[In the following introduction to Miyazawa's collection of verse Spring and Asura, Watson notes the pervasive presence of Buddhist ideals—selflessness, compassion, and the oneness of the universe—in Miyazawa's life and poetry.]

  Those who with a happy frame of mind
Have sung the glory of the Buddha,
Even with a very small sound,…
Or have worshipped,
Or have merely folded their hands,…
Or have uttered one 'Praise be!'—
All have reached the state of buddhahood.

So declares the Saddharmapundarika or Lotus of the Wonderful Law, one of the most important sutras or scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism. It is a text to which Kenji Miyazawa paid special reverence, and both his life and his poetry were dedicated to the active expression of its teachings.

Kenji Miyazawa was born in 1896 in Iwate prefecture, an impoverished farming region of northern Japan. As a child he displayed great interest in minerals and wild life, and went on to major in agricultural studies in high school and to take part in various agronomical surveys and research activities after graduation. It was in his high school days likewise that he first manifested an unusual devotion to Buddhism, first undergoing a period of Zen training and later becoming a follower of the Nichiren Sect and a devotee of its principal object of veneration, the Lotus Sutra, reciting from the text morning and evening.

For a time he worked in his father's pawn shop, and later attempted to support himself in Tokyo by doing various literary chores, at the same time writing poems and children's stories and pursuing his studies on his own in the Ueno public library. The critical illness of his younger sister Toshiko brought him back home to Iwate in 1921. With the exception of brief trips to the capital, he remained there until his death in 1933, unmarried, living a life marked by extreme frugality and hard work.

These later years were dedicated to improving the spiritual and material lives of his neighbors in the farming towns and villages of Iwate. He taught natural science and other subjects in the local schools, composed songs and wrote and produced plays for his pupils and fellow townsmen, taught them to perform ritual dances and play musical instruments, and entertained them with his phonograph records. He instructed them in practical matters of soil improvement, fertilizers, and crop rotation, operated a free counseling service on agricultural affairs, and consulted with local weather stations and meteorological observatories on ways to prevent or alleviate the floods, droughts, and cold and wind damage that so often afflicted the area. At one point he ate so sparingly and drove himself so hard that he was laid up for three years with pleurisy. His last job was that of engineer with a local rock-crushing company, working to improve methods of refining calcium carbonate and lime. He died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-eight, affirming on his deathbed his unbounded faith in the Lotus Sutra.

Miyazawa was a rapid and prolific writer, turning out a large number of children's stories and other prose works, as well as poems, some written in classical Japanese and cast in traditional forms, others in a freer form and employing a simple, colloquial style. It is the works of this last category that concern us here, the collection of free-verse poems known as Spring & Asura. Only the first part of the collection appeared in Miyazawa's lifetime, a small group of poems printed at the author's expense in Tokyo in 1924. The remainder of the poems was published in the years immediately following his death, when his works gradually gained the recognition they had been denied during his lifetime. The entire collection contains something over twelve hundred poems; many were left untitled and are identified by the number of the work in the collection as a whole.

Miyazawa looked on his poems as expressions of his religious convictions and ideals, on poetry itself as a form of religion. Underlying his poems and other writings is the world concept of Mahayana Buddhism, particularly as it is expounded in the Lotus Sutra. The fundamental doctrine of that text (as may be seen from the quotation at the beginning of the introduction), is the immediate accessibility of buddhahood to the sincere believer, no matter how humble or hampered by circumstance, as well as the compassionate aid extended to all creatures by the bodhisattva, the potential buddha who chooses to remain in the phenomenal world in order to assist other creatures to the realization of buddhahood. Miyazawa's own life of selfless service to his neighbors, along with his passionate and hauntingly beautiful poems and stories, represent and attempt, in so far as the human condition allows, to approximate this bodhisattva ideal.

A second fundamental concept of Buddhism, the equality and ultimate oneness of all beings and objects in the phenomenal world, finds expression in his poetry in an attitude of compassion and tenderness toward even the lowliest forms of life and a sense of mystic and intensely personal identity with the universe and all that makes it up. His skyscapes in particular manifest a kind of Vedic reverence for the forces of nature and an inexhaustible joy in the celebration of winds, clouds, and the constantly varying lights of the atmosphere.

Overt references to Buddhist belief are to be found scattered throughout Miyazawa's poetry, to the Lotus Sutra, object of his veneration, to the so-called six realms of existence into which unenlightened beings are repeatedly reborn, or to the Tushita Heaven, paradise of the bodhisattva Maitreya, to which he prayed that his dying sister Toshiko might be transported. To this extent, and in its underlying philosophy, his poetry is conventional and rooted in the age-old Buddhist traditions of the Japanese past. In its imagery, however, his poetry breaks totally from the stereotypes of the past. In place of the Indian landscape with its elephants and tropical birds that is a fixture of the sutras and other early works of Buddhist literature, he shows us the green-bladed rice paddies and snowy mountains of his native Iwate; while the lapis lazuli, emeralds, and other fabulous gems that in the ancient scriptures symbolized the splendor and multifariousness of creation are in his writings transformed into the minerals, metals, and chemical compounds which he himself worked with and knew from daily experience. All the varied elements of his knowledge, both technical and commonplace, book-learned and experiential, are treated with equal honor and reverence by him, and are ranged side by side in indiscriminate and joyous profusion. The juxtaposition of levels and categories of diction that results is like nothing that I am familiar with in the work of any other poet, east or west.

Such a conglomeration of diction may at first encounter strike one as bizarre, even surrealistic, and yet one should not suppose that the aim is merely to startle and arrest. Because Miyazawa, through his studies, happens to know the precise scientific term for a particular chemical substance or meteorological phenomenon, he takes the same delight in naming it that he takes in naming the trees of the hillside or the grasses of the field, as a more traditional poet might do. He celebrates not just the picturesque or conventionally beautiful elements of the scene around him, but all the dharmas or phenomena of existence, without prejudice or partiality. In this sense, his works may in fact be called a poetry of universal affirmation.

The seventy-three poems in Mr. Sato's selection are representative of the entire span of Miyazawa's poetic career, beginning with works that appeared in the first section of Spring & Asura that was published in 1924 and ending with those written shortly before his death. At the same time they succeed in conveying an excellent impression of the breadth and variety of subjects treated in Miyazawa's free-verse poems. There are works dealing with the poet's friends and family, including the famous "Last Farewell" to his sister Toshiko; sketches, sometimes with a satiric bite, of local officials and entrepreneurs, and portrayals of the hard pressed farmers whose sorrows he shared and did his best to assuage. There are poems that reflect his abiding interest in music and his passion for Japanese prints; poems about fertilizer, factories, ailing draft horses and doomed irises; about a hemorrhaging tooth that can't be stopped and a mysterious enemy named Kuma; and poems that simply extol the rivers, birds, uplands and vast light-struck skies of the Japanese countryside that Miyazawa saw each day and couldn't rest until he had written about.

Few of these free-verse poems of Miyazawa, so far as I am aware, have been translated into English. The Bownas and Thwaite Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964) contains a translation of Miyazawa's best known poem, "November Third" (Bending neither to the rain / Nor to the wind"), a homiletic piece written when he was ill in Tokyo and expecting to die. So great is its popularity in Japan that it is printed on cloth and hung in sampler fashion: almost any Japanese, though he may know little else about Miyazawa, can identify it as the work of "the saint of northern Japan" and recite it by heart.

In the 60's the distinguished American poet and translator Gary Snyder produced translations of eighteen of Miyazawa's poems, published in his The Back Country, the finest and most extensive selection of Miyazawa's work at that time available to the English reading public. With Snyder's striking and deeply sympathetic renditions, Miyazawa for the first time became a poet of international importance.

It is no easy task to follow in Snyder's footsteps, as I myself learned in making translations from the Chinese poet Han-shan, whom Snyder had previously translated. Mr. Sato's Miyazawa selection, of course, is by far the most voluminous to appear to date in English. In addition he has, it seems to me, been extraordinarily successful in capturing and bringing over both the sharply observed, often dazzling imagery of Miyazawa's poetry, and the relaxed, almost prosy matrix in which it is characteristically set. Miyazawa's free-style poetry, totally divorced from traditional Japanese forms and, so far as I know, uninfluenced by foreign models, is lumpy and jarring, inset with difficult Chinese compounds, terms borrowed from Sanskrit, English or German, and even bits of local Tohoku dialect, deliberately spaced on the page in ways that Mr. Sato has been careful to suggest in his translation. And yet—to return to a point already made above—as though to point up the essential commonness and universality of the statement, Miyazawa has enclosed his astonishing assortment of terms and images within the simple vocatives and declaratives of everyday Japanese. Mr. Sato in his translation has with great taste and fidelity rendered both the strangeness and the simplicity of Miyazawa's poetry, both its intense individuality and its passionate concern for transcendent values and the celebration of all the manifold aspects of creation. He has made it possible for Miyazawa to speak not only to his neighbors and countrymen, but to readers of English as well, a step toward the universal call to all sentient beings that Miyazawa no doubt visualized as his ideal.