emptiness” is the world that a new-born baby looks at - it is what the senses are faced with at the start of the process of perception - and “form” is all that we add: instant reactions, language, picking and choosing, education, science, culture, ethics, feelings, judgements, attachments, opinions, ego etc. etc. Whatever you perceive is inevitably a solution of emptiness in form. Sometimes it will be a strong solution, more closely approaching “such­ness,” and sometimes a weak solution almost entirely composed of imaginary projections of desire, abstractions, ideas and fancies.

Since one approaches haiku trying to focus on the natural world and to purge the haiku of ego, opinions, judgements, and explicit feelings one is tempted to think that a haibun might be understood as a genre which offers a rare opportunity to try to combine human culture as the “form,” in prose, and nature as the “emptiness,” in haiku. There is indeed a lot of mileage in this idea, but what Basho does in his haibun, Narrow Road to the Interior clearly has another element to it, taken from the Japanese aesthetic tradition.

Basho uses highly wrought poetic prose for what you might think would be the best haiku subjects (beautiful blossoms, mountain gorges and crags, famous beauty spots, ruins, historic landmarks) and also uses heightened poetic prose for his beautiful account of shikantaza meditation and its enlightening bliss, and his visits to spiritually moving sites with religious associations. He is clearly keeping his use of haiku for something else, not a frontal assault on “emptiness,” or “awakening” or nature’s beauty.

He builds upon the exalted courtly Japanese tradition of delicate and elusive elegance, evanescent beauty, and refinement of artistic taste (the tradition of The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, Essays in Idleness, originally based in an aristocratic aesthetic). He goes to the “high” status content in prose, but in his verse is aiming to “return it to the low” by moving amongst the ordinary people and choosing over-looked, obscure, low status subject-matter, almost no subject-matter, in haiku poetry.

In poetry he eschews grandeur and finds obscure negligible subjects that are hardly even there. He is aiming “to return to the market place with bliss-bestowing hands,” perhaps, by treating much less courtly sub­jects with the same degree of delicacy of classical literature, and seeing the nuggets of “gold” in poor people and their simple lived experiences.

He innovates by combining an aristocratic taste for subtlety, delicacy and elegance with the life of a wandering holy man, provided with just what he can carry in one bag, victim of the wind and the rain and the frosts, like everybody else, and mixing amongst the poor working people of the underprivileged classes.

His haiku subjects are not approached directly as emptiness, but they are certainly fuga-no-michi: Basho’s ‘Way of Elegance,’ and have yugen, yuen, and karumi, the classic Japanese artistic virtues. Yugen and yuen are artistic qualities of elegance, mysterious beauty, unfathomable and poetic. Karumi is a Japanese sense of impermanence, the spiritual lightness of ever-changing things, viewed with detachment.

We might well think his poetic subjects are “empty” - they are extreme examples of impermanence – but they are not bare. They have added sophisticated beauty, a delicate aftertaste, and a tug of emotion. “The first task for each artist is … to become one with nature,” he writes, and he knows that “the subject is the season,” a subject that is always changing, a combination of the departing season and the coming one, dying things and sprouting things, and full of changing feelings of loss and gain.

This early spring
barely nine days old and all
those fields and mountains!

Withered winter grass –
waves of warm spring air
shimmering just above

(from The Knapsack Notebook. I am choosing to use the Sam Hamill translations in Narrow Road to the Interior, Shambhala Classics, 1998)

Relishing down to earth subjects, returning to the low, not focused on delicious court costumes and gourmet tastes, or the glamour of the scene, Basho goes to famous holy places and praises them culturally in heightened prose, then eschews all that to find the haiku of unregarded things. These examples are all from Sam Hamill’s translation of Narrow Road to the Interior (Shambhala Classics 1998).

Basho’s high status subjects in heightened prose: zazen, and beauty spot

Shikantaza, deep-sitting concentration and insight, a way of enlightenment as transparent as moonlight, its light infinitely increasing, spreading from hermitage to mountaintop and back, reverence and compassion shining in everything it touches. Its blessing flows down from these mountains, enriching all our lives.

Small islands, tall islands pointing at the sky, islands on top of islands, islands like mothers with baby islands on their backs, islands cradling islands in the bay. All covered with deep green pines shaped by salty winds, trained into sea-wind bonsai. Here one is almost overcome by the sense of intense feminine beauty in a shining world. It must have been the mountain god Oyamazumi who made this place. And whose words or brush could adequately describe a world so divinely inspired?

Basho’s low status subjects, the haiku of unregarded things

Decked out like Shinto priests and following a monk, Basho and Sora tour the Three Holy Mountains and write poems. Basho gives us delicate images: a whole dark world, very faintly lit; an unusually mobile image of impermanence (amusing, too); and a vow of silence felt with unexplained deep feeling: 

Cool crescent moon
shining faintly high above
Feather Black Mountain

How many rising
clouds collapse and fall on
this moonlit mountain

Forbidden to speak
alone on Yudono Mountain
tears soak through my sleeves

(Translations by Sam Hamill)

Basho’s religious feeling in prose, and a haiku of fleeting yugen

The temple doors, built on rocks, were bolted. I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open. 

Lonely stillness –
a single cicada’s cry
sinking into stone

Dogen wrote, “To forget the Self is to forget even the attachment to the goal…” There is a great joke at the heart of form and emptiness: the attempt to do something ambitious with Nature, take a ride on it, polish it and display it, make it beautiful, is delusional. Best leave it alone. Stop striving. It’s absurd. You can’t do emptiness as a performance.

Basho appears to approach this problem from an oblique angle, saying something like this: Practising an art is not itself empty, but the haibun form can open a dialogue with emptiness, dramatising form and emptiness as the Heart Sutra does when denying the value of the Four Noble Truths, or denying old age and death. The Way of Elegance makes the most transitory trivia into delicate observations which become mysteriously lovely, and interesting. Impermanence is always the subject, observed through seasons, and never nailed down, but something artistic is our form of fascination, and a pleasure.