Impermanence, Fate, and the Journey: Bashō and the Problem of Meaning
[In this essay, Barnhill considers Bashō's treatment of an abandoned baby in his travel journal The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton. The critic contends that Bashō regarded the infant's suffering as one that is shared by all, an idea that appears in several other travel sketches.]
The travel journals of Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694), one of Japan's great wayfaring poets, present a complex vision of the universe and a compelling way of life.1 It is generally agreed that this vision and way of life have religious significance, but what that religiosity consists of and how we can talk about it are perplexing issues.2
One passage that suggests the distinctive character of Bashō's religiosity comes near the beginning of his first journal, The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton (Nozarashi Kikō).
I was walking along the Fuji River when I saw an abandoned child, barely two, weeping pitifully. Had his parents been unable to endure this floating world which is as wave-tossed as these rapids, and so left him here to wait out a life brief as dew? He seemed like a bush clover in autumn's wind which might scatter in the evening or wither in the morning. I tossed him some food from my sleeve and said in passing,
Saru o kiku hito
sutego ni aki no
kaze ika ni
Those who listen for the monkeys:
what of this child
abandoned in the autumn wind?
Why did this happen? Were you hated by your father or neglected by your mother Your father did not hate you, your mother did not neglect you. This simply is from heaven, and you can only grieve over your fate.
NKBT 46:36-37
Bashō's response to the abandoned baby seems quite callous, and scholars have long debated his attitude. A critic as distinguished as Donald Keene has concluded that ‘perhaps the simplest explanation is that a waif by the roadside was a far more common sight in Bashō's day than in our own’.3
The search for the simplest explanation, however, can be a dangerous one, especially with a writer as complex as Bashō. His journals are not journalism. Though the journals are based on the journeys he took through Japan, he altered the details of his travels in order to construct works of literature. What this means, William LaFleur has said, is that ‘everything counts in a passage by Bashō. There are no throw-aways or gratuitous bits of unassimilated information’.4
The context of this passage accentuates the fact that the passage counts. The encounter with the baby is the very first episode presented after the departure scene and the crossing of the initial mountain barrier. It is, in a sense, the second opening of the journal. In addition, the passage echoes the ‘first’ opening of the journal.
I set out on a journey of a thousand leagues, packing no provisions. I leaned on the staff of an ancient who, it is said, entered into nothingness under the midnight moon. It was the first year of Jōkyō, autumn, the eighth moon. As I left my ramshackle hut by the river, the sound of the wind was strangely cold.
Nozarashi o
kokoro ni kaze no
shimu mi kana
Bleached bones
on my mind, the wind pierces
my body to the heart
NKBT 46:36
The journal begins with the image of bleached bones in a field, an image of someone who has died by the roadside. The impact of the scene upon Bashō is brought out by a particular poetic technique. The word kokoro here functions as a kakekotoba, a pivot-word that affects both parts of the poem: the field-exposed bones are on his mind (kokoro) and the wind penetrates his body (mi) to his heart (kokoro). As Ogata Tsutomu has said, the poem combines the pathos of nature (the autumn wind), human pathos (death), and the physical pain of the cold wind on the body.5
Certainly Bashō is imagining his own whitened bones: he foresees the possibility that he himself will die by the roadside and he accepts that fate. This identification of Bashō and the bones is emphasized by the fact that the poem is framed by the images of bleached bones and his body. In the prose section, however, he identifies himself with the wayfarers of old, in particular with the Sung dynasty Ch'an Buddhist monk Kuang-wen (1189-1263).6 Thus the poem's image of the bones also suggests other travellers who have died by the road. We are presented both with an image of wayfaring as a classical ideal Bashō is following and also with an image of death as its possible—or likely—result.7 Bashō recognizes and accepts the possibility as an integral part of the ideal of the wayfarer.
This introductory passage of the journal ties in closely with the abandoned baby episode. After crossing the barrier, Bashō immediately encounters a living—and dying—example of what he had previously only imagined. A traditional theme in Chinese and Japanese poetry was that of a poet listening to the mournful cries of monkeys, and Bashō adopts and adapts that theme. As Imoto Nōichi has said, Bashō combines the ‘fictional’ image of hearing monkeys cry with the ‘realistic’ image of encountering the wail of an abandoned baby.8 The poem thus ‘moves’ in the same way the journal does: the journal moves from the classical and fictional images of the ancient pilgrims and the bleached bones in the opening passage to the actuality of the abandoned baby, and the poem moves from the classical image of listening to the monkeys to the actuality of the crying child.
The poem ends with an incomplete question, ika ni (‘how’ or ‘what’), which draws the reader into the poem. We have to complete the question, and in so doing we take on some of the pained voice of the poem: how would the ancients feel about this child, and what would they do? The poem thus acts like a vortex combining the sorrow of the monkeys, the ancient poets, Bashō, the baby and the reader. To all these ‘cries’ is added the bitter sound and coldness of the autumn wind.
This image of the cold autumn wind emphasizes the identity between Bashō and the baby. In the opening poem the autumn wind pierces Bashō's flesh; in this poem the same wind bites into the baby's. Bashō's grief is aroused not simply from the recognition of another person's precarious condition but from the close affinity between his own condition and the baby's. The idea of death on the road—Bashō's death as well as that of the ancients—is embodied before him in the baby. Someday it may well be he who is dying by the roadside.
Bashō's sadness and his feeling of affinity with the child might make it more puzzling why he does not save the child. He does enact both his compassion and his identification with the child by throwing it some food, but this is done ‘in passing’: Bashō knows this will not save the child. His action and lack of action has been defended on at least two grounds. One argument, already seen in Keene's interpretation, is that scenes such as this were probably common in Bashō's time. Imoto, for instance, has argued that peasants of that time practised child abandonment and abortion because of widespread poverty.9 A second defense is that Bashō's rejection of responsibility for the child is no more callous than our own neglect of the orphans of our day. Yamamoto Kenkichi has stated that those wishing to condemn Bashō for not saving the child should give all their money to orphanages and veterans hospitals.10
Both arguments fail to account for the tone and sense of the passage. Bashō's presentation of the episode is charged with grief for the child and with a feeling of deep affinity. His response is not moral indifference to a common condition. In addition, he initially presents the suggestion that the child's condition might be a result of the difficult circumstances of its parents, but he concludes that it is heaven that is the cause.
This answer to his questions—that the baby's condition comes ‘from heaven’—is abrupt and almost elliptical. It seems more to raise questions than to answer them. Before trying to interpret the meaning of ‘from heaven’, however, it is worthwhile to ask what kind of passage this is. I suggest that this is an encounter with what Clifford Geertz, following Max Weber, has called the Problem of Meaning. Geertz develops the notion of the Problem of Meaning in his analysis of religious symbols, and his discussion helps clarify the nature of the passage:11
There are at least three points where chaos—a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability—threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and the limits of his moral insight.
For Geertz, these three parts of the Problem of Meaning—bafflement, suffering and the sense of intractable ethical paradox—are forms of impotence. They challenge ‘the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it …’12
As Geertz notes, modern anthropologists have focused on suffering and ethical paradox.13 In this paper I will do the same. A close reading of Geertz's discussion of these two aspects reveals that each can be divided into two parts. The emotional problem in the Problem of Meaning (the second part mentioned above) consists of both how to give precision to one's feelings and how to endure those feelings and the world.14 Emotional impotence, then, involves what we can call perceptual and practical aspects: the inability to feel with some order or definition and the inability to endure one's suffering. If, in our experience of reality, we cannot feel with precision or endurance, then there is emotional chaos.
Similarly, the third part of the Problem of Meaning, moral impotence, is two-fold. Ethical paradox is found both in the problem of making moral sense out of a situation and also in finding some normative guides to govern our action.15 Thus the moral problem in the Problem of Meaning also has perceptual and practical aspects: the problems of how to interpret the ethical nature of situations and how to act morally. If the world is such that we cannot do these things, there is ethical chaos.
This double nature of the emotional and moral aspects of the Problem of Meaning is reflected in Geertz's notion of religion:16
Religious patterns such as those I have been discussing thus have a double aspect: they are frames of perception, symbolic screens through which experience is interpreted; and they are guides for action, blueprints for conduct.
For Geertz, religion is that part of culture where the perceptual and practical aspects of life become reflexive. The religious perspective, he says, ‘is the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there is an unbreakable inner connection’.17 Religion, then, is that which provides ‘the settled sense of moving with the deepest grain of reality’.18
Similarly, the emotional and moral aspects of the Problem of Meaning consist of the problem of how to ground our feelings and our ethics in the nature of reality. Emotions and ethics are meaningful in so far as they reflect and tie into the fabric of the universe. For the religious person the world has an emotional tenor and moral structure, and the Problem of Meaning is how to anchor our feelings and ethics into them.19
Geertz discusses the ethical aspect of the Problem of Meaning in terms of the traditional notions of good and evil. But certain passages in Geertz suggest that the practical aspect is broader than that. The problem of providing ‘normative guides to govern our action’ goes beyond questions of good and evil. ‘The way one ought to live’ includes, for instance, life style and vocation, whether it be a monk, sage or shaman.20 The Problem of Meaning is at work here too: if it is not possible to discover an unbreakable inner connection between one's general and fundamental mode of life and the way things really are, then the world doesn't make sense.21 The Problem of Meaning, then, involves how to feel, how to endure one's suffering, how to interpret the ethical character of the world, and how to act and to orient our lives—all in concert with the essential nature of reality.
Bashō's encounter with the abandoned baby is an encounter with all four of these aspects of the Problem of Meaning, but this fact emerges only when we investigate his enigmatic references to heaven. Two interrelated symbols that dominate his travel journals form the context for his notion of heaven: impermanence (mujō) and the journey. The notion of mujō has had a long history in Japanese culture and there have been many, quite different developments of this symbol.22 Indeed, it is probably more accurate to talk of many mujō's in Japanese culture rather than one. It is not surprising that a writer as complex as Bashō develops several distinct mujō's—more than we can discuss here.
One of the most common and primary elements found in his formulations of mujō, however, is the imminence of death. In his journal A Visit to Sarashina Village (Sarashina Kikō), Bashō graphically depicts this idea. He and his companions are making a steep climb to the village of Sarashina with Bashō on horseback. Out of pity for a monk who is burdened with an extremely heavy load, his companions pile the monk's bundles onto Bashō's horse. Bashō is left on top of these bundles, teetering on an uncertain mount as the mountain path narrows:
Overhead high mountains and strange peaks hung in layers. On my left a great river flowed; below was a precipice that seemed to drop a thousand feet. There was not a single piece of level ground, and I was terrified to be in the saddle. The fear simply would not leave.
NKBT 46:66
Bashō decides the situation is too much for him and dismounts. A servant, however, has no such fears and promptly takes Bashō's place.
We passed through Kakehashi and Nezame, then Sarugababa and Tachitōge of the ‘Forty-eight Turnings.’ The trail wound around as if on a pathway to the clouds. Even on foot I was dizzy and shaken, my legs trembling, yet the servant showed no signs of fear and kept dozing on top of the horse. Many times I thought he would surely fall; I was terrified as I looked up from behind. Gazing upon the sentient beings of this transitory world, the Lord Buddha must feel the same. When we reflect upon the unremitting swiftness of change, we can see why it is said: ‘the whirlpool of Awa is free of wind and waves.’
NKBT 46:66-67
The reference to the whirlpool of Awa derives from a popular Buddhist poem: ‘Compared to our journey through this world, the whirlpool of Awa is free of wind and waves’.23 Life is turbulent, change is inexorable and swift, but in particular we are all like the servant, riding precariously on the edge of death.
The imminence of death is not a momentary circumstance that occurs from time to time. It is an essential characteristic of human life. Bashō's descent from the teetering mount is ironic: he gets down because of the vertigo he feels at being so close to falling, yet he realizes in the end that the condition of imminent death in a transitory world defines the very nature of human existence. One cannot escape that condition as one can dismount from a horse.
Indeed, Bashō deliberately attempted both to symbolize and to expose himself to this condition in the life of a wanderer. The opening of The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi) deftly fuses the symbolic and the physical, the essential and the voluntary aspects of the journey.
Months and days are the wayfarers of a hundred generations, the years too, going and coming, are wanderers. For those who drift life away on a boat, for those who meet age leading a horse by the mouth, each day is a journey, the journey itself home. Among ancients, too, many died on a journey. And so I too—for how many years—drawn by a cloud wisp wind, have been unable to stop thoughts of rambling. I roamed the coast, then last fall brushed cobwebs off the river hut. The year too gradually passed, and with sky of spring's rising mist came thoughts of crossing the Shirakawa barrier.
NKBT 46:70
Time, in the form of days, months, and years, is itself a wayfarer, and human life as a whole and everyday within it is a journey.
One can, however, choose to reflect and expose oneself to this condition by physically leading a journey life. There is irony also in the sentence ‘Among ancients, too, many died on a journey’. If ‘journey’ is the essential, inescapable condition of human life, then everyone ‘dies on a journey’. But the ancients embodied that condition by leading wandering lives, and this is what Bashō does. The word ‘journey’ thus acts somewhat as a kakekotoba does in Japanese poetry. The word ‘journey’ before this sentence refers to the essential condition of human beings, and after this sentence it refers to Bashō's actual wanderings through Japan. In this sentence, however, the word has both meanings.
Bashō thus sought a life in which his way of life and his understanding of the fundamental nature of reality were closely interwoven. Put in Geertz's terms, between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there was, for Bashō, an unbreakable inner connection. His view of the structure of reality and his programme for human conduct were mere reflexes of each other and the result was a settled sense of moving with the deepest grain of reality.24
To return now to the abandoned baby in the Nozarashi Kikō, Bashō has two sources for his action of leaving the baby by the roadside. First, the baby's condition of being like a bush clover that will soon scatter or wither is an inescapable one. When he meets the baby crying by the roadside he is initially puzzled that a child could be in such a situation. But as in the episode of the teetering horse he realizes that the condition of being on the edge of death is precisely ‘from heaven’, the fundamental condition of all life at all times. Second, in going on the journey Bashō had consciously decided to seek out for himself the very condition the baby is in: exposure not only to the elements (the autumn wind of both the Saru o kiku and of the Nozarashi o poems) but also the imminence of death. Bashō thus understands the child's condition as being neither absurd nor accidental but as explicable in terms of the basic nature of reality: life is impermanent and is a journey upon which one will die.
Bashō never explicitly answers the question that is implied in the poem, the problem of how emotionally to respond to the baby's suffering. The passage does present, however, two types of emotions that constitute Bashō's own response to this question: compassionate sorrow for someone in a shared condition, and resignation to that condition and its suffering. The feelings of compassion and acceptance reflect the nature of reality: the communal and inescapable condition of being on a journey and on the edge of death. Thus the symbols of mujō and the journey and the related symbol of heaven provide, in Geertz's terms, a cosmic guarantee for the ability to give definition to emotions, even in a situation as extreme as this. Because of the perceived pervasiveness and ultimateness of impermanence and the journey, Bashō can react to the child's distress not with a swirl of emotions but emotions that fit with the character of the universe: compassion and resignation.
The affective aspect of the Problem of Meaning involves the ability not only to feel suffering with precision but also to endure that suffering. As Geertz puts it, religious symbols must affirm the ‘ultimate sufferableness’ of the world.25
As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.
Bashō can bear to contemplate the baby's suffering because he recognizes in it the manifestation of the universally shared condition of human existence. He tries to make the baby's suffering sufferable by the two acts of giving it food and telling it why it is suffering. The food could bring the baby only temporary relief, the words none at all. But the actions are portrayed as sincere, spontaneous acts of compassion, and they communicate to the reader Bashō's view that the baby's suffering is neither isolated nor absurd. Arising out of the very nature of the universe, the suffering is shared by all.
It is interesting to note what happens to the notion of ‘moral’ in Bashō's response to the Problem of Meaning. For Geertz, the Problem of Meaning provides a moral structure by ‘affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole’.26 Here, as elsewhere, Geertz seems to identify rationality and justice (a tendency dating back to Socrates). For Geertz, the only alternative to moral chaos seems to be a world in which events are meaningful (grounded in the basic fabric of reality) and also tied to an overriding moral order. But these are two separable aspects of the Problem of Meaning. The first aspect yields the question: is the world a moral enigma or can we discover the reason for suffering and evil and how they are related to the nature of reality? The second aspect yields the question: is the good somehow preserved, is good rewarded and evil punished, as in the traditional notions of heaven and hell and karma?
Geertz does not seem to consider the possibility of an ordered, understandable world that is amoral. A world that exhibits knowable principles into which individual events can be grounded is not chaotic but meaningful in Geertz's sense of the term. Yet this fact does not entail that the world is moral.
Bashō's response to the abandoned baby seems to suggest an amoral order. For Bashō there does not seem to be cosmic protection of innocence or the good; the world is such that an innocent child can be left to suffer and die. No retribution sets things right, nor is there anyone to blame. Yet there is no moral chaos. The world is not ruled by whim; it manifests identifiable principles by which even such an extreme situation as the abandoned baby can be explained and accepted.
Had Bashō showed compassion for and resignation to the baby's plight without answering his initial puzzlement, the passage would have been merely an example of accommodation to moral chaos. But Bashō discerns in the baby's suffering recognizable universal principles of the universe. The world as a whole is not irrational; there is no chaos.
But do these principles—mujō and the journey—constitute a moral structure? Bashō's universe seems morally indifferent: individuals suffer from impermanence in various degrees and at various points in their lives without regard to their moral guilt or innocence. The structure seems to be amoral, not moral; the world may be meaningful, but it seems unjust.
In Bashō's journals, however, this injustice and moral indifference are substantially mitigated. In depicting the universal character of mujō and the journey, Bashō stresses the communal nature of the condition. Bashō's journals do not present resignation to shared misery but an affirmation of community and the life lived within it. The bond between Bashō, the baby, the ancients and the horseguide—and the months and days—is both wholly good and part of the fundamental fabric of the universe. Thus Bashō's recognition of mujō and even the sufferings it causes leads finally not to confusion and despair, or grim resignation, but to the celebration of life. Despite the vicissitudes of the journey-life, the community continues and as such the world is fundamentally whole and sound. In this sense the world is not unjust, for all people exist in a community and share the same condition. In this sense the world has a pronounced, if complex, moral structure.
A very different kind of scene in a much later work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, suggests the same moral structure and sense of community.
Today we made our way through the most precarious parts of the north country, places such as Unseen Parents, Unwatched Child, Turned-back Dog, Retreating Horse. At night, exhausted, I sought out a pillow and was near to sleep when I heard the voices of two young women in the front, one room away. The voice of an old man mingled with theirs. From what I could hear they were courtesans from a place called Niigata in Echigo on their way to worship at the Ise Shrine. The old man had seen them off as far as this barrier and they had written letters and brief notes for him to take back to their village in the morning.
At one point I heard these words: ‘Cast adrift on the beach where the white waves break, daughters of the shore, we have fallen to a wretched life. Each night there are the fleeting pledges of love; what shameful karma do we carry from our past days?’ On they talked, and I drifted to sleep.
In the morning as we set off, they came pleading to us with tears falling. ‘We don't know which way to go on this sorrowful road, we are so worried and upset, could we follow your footsteps from off in the distance? By the mercy of your robes, grant us the blessing of your great compassion and we will be bound to the Buddha.’ ‘It is unfortunate’, I said, ‘but we are always stopping here and there. Just entrust yourself to the way others are going. Surely the gods will protect you from harm.’ With these words we left them behind, but for a time the pity of their situation would not leave me.
Hitotsu ya
yūjo mo netari
hagi to tsuki
In the one house
Courtesans, too, slept:
Bush clover and moon
I recited this to Sora, and he wrote it down.27
NKBT 46:91-2
The basic similarities between this episode and that of the abandoned baby episode are obvious. Like the baby, the courtesans are locked into a bitterly painful situation. Bashō is confronted with their fate and their tears and, as in the other passage, he shows compassion and remorse. He also leaves them in their grief. Differences between the two passages, though, are also apparent. The courtesans are adults, and they certainly do not have the baby's innocence. In the courtesan passage, Bashō does not seem to give an explicit interpretation of the basis and nature of their circumstance. Instead, the courtesans give their own interpretation: their fate is a result of karma.
What is their situation? In part they feel lost and helpless on their pilgrimage to Ise. Their fellow villager is returning home, and they feel in desperate need of someone to guide them on their way. Because Bashō appears to be a monk travelling to Ise, they believe and hope that he will show them compassion and help them find their way.
There is, of course, more to the courtesans' tears than their anxiety about travelling alone to Ise. The conversation Bashō overheard the night before makes clear their great distress about ‘having fallen to a wretched life’. Their grief and anxiety concerns not merely the way to Ise but also their way of life: the ‘sorrowful road’ they are lost on is their life as well as the road to Ise. Here too Bashō seems to be a possible source of aid, an opportunity to break out of the wretchedness of their lives. To understand this, however, we need to discuss one of the major themes of this passage: relationships.28
There are three primary types of relationships mentioned in the passage. The first is the courtesans' sexual relationships, characterized by ‘fleeting pledges of love’ (sadamenaki chigiri). Their life is thus filled with impermanent and vulgar relationships. To this is opposed a second type of relationship, a kechien, a term translated here as ‘bound to the Buddha’. A kechien refers to a connection to the Buddha made by an aspirant in order to aid in the attainment of Buddhahood. This type of relationship is the exact opposite of the ‘fleeting pledges of love’ because it is both permanent and spiritual. The courtesans, it seems clear, hope to establish this kind of relationship as an alternative to their fleeting pledges of love and in so doing break the total grasp that mujō and the vulgar world have on their lives. In this way the black-robed Bashō seems to them to be an opportunity to achieve release from the wretchedness of the fleeting, floating world.
In his very terse reply, Bashō refuses to help them bring about this kechien. Indeed, he seems to deny that the women have any problem at all. He does, however, encourage them to establish a third type of relationship: entrusting themselves to ‘the way others are going’. The significance of this reply begins to emerge when we consider a second theme of this passage, the idea of a way. Embedded in the courtesans' statement Bashō overheard during the night is an allusion to an anonymous classical poem:29
Shiranami no
yosuru nagisa ni
yo o tsukusu
ama no ko nareba
yado mo sadamezu
If I were a
daughter of the shore
who lives out her life on the beach
where the white waves break,
my dwelling too would be fleeting.
The use of the phrases shiranami no yosuru nagisa ni (on the beach where the white waves break) and ama no ko (daughters of the shore) by the courtesans in their conversation makes the allusion to this poem a very direct one. The words of the courtesans, however, differ from those of the original poem. Instead of the phrase yo o tsuku (‘we live out our lives’ on the beach where the white waves break), the courtesans in Bashō's passage use the term hōrakashi. This term means to ‘abandon’, ‘wander’ and ‘be wretched’ (in my translation it has become ‘cast adrift’). This change depicts the lives of the courtesans as unpleasant drifting. In order to avoid this condition of being aimless wanderers, they have embarked on a pilgrimage with a specific destination and goal, Ise. They want Bashō to help them stay on their course and reach the end of their pilgrimage.
Bashō rejects this plea and he rejects the ideal embodied in it as well. His reason for not guiding them is also a description of a type of journey very different from a pilgrimage to Ise. Bashō's journey has no specific goal or end, ‘always stopping here and there’. It is, in fact, very similar to the condition that the courtesans are trying to escape, with one major exception: Bashō accepts the condition. This is not to say Bashō never experiences fear or fatigue; the opening of the passage functions precisely to show how dangerous and exhausting his journey can be. Yet he feels no fundamental distress at being a guideless wanderer. It is in fact a condition that he has consciously sought.
In this light, Bashō's rather curt reply has a double meaning. In one sense his answer is utterly pragmatic: if you are heading towards Ise and don't know the way, ask anyone going there to help you. Bashō himself enlisted such short term guidance during his journeys. To the simple problem of finding their way to Ise, Bashō gives a simple answer.
To their deeper problem of finding their way through life, Bashō has the same answer but with a more subtle meaning. The Japanese literally read tada hito no yuku ni makasete yukubeshi, ‘just go, entrusting yourself to the going of others’. The ‘going of others’, Bashō has told us at the beginning of this journal, is to be on a journey, an endless journey in which we are always exposed to mujō. In his own life he sought to open himself to and embody what he saw to be the basic nature of life, an endless journey characterized by impermanence. In a very real sense, the courtesans have asked him to help them avoid these aspects of life: they seek a permanence of relationship, a kechien, cut off from the fleeting, vulgar world and they seek to change their drifting into a pilgrimage with a goal and end. Bashō refuses to help them. Instead, he advises them to accept the universal ‘going’ of others: the journey-ness of life and its impermanence. He does not try to dissuade them from going to Ise—Bashō himself made pilgrimages of this kind—but the words he uses suggest that their pilgrimage would best be part of an endless journey. In so doing, they can achieve the relationship Bashō offers as an alternative to a kechien: sharing with all others the fundamental condition of life.
I previously suggested that at first glance Bashō seems to be rejecting the idea that the women have a problem at all. At second glance the same point holds. Bashō accepts the courtesans' view that their life is characterized by impermanence and a journey without guide or goal. But he understands it not as a problem resulting from karmic retribution but as the universal condition of life reflecting the fundamental character of existence. Impermanence is not a problem to avoid but is a fact to ‘realize’ both in one's interpretation of life and in one's way of life.
One result of Bashō's view of life is the blurring of the distinction between the courtesans and himself. This notion can be seen especially in a third theme of this passage, the house or inn. This term first appears in a rather indirect way in the courtesans' allusion to the poem cited previously. The courtesans make the statement that their life is characterized by pledges that are sadamenashi: uncertain, unstable, fleeting. In the poem, the ‘daughters of the shore’ live in houses that are sadamezu:30 temporary dwellings. The allusion expands the courtesans' statement: knowing the classical poem we are made to think of the courtesans' life as characterized by impermanent dwellings as well as impermanent vows.
The theme of the impermanent dwelling is a rich one in Japanese culture. William LaFleur has analysed in detail this theme in terms of the literary topoi of the hermit's hut and the traveller's inn.31 What is important for this discussion is that there were traditional associations between the notions of the traveller's inn and courtesans and also between these two notions and mujō. The traveller's inn was a place of both temporary stays and temporary relationships because the traveller could often rent a yūjo, or ‘playgirl’, along with a room.
The locus classicus of this theme is a pair of poems by the priest poet Saigyō (1118-1190) which take the form of a dialogue between Saigyō and a courtesan.32
On the way to the temple called Tennō-ji, I got caught in the rain. In the area known as Eguchi I asked at one place for a night's lodging. When refused, I replied as follows:
yo no naka o
itou made koso
katakarame
kari no yadori o
oshimu kimi kana
It is hard, perhaps,
To hate and part with the world;
But you are stingy
Even with the night I ask of you,
A place in your soon-left inn.
The response by a ‘woman-of-play’:
ie o izuru
hito to shi kikeba
kari no yado ni
kokoro tomuna to
omou bakari zo
It's because I heard
You're no longer bound to life
As a householder
That I'm loath to let you get attached
To this inn of brief, bought stays.
As LaFleur has noted, the first poem centers on the theme of relinquishment. As a monk he has abandoned the world, so the woman ought to relinquish the room—and herself—for the night. Her refusal, LaFleur points out,33
is not due to a lack of liberality but because she is concerned for his long-range welfare. Since he has adopted a vocation understood to be in harmony with mujō—that is, has left off being a householder—she doesn't wish to see him lose his freedom by becoming ‘attached’ to the house. The keen edge of her retort lies in the implication that, although all houses are temporary and cannot ultimately be ‘held’ by anyone, hers, as an inn (brothel), is especially a place of brief stays.
The notion of the inn is based on the double significance of kari no, a modifier that means both ‘temporary’ and ‘rented’.34
The idea is that the inn (brothel) makes manifest the truth about all houses—the ‘ie’ with which the woman's poem begins. It divulges the truth of the fundamental impermanence/instability that is, in reality, characteristic of them all.
This pair of poems gave rise to a magnificent Nō play by Kan'ami (1333-1384) entitled Eguchi.35 The play presents a travelling monk who comes across the grave of the courtesan of the Saigyō poems. A woman appears at the scene and later we find out that she is the spirit of the courtesan. The theme of the courtesan as teacher, present in the Saigyō poems, is developed in Eguchi and reaches perhaps its grandest expression in that play: the courtesan turns out to be an incarnation of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Fugen Bosatsu).
The encounter between Bashō and the two courtesans in The Narrow Road to the Deep North recalls this legend of the meeting of Saigyō and the Eguchi prostitute, but Bashō deftly turns the structure of that meeting inside out. In place of Saigyō's asking a favour of a courtesan, the courtesan begs Bashō for aid. In place of a request for a night's lodging, is a plea for guidance on a day's journey. Instead of the request from Saigyō, the priest, who has chosen his way of life and is at ease in it, the request comes from two women who are distraught about their way of life and are trying to develop an alternative to it. In both Saigyō's Eguchi poems and Bashō's passage, the request is denied, but inversion applies also to the content of this denial. The admonition by the Eguchi courtesan in her poem—repeated verbatim in the final speech in the Nō play Eguchi—is ‘do not set your heart on a passing shelter’ (kari no yado ni kokoro tomuna). Instead of being negative in form, Bashō's admonition is positive: ‘entrust yourself to the way others are going’. Instead of urging the avoidance of a relationship, Bashō urges the courtesan to establish one.
Another difference between Saigyō's meeting with the courtesan and Bashō's is the fact that Bashō's courtesans are travellers. As LaFleur has noted concerning the Saigyō poems and the Nō play Eguchi, ‘the courtesan in the inn matches her profession with her place of residence; both articulate impermanence/instability’.36 In The Narrow Road, however, the courtesans embody mūjo in a compound sense: they do not reside in a passing shelter, they themselves are travellers who stop over in the inn only one night. As we have seen Bashō also has presented them as travellers in a deeper sense, as being hōrakashi, cast adrift.
This depiction of the courtesans as travellers suggests a close affinity between them and Bashō. Despite the obvious differences between them, LaFleur suggests that a kind of parity and community is established between Bashō and the women.37 It is unclear whether or not it is ‘established’ because the courtesans do not seem to consciously experience it. They approach Bashō with a very hierarchical attitude, normally associated with the roles of lay person and cleric. Bashō's response rejects this hierarchy because, unlike the courtesans, he does recognize the common bond. Indeed, his words ‘go, entrusting yourself to the going of others’ seem to be an admonition: ‘see your parity and community with everyone and act according to that relationship’. Their fundamental bond with everyone consists precisely in being travellers in a world of impermanence along with all people, ‘each day a journey and the journey itself home’.
After expressing, however briefly, the deep affinity between himself and the courtesans, Bashō leaves them. The hokku near the end of the passage, however, recalls and emphasizes this affinity. It also returns us to the theme of the dwelling. The poem begins with the image of one house. Given the traditional association of the inn and mujō, the image of the one house suggests more than a particular building where an interesting encounter took place. As LaFleur has said, the impermanent nature of the inn manifests the truth about all houses and about the nature of life itself. Bashō and the courtesans slept—and always sleep—in the house of impermanence.
The use of the word mo (‘too’) in the poem is similar to the multiple use of mo in the opening passage of the journal. In that passage, mo joined the images of days and months, years, ancients and Bashō as embodiments of the impermanence and the journey aspects of life. In the Hitotsu ya poem, Bashō draws the courtesans into this company which, after all, includes everyone and everything in the world. The courtesans, Bashō and everyone sleep in this house of impermanence.
The traditional interpretation of this poem identifies Bashō with the moon and the courtesans with the bush clover.38 While this reading is valid, the emphasis in this passage on the fundamental affinity between Bashō and the courtesans suggests that the poem can be read another way as well. Both Bashō and the courtesans are presented as partly religious and partly secular in the conventional senses of these terms, although in a converse way: Bashō has all the appearances of a monk on a pilgrimage but he is not, while the two women are prostitutes yet are, in fact, on a religious pilgrimage. The structural distinction between cleric and commoner has broken down: Bashō and the courtesans can be associated with both the hagi and the moon.39
Embedded in Bashō's curt reply and his poem, then, is an interpretation of the nature and cause of the courtesans' situation and an appropriate course of action for both the courtesans and Bashō. The structure is the same as in the abandoned baby episode: someone in distress confronts Bashō, a convenional interpretation of the situation is given, Bashō gives an alternative interpretation, and then he walks away from the person in distress. The perspective—and, we might say, the point—is the same in both passages. Bashō and the distressed persons alike embody the fundamental aspects of reality: mujō and the endless journey. This perspective emphasizes the deep bond between Bashō and the baby and courtesans. It also leads Bashō to leave them as they were, abandoned and fully exposed to impermanence.
As in the abandoned baby episode, Geertz's notion of religion helps clarify the significance of the courtesan passage. In Geertz's terms, Bashō presents the courtesans' distress as a problem of meaning in which there is a desperate need for an explanation of the suffering and also for a way of responding to it. The courtesans see their suffering in terms of being trapped in the condition of being guideless wanderers in an impermanent world. For them this suffering arises from karmic retribution. While Bashō also sees their situation as one of being wanderers exposed to impermanence, he interprets it as arising not from the wheel of karma but from the pervasive and fundamental character of mujō. Thus they cannot escape from their situation, but it is sufferable for it arises from and reflects the basic character of reality. Their suffering makes sense.
Bashō's ‘normative guide for action’ is to ‘go, entrusting yourself to the going of others’. They must accept their condition of being wanderers in a world of impermanence and recognize their fundamental affinity with everyone else. A phrase in the opening passage of The Narrow Road could be turned into an admonition with the same meaning: ‘each day being a journey, make the journey home’ (hibi tabi ni shite, tabi o sumika to su). For Bashō, the courtesans must accept and continue their wandering. If they do, they too can achieve a settled sense of moving with the deepest grain of reality.
The affective aspect of the Problem of Meaning—how to feel—is not as central to this passage as it is to the abandoned baby episode where Bashō raises the question in the Saru o kiku poem. However, the courtesans' distress is an important problem: they seem to be on the verge of emotional chaos and an inability to endure their anxiety. Although the tones of the two passages are very different, the two primary aspects of Bashō's emotional response in the abandoned baby episode—compassion for their condition yet acceptance of it—are present in the courtesan passage as well. In the baby episode Bashō's compassion was paramount because the child was dying and it could not benefit greatly from his advice about accepting fate. In the courtesan passage, however, the primary problem is to bring the courtesans to accept their condition, to make their condition sufferable to them and to anchor their emotions in the nature of reality.
Although the term itself is never mentioned, the notion of ‘heaven's will’ or fate seems to be operative in this passage. Bashō rejects the courtesans' plea for aid for the same fundamental reason he leaves the baby by the roadside: their condition is heaven's will, the result not of the karma of their past but of the basic fabric of reality. The term ‘heaven's will’ does appear, however, in another section of The Narrow Road, one with important similarities to the passages on the abandoned baby and the courtesans. Again Bashō encounters suffering, but this time it is his own.
That night we stopped over at Iizuka. There was a hot spring there, and we bathed and rented a room. It was a crude, shabby place, with straw mats over a dirt floor. There wasn't even a lamp, so we bedded down by the light of the sunken fireplace. Night came, thunder rolled, rain poured down. The roof leaked over our heads and I was harassed by fleas and mosquitoes: I could not sleep. My old illness too cropped up and I almost fainted. Finally the sky of the short summer night began to lighten, and we set off once again. But the night's afflictions stayed with me and my spirits would not rise. We borrowed a horse and headed for the post town of Ko-ori. My distant journey remained, I was anxious about my illness, and yet this was a pilgrimage to far places, a resignation to self-abandonment and impermanence. Death might come by the roadside but that is heaven's will. With those thoughts my spirits recovered a bit, I began to step broadly on my way, and jauntily I crossed the Okido Barrier at Date.40
NKBT 46:76
This is perhaps Bashō's most vivid portrayal of his own sufferings on the road. The annoyances of travelling are mentioned in other passages as well but this passage presents a man at the edge of endurance. The chronic illness was a stomach ailment, possibly acute diarrhoea or haemorrhoids, and it both plagued and weakened him. The fact that this section comes fairly early in the journey emphasizes the seriousness of his situation and suggests how easy it would have been to be disheartened.
The passage is not simply an account of hard times and resolve. It is one person's encounter with the Problem of Meaning: how to understand suffering and, understanding it, how to endure it. Suffering becomes sufferable, as we have seen, when it can be understood and meaningful, rooted in the nature of the universe. As Geertz says of the Navaho sing, the need is to ‘give the stricken person a vocabulary in terms of which to grasp the nature of his distress and relate it to the wider world.’ A sing, he says,41
is mainly concerned with the presentation of a specific and concrete image of truly human, and so endurable, suffering powerful enough to resist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness raised by the existence of intense and unremovable brute pain.
Bashō finds the image of truly human and endurable suffering in the idea of a pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage of a particular type, not the kind the courtesans undertook in which there was a defined goal and hopes of changing their essential condition. Bashō's was an endless pilgrimage, the full exposure of himself to and an embodiment of the essential condition of ‘abandonment’ and impermanence, the qualities which the baby and the courtesans grieved over. However brute and unremovable his pain, it became meaningful and sufferable because it was, like death on the road, heaven's will.
Heaven's will, understood in terms of the fundamental and pervasive character of impermanence and the journey, ties these three passages together. It also gives them a particularly religious character for, in each of them, suffering is presented as a Problem of Meaning which is solved by recourse to this particular notion of fate. By referring to the ultimacy and inescapability of mujō and the journey, Bashō explains suffering in terms of the fundamental nature of reality and also presents norms of conduct and types of feeling that accord with that reality. The final image of the Ōkido barrier passage is one that well characterizes Bashō's way of life and its religious character. If religion provides the settled sense of moving with the deepest grain of reality, and reality is ultimately understood as impermanence and an endless journey, then surely Bashō's religious life can be seen in the image of a wayfarer crossing yet another barrier.
Notes
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The texts used in this article are found in Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, Tōkyō, Iwanami Shoten, 1959, vol. 46, abbreviated here as NKBT 46, followed by the page number. I would like to thank Professors Edwin Good and Susan Matisoff for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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For four very different approaches to Bashō's religiosity see Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave: Bashō's Haiku and Zen, New York, Weatherhill, 1978, James Foard, ‘The Loneliness of Matsuo Bashō’, in Frank E. Reynolds and Donald Capps (eds), The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religion, The Hague, Mouton, pp. 363-91, Richard Pilgrim, ‘The Religio-Aesthetic of Matsuo Bashō’, Eastern Buddhist, n.s. 10.1 (May 1977), pp. 35-53, and Makoto Ueda, ‘Impersonality in Poetry: Bashō on the Art of Haiku’, in his Literary and Art Theories in Japan, Cleveland, Western Reserve University Press, 1967, pp. 145-72. Among the many works in Japanese on this subject, see Umehara Takeshi, ‘Bashō to Shūkyō’, in Nakamura Yukihiko (ed.), Sakka no Kiban, Tōkyō, Kadogawa Shoten, 1970, pp. 269-314, and Yamamoto Tadaichi, ‘Bashō Bungaku no Shūkyōsei’, in Bukkyō Bungaku Kenkyū, 2 (1964), pp. 247-81.
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Landscapes and Portraits, Tokyo, Kodansha, 1971, p. 106, n. 15.
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The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, p. 152. A comparison of Bashō's last travel journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi) with a factual record of the journey made by his travelling companion Sora reveals Bashō's fictionalizing of that journal. Unfortunately we have no such factual record of his other journeys. For an argument that Bashō probably did not alter factual details in his earliest journals, see Imoto Nōichi, Bashō: Sono Jinsei to Geijutsu, Tōkyō, Kodansha, 1968, pp. 109-11. However, without corroborative evidence such judgements are conjectural. In any event, we are dealing here not with historical questions about Bashō's biography but hermeneutical questions about his literary texts. The characters and events in his journals are ‘fictional’, literary constructions that may or may not reflect historical characters and events. Except in a few instances where I am clearly talking about Bashō as author, the term ‘Bashō’ in this paper refers to a persona in a literary work.
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Ogata Tsutomu, Matsuo Bashō, Tōkyō, Chikuma Shobō, 1971, p. 117.
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For a discussion of the allusions to Chuang Tzu and Kuang-wen, see Ogata, pp. 115-16. The ancient referred to in the opening passage of the journal is generally considered to be Kuang-wen.
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The image of wayfaring and death are also found in the opening of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. See page 6 for a translation.
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Imoto, pp. 111-12.
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Ibid., p. 111.
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Bashō, Tōkyō, Shincho, 1957, p. 55.
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The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books, 1973, p. 100.
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Ibid., See also p. 108.
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Ibid., p. 100.
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Ibid., p. 104.
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Ibid., p. 106.
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Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968, p. 98.
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Ibid., p. 97.
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Ibid., p. 102.
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The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 104 and 108.
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Thus I use the term ‘ethical aspect’ in a broad sense that includes not only good and evil but also how things ought to be and how we ought to live.
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This is not to say there always is such a connection, or that it is always known, only that such a connection must be possible and knowable. See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 100.
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Among the many discussions of mujō, see Isode Tadamasa, Mujō no Kōzō, Tokyo, Kodansha, 1976, Karaki Junzō, Mujō, Tōkyō, Chikuma Shobō, 1965, Nishida Masayoshi, Mujō no Keifu, Tōkyō,Ōfusha, 1970, Mujō no Bungaku, Tokyo, Nanawa Shobō, 1975, and William LaFleur, ‘Inns and Hermitages: The Structure of Impermanence’, in The Karma of Words, pp. 60-79.
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The poem is said to be by Kenkō. Translation by Keene p. 129.
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My contention is that Bashō felt this settled sense insofar as he was a wanderer. This does not rule out feelings of regret or anxiety stemming from other aspects of his life. The question of Bashō's tranquility—and lack of it—is a complex one and not at issue here.
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The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 104.
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Ibid., p. 168.
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Despite reference to Sora, this encounter is not mentioned in his record of the journey of 1689-90. It is presumed to be a fabrication by Bashō: the characters are probably fictional in a historical as well as literary sense. The term I have translated as ‘daughters of the shore’ is ama no ko. The term literally reads ‘child of the sea’ but means both ‘daughter of a fisherman’ and ‘prostitute’. This second meaning arose from the frequency of brothels at sea ports. See also the poem cited on p. 20.
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For another discussion of this theme, see LaFleur, p. 75.
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The poem is in the Shinkokinshū, no. 1701.
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The endings -nashi and -zu both indicate the negative.
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See his ‘Inns and Hermitages’.
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Translation by LaFleur, pp. 70-71.
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Ibid., p. 71.
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Ibid.
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For an English translation, see Royall Tyler, Pining Wind: A Cycle of Nō Plays, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University China-Japan Program, 1978, pp. 75-87.
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The Karma of Words, p. 74.
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Ibid., p. 173, n. 33.
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For a translation that makes this identification, see Nobuyuki Yuasa's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Baltimore, Penguin, 1966, p. 132. For interpretations that reject this identification, see Shigetomo Ki, Basho no Kenkyū, Tōkyō, Bunri Shoin, 1971, p. 324, and LaFleur, p. 77.
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In the Nō play Eguchi, the courtesan is closely associated with the moon.
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As he often does, Bashō plays on the meaning of the place name: Date means dandyish or jaunty.
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The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 105. The Navaho sing, according to Geertz, is a religious psychodrama dedicated to removing physical or mental illness.
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