Matsuo Bashō

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Bashō's Ghost

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SOURCE: “Bashō's Ghost,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 18, No. 6, November 1989, pp. 49-54.

[In the following essay, the American poet Hamill explores Bashō's literary and spiritual lineage and maintains that while Bashō studied his predecessors scrupulously, he expressed his freedom by forging a new, truly elegant style that redefined haiku as a full lyric form capable of handling emotional and spiritual depth.]

The moon and the sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

—Basho, Oku no hosomichi

Basho rose long before dawn, but even at such an early hour, he knew the day would grow rosy bright. It was spring, 1689. In Ueno and Yanaka, cherry trees were in full blossom, and hundreds of families would soon be strolling under their branches, lovers walking and speaking softly or not at all. But it wasn't cherry blossoms that occupied his mind. He had long dreamed of crossing the Shirakawa Barrier into the heart of northern Honshu, the country called Oku lying immediately to the north of the city of Sendai. He had patched his old cotton trousers and repaired his bamboo hat. He placed his old thatched-roof hut in another's care and moved several hundred feet down the road to the home of his disciple-patron, Mr. Sampu, making final preparations before embarkation.

On the morning of May 16th, dawn rose through a shimmering mist, Fujiyama faintly visible on the horizon. It was the beginning of the Genroku period, a time of relative peace under the Tokugawa shogunate. But travel is always dangerous. A devotee as well as a traveling companion, Basho's friend, Sora, would shave his head and don robes like a Zen monk, a tactic which often proved helpful at well-guarded checkpoints. Basho had done so himself on previous journeys. Because of poor health, Basho carries extra nightwear in his pack along with his cotton robe or yukata, a raincoat, calligraphy supplies, and of course hanamuke or departure gifts from well-wishers, gifts he found impossible to leave behind.

Basho himself would leave behind a number of gifts upon his death some five years later, among them a journal composed after this journey, his health again in decline, a journal made up in part of fiction or fancy. But during the spring and summer of 1689, he walked and watched. And from early 1690 into 1694, Basho wrote and revised his “travel diary” which is not a diary at all. Oku means “within” and hosomichi means “path” or “narrow road.” The no indicates a possessive. Oku no hosomichi: the narrow road within.

The Oku no hosomichi is not simply a travel journal. Its form, haibun, combines short prose passages with haiku. But the heart and soul of this little book, its kokoro, cannot be found simply by defining form. Basho completely redefined haiku, he transformed haibun. But these accomplishments grew out of arduous studies in poetry, Buddhism, history, Taoism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and some very important Zen training.

Basho was a student of Saigyo, a Buddhist monk-poet who lived five hundred years earlier (1118-1190); Saigyo is the most prominent poet of the imperial anthology, Shin-kokinshu. Like Saigyo before him, Basho believed in co-dependent origination, a Buddhist idea holding that all things are fully inter-dependent, even at point of origin; that no thing is or can be completely self-originating. Basho said of Saigyo, “He was obedient to and at one with nature and the four seasons.” The Samantabhadra-bodhisattva-sutra says, “Of one thing it is said, ‘This is good,’ and of another it is said, ‘This is bad,’ but there is nothing inherent in either to make them ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The ‘self’ is empty of independent existence.”

Basho, dreaming of the full moon as it rises over boats at Shiogama Beach, is not looking outside himself; rather he is seeking that which is most clearly meaningful within, and locating the “meaning” within the context of juxtaposed images, images which are interpenetrating and interdependent. The images arise naturally out of the kokoro or hsin—the heart/soul/mind.

Two hundred years before Basho, Komparu Zenchiku wrote, “The Wheel of Emptiness is the highest level of art of the Noh—the performance is mushin.” The art of artlessness, the act of composition achieved without “sensibility” or style—this directness of emotion expressed without ornament set the standards of the day.

At the time of the compiling of the Man'yoshu in the late 8th century, the Japanese critical vocabulary emphasized two aspects of the poem: kokoro, which included sincerity, conviction, or “heart”; and “craft” in a most particular way. The Man'yoshu poets were admired for their “masculinity,” that is, for uncluttered, direct, and often severe expression of emotion. Their sincerity (makoto) was a quality to be revered.

One of the first karon or literary criticism in Japanese is that of Fujiwara Hamanari (733-799), author of Kakyo-hyoshiki, an essay listing seven “diseases of poetry,” such as having the first and second lines end on the same syllable, or having the last syllable of the third and last lines differ. There were various dissertations on “poem-diseases,” all largely modeled on the original Chinese of Shen Yo (441-513). The idea of studying craft in poetry must have caught on quickly because by 885 the first uta-awase or poetry-writing contests were being held.

At the time of the compilation of the Man'yoshu, very little poetry was being written in Chinese; Hitomaro and Yakamochi, the great 8th century poets of the Man'yoshu, wrote without many allusions to Confucian and Buddhist classics, their poems drawing inspiration from the landscape and experience which is uniquely Japanese. Another court anthology contemporary with the Man'yoshu, the Kaifuso, represents the introduction of poetry written in Chinese, despite a few samples in the Man'yoshu. Through the influence of the monk Kukai, also called Kobo Daishi (774-835), the study of Chinese became the norm for what amounted to a Buddhist aristocracy. As founder of the Shingon or “True Word” sect in Japan, Kukai followed a tradition of secret oral teachings passed on from Master to disciple, and had himself spent two years studying in China under Hui Kuo (764-805). The later influence of Sugawara no Michizane established Chinese as the language of scholarly poets, so much so that upon his death, Michizane was enshrined as a god of literature and calligraphy. His followers found Japanese forms too restrictive for their multi-layered poetry. Every good poet was a teacher of poetry in one way or another, many taking on disciples. Michizane's influence was profound. He advocated both rigorous scholarship and genuine sincerity in composition, his own verses substantially influenced by the T'ang poet, Po Chu-i. The form was shih or lyric verse composed in five or seven character lines written in Chinese, but unlike most earlier Japanese poets, Michizane's poems were deceptively simple, and like the poetry of Po Chu-i, strengthened by a combination of poignancy and conviction. Poetry written in Chinese was called kanshi, and Michizane established it as a major force.

In his kana (phonetic alphabet) preface to the Kokinshu in the 10th century, Ki no Tsurayuki, author of the famous Tosa Diary, lists “six types” (rokugi) of poetry:

1. soe-uta: suggestive or indirect expression of feeling;


2. kazoe-uta: clear, direct expression of feeling;


3. nazurae-uta: parabolic expression;


4. tatoe-uta: expression that conceals powerful emotion;


5. tadagoto-uta: refinement of a traditional expression;


6. iwai-uta: poem expressing congratulations or praise.

Tsurayuki's list owes something to Lu Chi's “catalogue of genres” in his 3rd century Chinese Art of Writing (Wen Fu), which is itself indebted to various treatises on the classic Confucian poetry anthology, Shih Ching or Classic of Poetry. Much of the penchant for cataloguing and classifying types of poetry is the result of the Confucion classic, Ta Hsueh or Great Learning, in which Master Kung (Confucius) says “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name,” and that when “things are properly identified, they fall into natural categories and understanding [and, consequently, action] becomes orderly.” Lu Chi, the dedicated student of Confucius, reminds us that the art of letters has saved governments from certain ruin. He finds within the study of writing itself a way to set his own life in order. Studying Chinese, the Japanese literati picked up Lu Chi's habit of discussing poetry in terms of form and content. And from the 5th century Chinese scholar, Liu Hsieh, drew the term amari no kokoro, a translation of Liu's original yu wei or “after-taste.” As a critical term, it would be used and re-shaped, and used again, still a part of literary evaluation in the late 20th century. Narihira says of a poem in the Kokinshu,Kokoro amarite—kotoba tarazu,” or “Plenty of heart; not enough words.” Kuronushi says, “Kokoro okashikute, sama iyashi,” or “Interesting kokoro, but a rather common form.” The poet strives for a quality called amari no kokoro, meaning that the heart/soul of the poem must reach far beyond the words themselves.

For Basho, this most often meant a resonance found in nature. When he invokes the call of the little mountain bird, kankodori, the name of the bird invokes its lonely cry. Things are as they are. Insight permits him to perceive a natural poignancy in the beauty of temporal things—mono no aware. Aware originally meant simply emotion initiated by engagement of the senses. In its own way, this phrase is Japan's equivalent of William Carlos Williams's dictum, “No ideas but in things,” equally misappropriated, misapplied, and misunderstood. In The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris's study of The Tale of Genji, he says of aware, “In its widest sense it was an interjection or adjective referring to the emotional quality inherent in objects, people, nature, and art, and by extension it applied to a person's internal response to emotional aspects of the external world … in Murasaki's time [ca. 100 A.D.] aware still retained its early catholic range, its most characteristic use in The Tale of Genji is to suggest the pathos inherent in the beauty of the outer world, a beauty that is inexorably fated to disappear together with the observer. Buddhist doctrines about the evanescence of all living things naturally influenced this particular content of the word, but the stress in aware was always on direct emotional experience rather than on religious understanding. Aware never entirely lost its simple interjectional sense of ‘Ah!’”

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