after Basho, Buddha, and Japan

two samples below from 'An Other Road Into the Heartland'

Invocation

After much time negotiating: lockers to store our bags, train schedules to Misawa (where my daughter and her husband now reside), and subway connections; we rise to the Asa-kusa district of Tokyo and begin our day walking towards Senso-ji, Tokyo's largest Buddhist temple complex. But first we need to negotiate the gauntlet of shops and people lining the narrow street leading to Kannon Hall. As we exit the first arcade of trinkets, souvenirs, and exotic foodstuffs, a young Japanese gentleman in tanktop and khakis and his wife clothed in a colorful kimono gently waylay me, asking if their young son might practice his English. Explaining that we only have this single day to see the sights of Tokyo, I almost extricate myself from the situation, but Emmy and Beverly have come back to see why I tarry so. So now we must have pictures! The poor boy is in a mild state of shock. Still, though a bit sheepishly, he offers the peace sign to each view-finder, and our first full day here in Japan.

everyone is talking
but I’m understanding
nothing but the signs

Sayonara

The afternoon is getting late. We shop for souvenirs, then stop at a restaurant. When finished we walk to the train station to return by land to Shiogama and the car. As we wait, a vision of the past walks by. He's dressed in ancient Japanese attire, wearing straw sandals and a rice hat, treading slowly towards the shore of Matsushima. Maybe he's a monk. Maybe he works in costume at some tourist at-traction. But I prefer to imagine a third possibility: it's Basho bidding us sayonara, leaving our collective dream. The Basho pilgrimage is ending; he’s prepared us well for what comes next.

like Basho I have followed
footsteps of a poet
seeking his inspiration

Dreaming Poetics 7: Basho as Traveling Poet

from Bashô and the Mastery of Poetic Space in Oku no hosomichi
by Steven D. Carter
in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 120, No. 2 pp190-198.
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If we want a better understanding of Oku no hosomichi as a product and not just a by-product of Basho's professional practice, then, it may be that we should start by seeing that record in terms of its genre affiliations, which connect it back to a long tradition of travel writing by poets in similar circumstances.
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Nonetheless, it is clear that his foremost concern is not to guide tourists, but poets-and less with telling them how to get to specific sites than with instructing them in how to travel as poets. What above all he wants to create is an instructive image of himself as a poet on the road, responding to challenges, practicing his hermeneutic expertise. One thinks, for instance, of his famous description of Ryushakuji…
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So well known is the hokku produced there that one must remind oneself that the trip to Ryushakuji was actually a detour for the poet and was nowhere on his itinerary. In that sense, the hokku can be said to have come about almost by accident. Nevertheless, it was Basho's dedication to the hermeneutic enterprise-the challenge of striding out, and of converting the experience of landscape into poetry-that made the accident possible. Without the dedication required in climbing up the long trail to the temple, neither the experience at the top nor the famous poem would ever have happened.
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There are many other prescriptions for the traveling poet in Basho’s text. Perhaps the most obvious is that one must go the road alone, or at least as if alone; hence the scarce mention of group activities (one wonders if in some way time spent on the road felt like a consolation to those who were so involved in group activities at every stop) and the tendency to treat experience as solitary even when it was not…
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Another feature of the text that can be attributed to established rhetorical practice is the constant reminder that poetic travel is movement through time as well as space as Basho states explicitly in a passage about a stone monument-again something not on his itinerary in Ichikawa Village, near Matsushima….
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But there are also lessons in thetext specifically for haikai poets, indeed for Basho's own students, who would be primary readers of his record. The most important of these is that the haikai poet should be open to all experience as "literary" in a way that poets of the more courtly forms of the past generally were not. It is for this reason that in Oku no hosomichi we have references not only to historical figures such as Saigyo and Yoshitsune, but also to a host of locals…..
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Basho has become a truly transcendent figure, reified almost to the point of non-existence as a historical being. An account of his actual practice as both traveler and travel writer may help to show him for what he was-very much a human being, involved in struggles political and otherwise, a professional practitioner entangled in discursive negotiations and caught up in the nitty-gritty challenges of life on the road.
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Dreaming Poetics 6: Saigyo in Hiraizumi

"The usual list of ancient capitals would be Nara, Kyoto, and Kamakura, but some might add Hiraizumi to the list, for in the twelfth century it was the seat of power for a family of warlords that dominated the northernmost part of Honshu. Its visitors have included two of Japan's most beloved poets. Basho, a quintessential Buddhist traveler, recounted his observations in a particularly moving section of his Oku no hosomichi, but by the time Basho went the remaining vestiges of Hiraizumi's ancient glory would have been generally the same as those the modern tourist sees. In contrast, Saigyo, the other great poetic visitor, saw Hiraizumi at the peak of its splendor. In fact, he went twice, first as a young poet in 1144 and again more than 40 years later as an old monk seeking funds to rebuild Todaiji, which had been burnt in the wars between the Minamoto and the Taira. Although Saigyo too was a Buddhist, he seems to have taken little interest in Hiraizumi's famed religious edifices, for they merit only passing reference in the poems he wrote there, none of which appears in the familiar anthologies of translations. To rectify this omission, here is one that at least mentions what today is Hiraizumi's most famous temple:

Because of misdeeds they had committed, many monks from Nara had been sent away to the far north. When I met them at a place called Chuson and told them news from the capital, their tears flowed. It was very touching. Because this was such a rare event, I promised to write down the story, if I survived. To express my feelings in a distant land, I recited:

It is tears
that flow
in the Koromo River,
as we recall
the ancient capital.

Robert Borgen in Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1. (Winter, 2001), pp. 227-232.

Dreaming Poetics 5: from Reading Basho at Matsushima by Kitamura Tokoku

Beautiful scenery inspires everyone to some degree. It endows any rustic peasant with a poetic spirit and makes him a wanderer. Many so-called poets, however, think that they must compose a poem about the scene. They try to write the poem without allowing the scene itself to create the poem.
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Consider the fact that in his time, Basho was far more obliged to compose a poem than writers today, who must fabricate something out of whole cloth. How shameful it must have been for him to travel to the most scenic spot in Japan and then leave without writing a single poem! But Basho wrote something no mediocre rhymester could: the volume of Narrow Roads of the North spread out before me.
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I have always said that the greatest scenery kills writing. But there is something else I now know: the greatest scenery not only kills writing, it swallows up the 'I' as well. To be speechless before the greatest scenery is to have the whole of one's 'I' absorbed by it, to proceed in a daze, not knowing whether we are here or there. It steals our self; or rather, our self is drawn into it, to become lost in the dark unknown.
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When we reach this point, there is no poetry, no scenery, no means to distinguish between what is self and what is other. I call this 'union'. The more lasting our union, the more of the Divine we receive, and the more of the Divine will be present in a poem we compose afterwards. As this union lasts, we begin to see that mountains and rivers, trees and plants, all possess the same life-force that we do.
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In such realms, the poet must be satisfied with no poems. Is what I've read true-that Basho did not write a poem when he came to Matsushima? Or could I be wrong? For me this one volume can lead to salvation. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether my explanation has any merit, such were my feelings the night I spent at Matsushima. When I returned home and read over Narrow Roads, I saw that Basho wrote the following at Matsushima:

Is this the handiwork of Oyamatsumi in the ancient past of the mighty gods? Who could ever paint or describe in words the divine artistry of the Lord of Nature?

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from Reading Basho at Matsushima by Kitamura Tokoku translated by Michael C. Brownstein in Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 45, No. 3. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 305-306.

Basho Poetics 3: Detaching from Your Self

The Master said, "Learn of the pine from the pine, learn of the bamboo from the bamboo." In other words, one must become detached from the self.

If one understands this idea of "learning" in one's own way, the result will be no learning at all. "To learn" means to enter into the object and to feel the subtlety that is revealed there; then the poem grows. For example, no matter how clearly one represents an object, if the poem lacks the feeling that arises naturally out of the object, the self and the object would form a duality and the feeling would not have attained makoto. The poetic meaning would have come from the self.

trans Barnhill

Basho Poetics 2: The Disease of Knowledge

There is a disease characteristic of the skilled artist. In the Master's words, "haikai should be entrusted to the very young" and "it is the poetry of those with a beginner's mind that is most trustworthy." He often made comments such as this, and would point out all the maladies of the skilled.

Upon entering the inner life of an object’s makoto, one can either cultivate the spirit or kill it. If one kills the creative energy, the poem cannot move with the spirit. The Master said, "haikai should move with the spirit," and "if the rhythm is bad, the harmony will be spoiled." In this way the spirit is disrupted and killed.

In addition, sometimes the Master even said "in making a poem it may be good to coax the spirit." This is an injunction to cultivate it by beguiling it back to life.

Skilled disciples can lapse into bad habits, fostering a self which desires to make only excellent poems. Their discriminating minds then shut the gate to free expression, and they grow weary in their deliberations. In this condition, they are oblivious to the spirit, and their minds are foolish.

trans Barnhill

Basho Poetics: Constancy and Transformation

In the master's view of the *fûga *(poetic spirit), there are two principles: constancy through ten thousand generations, and transformation of the moment. Everything is contained in these two principles, and the two are rooted in one thing. That one thing is the *makoto* (genuineness) of * fûga*.

If one does not understand constancy, one can truly understand nothing of * fûga*. Constancy is unrelated to whether something is new or old; it is not concerned with transformation or the flow of change. It is based firmly on * makoto*. When we consider the verse of the generations of poets, we find generations of change. Yet whether the poems are new or old, what moves us today has not altered from what was moving in the past; many are the poems with *aware *(deep feeling). This we should understand as constancy.

On the other hand, it is the law of nature that life undergoes a thousand transitions and ten thousand changes. Were there no transformation, aesthetic style could never be made new. That style does not change is because it remains confined to the currents of one time only, and there is no pursuit of *makoto*. One who does not concentrate his mind on this pursuit does not realize the transformation inherent in *makoto*. He merely follows after others. One who does pursue *makoto* simply cannot stop at one place; he advances naturally to the next step. As time moves on, the art of haikai will go through its own thousand transitions and ten thousand changes, but all transformations based on * makoto* will be part of the master's art.

trans David Barnhill

Taos Meditation: Frank Waters on Ramana Dropping a Paradigm - Greatest Hits - Volume 11

Since I've begun blogging non-poetry at Dropping a Paradigm, and not posting anything here lately, until I do again, I'll post one post a week here from Paradigm.

Here I stand, sniffing the early morning breeze and spying out the vast landscape like an old coyote, as if to assure myself I am in the center flow of its invisible, magnetic currents. To the sun, and to the two oppositely polarized peaks, El Cuchillo and the Sacred Mountain, I offer my morning prayers. Then, letting the bright warming rays of the sun engulf me, I give myself up to a thoughtless silence.

One, I suppose, could call it meditation. I don’t, for I’m not sure how one is supposed to meditate. Once, I attended an hour’s talk on meditation given by a noted esotericist from England. He carefully explained the best hours of the day to observe it; how to choose a corner of the room; what kind of a religious painting or photograph to hang on the wall with a burning candle beneath it; the choice of the proper incense to burn; the posture to assume. By then his hour was up. I left the hall, thinking of a question that Dr. Evans-Wentz once had asked Sri Ramana Maharshi, the famous sage of India.

“Is it helpful to sit on a tiger’s skin?” he asked. “Should one sit in the lotus position, or may the legs be kept straight? What posture is best?”

“All of this is unnecessary,” the Maharshi answered. “Let the mind assume the right posture. That is all.”

It is enough for me, as a prelude to a busy day, to attain for a moment at sunrise a measure of unbroken silence, of profound stillness within.

~Frank Waters from ‘Mountain Dialogues’