What is it about haiku that imparts that mysterious little whiff of insight, so difficult to describe and yet so strangely satisfying? I would like to offer some pointers from my experience as a long term Zen Buddhist for whom the Way of haiku has become a valued part of my practice.
Characteristically we endeavour to secure and console our fragile self-identity by processing, shaping and colouring the raw experience of existence. Even - or especially - in the face of discouraging external circumstances, our minds strive to maximise the 'feel good' factor both emotionally and intellectually, helped and amplified by a social culture which includes plenty of imaginative literature. The worst of this offers merely escape from who we really are; the best offers a sometimes magnificent creative and cathartic treatment of our existential evasion. However, as imaginative literature, it remains ultimately subjective in the sense used by R. H. Blyth as "the state of mind in which a man looks at the outside world, or at himself, as he would like it to be"' The example he quotes from Byron would be hard to beat:
And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,
Dewy with nature's tear-drops as they pass,
Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves,
Over the unreturning brave. (1)
For Buddhism our root unease originates in the countless and subtle ways in which we try to evade, by action, thought and emotion, the totally open experience of just how it is and how we are. Trying to make it otherwise has been described as a life-long lawsuit against reality, which we can never win. Spirituality itself, even Zen Buddhism, may be expropriated by the needy ego as the ultimate evasion. Here is a beautiful warning from the eighteenth century Zen Master Hakuin:
At the north window, icy draughts whistle through the cracks,
At the south pond, wild geese huddle in snowy reeds.
Above, the mountain moon is pinched thin with cold,
Freezing clouds threaten to plunge from the sky.
Buddhas might descend to this world by the thousands,
They couldn't add or subtract one thing. (2)
Ultimately the only effective remedy is, in Blake's words, to learn to "cleanse the doors of perception" and let reality flood in. As all the spiritual traditions affirm, this brings a sense of joy and release and an ability to live more fully and freely in the world - and in the moment. Zen is a school of Buddhism concerned with the cultivation of a profound down-to-earth awareness of this 'suchness', unmediated by doctrine or other concepts. Haiku are the most thoroughgoing expression of literary Zen. They are also one of the several meditative 'Ways' (like calligraphy and the minimal ink paintings, zenga and haiga) whose form both gives expression to insight and helps to deepen it. The 'haiku moment' is thus no less than a tiny flash of an ultimate reality which in fact is just what is under our noses. Haiku which most clearly embody 'suchness' as the ground of our being I shall, in the Blyth tradition, call 'Zen haiku' and it is with these that I am particularly concerned. Exceptionally they may be quite didactic, like this from George Swede (which sums up the argument so far):
After the search for meaning
bills in the mail
Empty of Self-Need
It follows that haiku must spring from a mind open and unobstructed by any urge to make something of the reality that has come to the poet's attention. Those who go searching after haiku will find them shy and few and far between. Look for them and you will not find them.. Don't look for them, and they are not to be found. Of subjective meddling the 13th century Zen Master Dogen observed, "When the self withdraws the ten thousand things advance; when the self advances, the ten thousand things withdraw". And Basho advised: "When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy." (3)
Just washed
how chill
the white leeks!
In Zen parlance there is no need to "put legs on the snake" - not even poetic metaphysical ones, as does Nicholas Virgilio:
Lily:
out of the water
out of itself
Similarly, Bruce Ross identifies a "tendency in the fourth generation of American haiku writers of the late seventies, eighties and early nineties unfortunately to frequently offer catchy moments of sensibility that often rely on obvious metaphoric figures. These American poets desire to create 'haiku moments'. But a subjective ego, call it sentiment or call it imagination, intrudes upon their perception of the object".(4) Typical is the poem by Steve Sanfield quoted later in this paper in another context.
'How it is' doesn't come with meanings and explanations attached to give us the illusion of a more secure grip on it. Nor does it come tricked out with distracting embellishments. Allusive brevity is one invariable characteristic of the haiku form. We have an itch to add in order - as we fondly suppose - to clarify. Too much verbiage muffles the spark: the shorter the poem the more space for the reader.
The insight of the haiku moment is fresh, new-minted perception, though it may be so ordinarily expressed as to risk failing the "So What?" test unless the reader's reception is similarly attuned, as with Shiki:
A single butterfly
fluttering and drifting
in the wind
If haiku were no more than a reflection of how it is ("so what?") they would not engage our attention as they do. But they express how it is as experienced by a human being. Thus, in Martin Lucas's words, they are "open metaphors" for our human condition and resonate with that condition. They offer a glancing opportunity, without the poetic prompting of another, to accept for ourselves how it is. Such pure acceptance has qualities of compassion, release, quiet joy, subtle humour. It is well known to the mystics, like Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well". However, as T S Eliot observed:
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight. (5)
Haiku moments offer a little bit of existential therapy shared between writer and reader, a little bit of mutual compassion. For of all literary forms haiku are, in the current telltale slang, the least 'in your face'; they have the least 'attitude'. Indeed, they may leave us momentarily suspended in an emptiness which nevertheless feels authentic and moving, as with Shiki:
The long night
a light passes along
the shoji (screen)
At the other extreme the reader may just occasionally be prodded with a question, as in this example from Basho:
In the dense mist
what is being shouted
between hill and boat?
The sense of metaphor may be particularly strong when the poet has his own feelings in mind.. In this example, old age is deeply felt by Shiseki. He acknowledges the self-pity that comes with it, but he does not massage this feeling with any expressions of consolation:
My old thighs
how thin
by firelight
However, these 'open metaphors' retain their power only so long as readers leave them open and do not hasten to fill them with their own meanings. R. H. Blyth warns: "Where Basho is at his greatest is where he seems most insignificant, the neck of a firefly, hailstones in the sun, the chirp of an insect ... these are full of meaning, interest, value, that is, poetry, but not as symbols of the Infinite, not as types of Eternity, but in themselves. Their meaning is just as direct, as clear, as unmistakable, as complete and perfect, as devoid of reference to other things, as dipping the hand suddenly into boiling water." (6)
Traditionally, haiku poets have taken nature as their subject matter, as being more contemplatively accessible. Presumably human goings-on were assumed to be more likely to excite the poet's impulse to comment. But this is not necessarily so, as Jim Norton demonstrates below. Zen is commonplace: the ordinary is extraordinary when we are jolted out of our habitual selves; there is no need to hype it up. So it is with Jim Norton in a Dublin tenement:
What blue!
through my dirty lace curtain
April night
Coughing
and the stranger upstairs
coughs, too
But when nature turns dramatic only the best haiku poets can both express the drama and retain the haiku spirit without tipping over into subjective melodrama. In such highly tuned haiku the translator also will be put to the test. Here are two examples from Basho, translated by Lucien Stryk, (7) with all the dramatic down-to-earth energy of Zen:
Mogami river, yanking
the burning sky
into the sea
Shrieking plovers
calling darkness
around Hoshizaki Cape
Varieties of Awareness
Undistorted by self-need, reality displays characteristics of transience and insubstantiality which, deeply experienced (as at moments of lifetime crisis) may feel very threatening. Meditation enables a gradually prepared opening to them and joyful release from the lifetime effort of denying them at a deep existential level. When "how it is" ('suchness', sono-mama) is 'empty' of the weight of self-need we feel a sense of release, of lightness of spirit. This is the karumi experienced in miniature in haiku, many of which give little intimations of this 'emptiness'. In some instances it may move us very deeply: yugen - profound awareness to which we cannot put words. In Japanese culture certain mood responses, of elusive and overlapping meaning, have been identified. Unless appreciated in the spiritual context of Zen these easily become no more than haiku conventions or 'values', or Japanese mannerisms. "Willow pattern haiku", haiku `a la Japonaise, may result. Thus Bruce Ross refers to "the stylistically self-conscious underscoring of Zen-like experiences" to be found in many contemporary American haiku poets. (8)
Sabi is an acceptance of the 'emptiness', insubstantiality and vulnerability of phenomena (including oneself). But it is an acceptance coloured with a gentle, compassionate sadness, a delicate frisson, and not of stoic indifference. In Brian Tasker's words, "Sabi is a kind of pure and sublime melancholy and detached emotion which is not received in a self-centred way but simply honoured for what it is - a symptom of the human condition ... Sabi is the existential aloneness that can only be resolved by acknowledging its inevitability coupled with the joy and gratitude that can arise from its acceptance." (9) Consider the following haunting example from Basho (loneliness, deserted, aged, wild):
The loneliness
of this deserted mountain
the aged farmer
digging wild potatoes
On more superficial view sabi can refer to anything that is old, worn, tranquil, mellow and dignified. Like the other haiku 'moods', in the absence of real insight it can all too easily lend itself to tired and well worn 'oriental' haiku.
Wabi essentially denotes respect for the ordinary, the commonplace as opposed to the sensational. Simplicity, restraint, austerity are related meanings, with "rustic solitude" as a rather more mannered expression. Here is a nice contemporary example from Gary Hotham:
coffee
in a papercup ---
a long way from home
When the self withdraws its confirming sharpness and specificity of perception it leaves space for a more subtle, subdued, low key beauty to manifest. This is shibui, as in the following from Martin Lucas (silent, white, empty):
First darkness of dusk
silently a white owl
flies in the empty lane
Aware is the mood of transience, defined by Makoto Ueda as "sadness or melancholy arising from a deep, empathetic appreciation of the ephemeral beauty manifested in nature, human life, or a work of art".(10) It commonly translates as a nostalgic sadness connected with autumn, as with Marlene Mountain:
Faded flowers on the bed sheet
autumn night
Finally, another noteworthy haiku mood is surely that of understated humour, sometimes black or tinged with irony. It typically arises when one of our cherished delusions impacts with reality in the one haiku. Alexis Rotella has many delightful examples:
Undressed -
today's role dangles
from a metal hanger
The Zen of the Cutting Line
The majority of haiku achieve their main effect through a device called "the cutting line" or "eye opener". Some Zen preliminaries may help us to understand more profoundly how this device works. In order to free their students from the conventional self-assuring perceptual patterns, Zen teachers commonly resort to mutually contradictory words and phrases: iron women give birth; the sun rises at midnight, or, in this verse by the 15th c. Master Ikkyu:
Hearing a crow with no mouth
cry in the darkness of the night
I feel a longing for
my father before he was born. (11)
So characteristic of all spirituality, paradox is only baffling, only paradoxical, to a mind unable to step out of a logically structured world of this defining that. In all spiritual traditions, what is is the same as what is not; one thing is all things and all things are one thing:
The infinitely small is as large as the infinitely great when boundaries and distinctions are forgotten;
The infinitely large is as small as the infinitely minute when its outlines are not seen by any eye. (12)
There is all the solidity of the world of form in "a wooden hen sits on a coffin warming an egg" (Hakuin again). But it is empty of 'sense' - 'pure nonsense' - in that the self cannot confirm the self by making any sense of it. In Buddhist terminology, form is in fact 'empty' - of the order, solidity and permanence we need to attribute to it. But, paradoxically, it is also more real and factitious than the many ways in which we dress it up to escape its sharp edges. Ikkyu explains:
A well nobody dug filled with no water
ripples and a shapeless, weightless man drinks (13)
In Buddhist terminology, the power of Zen haiku lies in their embodiment of form-and-emptiness. The best of them come to us out of the moment in an insight so right, yet so beyond our ordinary habitual perception, as to dumbfound us. We find ourselves saying more than we mean and more than we know.
Two lines set the scene and a third, cutting line throws them out of gear by switching attention to a different perception, sparking across the gap between the phrases and momentarily illuminating the whole poem in a fresh light. Our customary - and solidified - perceptual associations are fractured. Self momentarily loses its foothold. Selfless space (emptiness) opens for an instant of naked clarity. We have been caught off balance. Trying to figure it out is like figuring out a joke: we miss the point. Occasionally the cutting line is wholly contradictory. Thus Sodo (1641-1715) says:
In my hut this spring
there is nothing -
there is everything (14)
However, haiku are usually more subtle, insinuating - and accessible - in their none-sense, as in this from Yamei:
In one shrill cry
the pheasant has swallowed
the broad field (14)
It would be possible (though probably not very useful) to attempt a classification of different uses of the cutting line. There is, for example, the double cutting line, where the second line magicks the third into being as a throwback illumination of the first. R. H. Blyth (in a different connection) quotes Kikaku:
The beggar wears
Heaven and Earth
as his summer clothes (14)
The cutting line provides a ready, specific device in haiku making and lends itself to the cleverness of what I call 'artful haiku' which lie at the opposite end of a continuum from 'insightful haiku'. This doesn't make them 'better' or 'worse', even as a genre, let alone individually. Most haijin probably write and enjoy both. Good 'artful haiku' can be quite clever at tweaking our fancy - and a bit more as in this one by Steve Sanfield:
Sleep on the couch she says
cutting his fantasies
in two
Altogether different is the distinction I would like to make between 'broad' and 'narrow' ends of the spectrum of insightful haiku. The broader profoundly illuminate our whole human condition, and are what I have specifically in mind as 'Zen haiku'; the narrower do so in a more limited and specific way. However the use of the words broad and narrow is not intended to refer to the quality of the haiku. Zen haiku are not necessarily good haiku. Here are two examples, broad (about the shortness.., and yet... of life) and narrow (about the tedium of matrimony), from Buson and Issa respectively:
In a short life
an hour of leisure
this autumn evening
Those two tired dolls
in the corner there - ah yes
they are man and wife
Note that although Issa's is the narrow one it is more than merely 'artful'. The man and wife are dolls: the metaphor is open ...
Finally, there is a Zen perspective on the optimum conditions for the making of haiku. Two conditions seem to be needful. First there is the priming and internalising of the form - getting into haiku mood and haiku mode. Hearing or reading haiku, and particularly sharing in a group, are valuable in this respect. For presumed contemplatives, haijin have usually been a sociable lot. Secondly, and more important, is opening to a contemplative state of mind.
My own experience of solitary meditation retreats of a week or more may be of interest here. The meditation I use is that of 'bare awareness' (shikantaza), in which the mind is a mirror, not a lens. Whatever comes up is simply observed, without mental comment, and dissolves like a bubble. After some practice the mind becomes still for quite long periods. This transparency carries over from the meditation periods. Primed with 'dry' haiku (through reading) it translates into haiku 'readiness'. I am far from being either a gifted meditator or haiku poet, and it is usually not until the second or third day that haiku begin to flow freely.
For company
an empty chair
Bruce Ross has argued that the writing of "the fourth generation of American and Canadian haiku poets ... attests to the presiding importance of Japanese haiku values to the haiku form as a whole."(15) Some awareness of the Zen Buddhist tradition underlying those values can be helpful. This is not a matter of taking on board some oriental philosophy or modelling classic Zen haiku; quite the contrary. Zen would condemn that, again, as "adding legs to a snake". It is rather a deepening of contemplative sensibility that is at the heart of the matter ...
References
- R.H. Blyth Zen in English Literature & the Oriental Classics. Hokuseido, Tokyo, 1942. p.72.
- Zen Words for the Heart: Hakuin's Commentary on the Heart Sutra, translated by Norman Waddell; Shambhala, Boston, 1996
- Quoted by John Stevens, in a footnote on p25 of in his introduction to Mountain Tasting: Zen Haiku by Santoka Taneda.Weatherhill, New York, 1980.
- Bruce Ross, ed. Haiku Moment. Tuttle, Boston, 1993. p.xxi
- T.S. Eliot Four Quartets. Faber, London, 1944 (The Dry Salvages, V).
- R.H. Blyth as for (1) above, p.49.
- Lucien Stryk, trans. On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho. Penguin, London, 1985. pp. 109 and 156.
- Bruce Ross as for (4) above, p.xxii.
- Brian Tasker Haiku and Zen. Barebones p.16 Wren Close, Frome BAl 1 2UZ U.K. pp. 38 & 39.
- Quoted by Bruce Ross as for (4) above, p.xxiv.
- Crow with No Mouth: lkkyu 15th c. Zen Master. Versions by Stephen Berg; Copper Canyon P., Port Townsend, WA, USA, 1989. p.17
- Extract from the Hsin-Hsin-Ming (On Trust in the Heart) by Seng-ts'an, c.600cE.
- As for (11) above, p.23.
- R.H. Blyth as for (1) above, pp186,186 & 159 respectively.
- Bruce Ross as for (4) above, p.xxvii.
© Text copyright 1997 Ken Jones. Troed Rhiw Sebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, SY23 3NB Wales. U.K. (tel. +44 (0) 1970 880603)
