The Heart of Haiku Read Online Free PDF

particularly for a poet seeking to bring into Japanese poetry ordinary objects and activities previously ignored. While visiting a temple—and perhaps assisting in the kitchen, since kitchen practice marks both good Zen and good guests— Bashō wrote:

    coldness—
    deep-rooted leeks
    washed white

    nebukashiroku araiagetaru samusa kana

    Any cook knows that cleaning the soil from leeks requires much time, and the coldness here is in the leeks, in the icy winter stream water they were washed in, and in the reader’s own hands, all at once. Even the leeks’ whiteness enters the reader’s body: chilled hands grow pale.
    This transparency of boundary is one of haiku’s most basic devices and instructions, and the permeability of self to non-self is made explicit in another poem from this period. At a river crossing, Bashō’s host treated the traveler with kindness, then asked for a written memento of the now-famous poet’s visit.  Bashō wrote:

    in rented rooms
    signing my name:
    “cold winter rains”

    yadokarite na o nanora suru shigure kana
     

    Renown had come to Bashō as a teacher as well as a poet during these final ten years of his life. The increasing support for his ideas and poems must have gratified; yet the ensuing demands also distracted and, at times it seems, clearly annoyed. To one aspiring student, he sent some sharp words counseling independence, along with this haiku:

    don’t copy me,
    like the second half
    of a cut melon!
    wareni niru na futatsu ni wareshi makuwauri

    At other times, Bashō reminded his disciples of the 9 th -century Buddhist teacher and poet Kukai’s words: “Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.” However strong his opinions and theories, Bashō’s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. Of the formal requirements of haiku, he said, “If you have three or four, even five or seven extra syllables but the poem still sounds good, don’t worry about it. But if one syllable stops the tongue, look at it hard.”

    As he turned 50, Bashō, living in what was now his third Bashō Hut, famously closed his brushwood gate. At the year’s start, he wrote in a letter, “Crushed by other people and their needs, I can find no calmness of mind.” He was caring for his ill nephew Tōin, who now had a family, having married a former nun, Jutei, and fathered three children. Students and fellow poets dropped by to ask advice, exchange poems, and talk; invitations to poetry gatherings were ceaseless. In April, Tōin died. In mid-August, Bashō  shut himself off from all visitors, resolving to find a way to free himself from outward obligation and its accompanying exhaustion and resentment. Two months later, he cut through the morning glory vine overgrowing his hut’s entrance, and emerged with a new philosophy, in life and in haiku. He called it karumi : “lightness.”
    Bashō’s transformation of spirit can be seen by comparing two haiku. The first—preceding Bashō’s retreat into seclusion—was written on New Year’s Day, 1693:

    Year after year,
    the monkey’s face
    wears a monkey’s mask
    toshidoshiya saru ni kisetaru saru no men          

    The second was written the last day of that year:

    year-end-thought:
    one night,
    even a thief came to visit
    nusubito no ōta yo mo ari toshi no kure    

    The earlier, New Year’s Day haiku is a portrait of entrapment within the social. Beneath persona, it says, there is only more persona—a street entertainer’s monkey doing the same tricks over and over, or a man (as Bashō commented to a student about this poem) making the same mistakes repeatedly, in an unchanging life. The second, haiku written a year later, surely refers as well to the overly social life Bashō had been leading, but here, bitterness has vanished, and the poet seems less rueful than amused. It reminds of the story of a Zen master who, finding his hut has been robbed, goes