It was one of those moments one stands outside one’s body, staring at the silhouette, dumbstruck, not wanting to believe words coming in. The phoned message from Japan was that the greatest modern Zen poet had died. I waited for the eulogies, a voice to cry out at the passing of a man who made fresh visions of the world, made wild and powerful music out of anything: shells, knitting, peaches, an airplane passing between his legs, the sweet-sour smell coming from a cemetery of unknown soldiers, the crab of memory crawling up a woman’s thigh, a sparrow whose stir can move the universe. A man who showed that things loved or despised were, when all’s said and done, as important and unimportant as each other. But all was silence as I looked out, hoping for a cloud of his beloved sparrows bearing his karma wheel around the earth.
I realized that he might prefer it this way. Yet there remain the masterworks, his gift to us, in spite of his mixed feelings on the handing down of insight with mere words. “If we sit in Zen at all,” he says in the foreword to Afterimages, a collection of his poems, “we must model ourselves on the Bodhidharma, who kept sitting till his buttocks grew rotten. We must have done with all words and letters, and attain Truth itself. As a follower of the tradition of Zen which is above verbalization, I must confess that I feel ashamed of writing poems and having collections of them published. My wish is that through books like this the West will awake to the Buddha’s Truth. It is my belief that Buddhism will travel round the world till it will bury its old bones in the ridges of the Himalayas.”
Yet, paradoxically, Shinkichi Takahashi was one of Japan’s most prolific poets, greatly honored (his Collected Poems won the Ministry of Education’s Prize for Art), thought by the Japanese to be their only poet who could properly be called a Zen poet, for his practice of the discipline was exceptionally pure. He discovered early in life that unless he grappled with the severest of the doctrine’s principles he would not be living, or writing, worthily. Yet, stuffy as this sounds, there was much humor in him, as in all enlightened Zenists:
Afternoon
My hair’s falling fast—
this afternoon
I’m off to Asia Minor.
The Pink Sun
White petals on the black earth,
Their scent filling her nostrils.
Breathe out and all things swell—
Breathe in, they shrink.
Let’s suppose she suddenly has four legs—
That’s far from fantastic.
I’ll weld ox hoofs onto her feet—
Sparks of the camellia’s sharp red.
Wagging her pretty little tail,
She’s absorbed in kitchen work.
Look, she who just last night
Was a crone is girl again,
An alpine rose blooming on her arm.
High on a Himalayan ridge
The great King of Bhutan
Snores in the pinkest sun.
The poet, born in 1901 in a fishing village on Shikoku, smallest of Japan’s four main islands, was largely self-educated, but broadly so: writing extensively on many aspects of Japanese culture, he introduced an important series of art books and had a successful career as a man of letters. Not bad for one who had dropped out of high school and rushed off to Tokyo in hope of a literary career. There he contracted typhus and, penniless, landed in a charity hospital. His circumstances forced him to return to his village. But one day, fired up by a newspaper article on dada-ism, he returned to Tokyo, working as a waiter in a shiruko restaurant (shiruko is red-bean soup with bits of rice cake) and as a “pantry boy” in a newspaper office, running errands and serving tea.
In 1923 he brought out Dadaist Shinkichi’s Poetry. The first copy of it was handed him through the bars of a police cell—at this time he was often in trouble for impulsive actions—and he tore it up without so much as a glance. Other collections followed, but by 1928 he knew his life was in dire need of guidance, and like many troubled artists he sought the advice of a Zen master. He could not have chosen better. Shizan Ashikaga, illustrious Rinzai Zen master of the Shogen Temple, was known to be a disciplinarian, one not likely to be impressed by a disciple’s literary forays.
At first the toughness of the training proved too much. Pacing the temple corridor, he fell unconscious; when he came to, he was incoherent. Later he was to write that this was inevitable, considering how completely different ascetic exercises were from his daily life and with what youthful single-mindedness he had pursued them. He was sent back to his family and virtually locked up in a small (two-mat) room for three long years. During this confinement he wrote many poems, which may have helped him to survive the ordeal and recover.
Back in Tokyo in 1932, Takahashi began attending Master Shizan Ashikaga’s lectures on Zen. Shizan once cautioned him, “Attending lectures cuts no ice. Koan exercise [meditation on Zen problems set by a master] is all-important.” Takahashi became his disciple in 1935. During almost seventeen years of rigorous training he experienced both great hardships and exultations of satori. By 1951, having learned all that he could, he was given, in the master’s own calligraphy, “The Moon-on-Water Hall”—his inka, or testimony that he had successfully completed the full course of discipline, one of only seven over many years so honored by the master.
Takahashi visited Korea and China in 1939 and was deeply impressed by Zenists he met there. He lived chiefly by his writings, and in 1944 began work for a Tokyo newspaper, leaving when its office was bombed out in 1945. He married in 1951 and lived with his wife and their two daughters in great serenity, a life he scarcely could have dreamt of in his turbulent youth.
The poet had distinguished himself in many ways by the time the first translated collection of his poems, Afterimages, appeared (simultaneously in the United States and England in 1970) to much acclaim. A reviewer in the Hudson Review observed that while other poets, East and West, would appear to descend from time to time into the natural world, Takahashi would emerge from it like a seal from the depths of the sea, his constant element. But it wasn’t sea or nature the poet lived in, it was Zen.
Yet that would hardly account for the appeal of his work, especially among fellow poets, throughout the world, with or without interest in Zen. He was foremost an artist. Many aestheti-cians have spoken of the difficulty of defining art, yet some artists have on occasion chosen to speak out, as did Tolstoy in What Is Art? Tolstoy identified three essential ingredients of effective art—individuality, clarity and sincerity—and to the degree that each, in combination with the others, was present, a work could be ranked on a scale of merely acceptable to necessary. Tolstoy was a moralist in all such matters, and never tired of inveighing against aesthetic notions based largely on the pleasure principle, among them “art for art’s sake”—life was too serious for such twaddle.
Though as a Zenist Takahashi was not inclined to theorize on literary matters, he might well have agreed with Tolstoy. Surely none would question the sincerity (integrity?) of his work, and that it should be individual, as all true Zen art, is perhaps axiomatic. It is the remaining essential in Tolstoy’s triad, clarity, that some may claim is critically missing. But as the poet often said, the very nature of the Zen pursuit, the attainment of spiritual awakening, rules out likelihood of easy accessibility to its arts. “When I write poems,” he told me, “no allowances can be made. Thought of a poem’s difficulty never troubles me, since I never consciously make poems difficult.”
A major reason for the difficulty of Zen poems, throughout the fifteen hundred years they have been written, is that many, perhaps the best known and most valued in and out of Zen communities, are those of “mutual understanding” (agyo or toki-no-ge in Japanese). Such poems are basically koan interpretations, as is the following piece, “Collapse,” written by Takahashi early in Zen training:
Time oozed from my pores,
Drinking tea
I tasted the seven seas.
I saw in the mist formed
Around me
The fatal chrysanthemum, myself.
Its scent choked, and as I
Rose, squaring
My shoulders, the earth collapsed.
This, Takahashi told me, was written in response to a koan his master asked him to meditate on, one often given disciples early in training, “Describe your face before you were begotten by your parents.” We observe the poet deep in zazen (formal Zen meditation), experiencing the extraordinary expansions and penetrations sometimes realized by the meditator. Suddenly, in the mist, he sees that face and is repulsed (“Its scent choked”). He rises, freed from it, ready for anything. The old world breaks up, and he enters the new.
Though Takahashi was always forthcoming with me about circumstances that may have led to the making of such poems (I was, after all, his translator), he was reluctant to reveal the manner in which they were received by the master, feeling such revelations would be too intimate. That attitude is only natural, perhaps, and besides, Zenists are cautioned to avoid such disclosures. The poet did confide, however, that the following was his versification of the master’s response to one of his koan-based poems:
Words
I don’t take your words
Merely as words.
Far from it.
I listen
To what makes you talk—
Whatever that is—
And me listen.
It is intriguing to imagine the scene: poet sitting before master for sanzen (a meeting for discussion of progress with koan), daring to complain that his interpretive poem was being misunderstood. “Words,” expressing more than gentle reproach, relates intimately to a special bond, while at the same time it defines perhaps the nature of such talk, in or out of a zendo (meditation hall). As one might suppose, there are no correct interpretations. The koan is meant to dislodge, throw off balance, and the adequate poem reveals to what degree the disciple has righted himself—nothing more or less. And the more successful the interpretation, the finer the poem as poem.
The poem of mutual understanding, important to Zen since the T’ang dynasty, is a clear gauge of progress in discipline. It is not “poem” until such judgment is made, not by a literary critic but by a qualified master. Most awakening poems are of this type, though hardly planned or anticipated. Only a master, aware of his disciple’s needs, lacks and strengths, knows whether the longed-for breakthrough has been made. The poem tells all, accompanied of course by numerous signs in conduct itself, in speech, walk, work and relationship with others.
The Japanese master Daito (1282–1337), when a disciple, was given by his master the eighth koan of Hekiganroku, a Chinese work of great antiquity made up of one hundred Zen problems with commentary. Daito, who gained satori from his struggle with the koan, wrote at least two poems of mutual understanding based on it. Here is the text of the koan and the two most important poems it inspired:
Attention! Suigan, at the end of the summer, spoke to the assembly and said: “For the whole summer I have lectured to the brethren. Look! Has Suigan any eyebrows?” Hofuko said, “He who does robberies has a heart of deceit.” Chokei said, “They grow.” Unmon said, “A barrier!”
Unmon’s barrier pulled down, the old
Path lost. Blue sky’s my home,
My every action beyond man’s reach:
A golden priest, arms folded, has returned.
At last I’ve broken Unmon’s barrier!
There’s exit everywhere—east, west; north, south.
In at morning, out at evening; neither host nor guest.
My every step stirs up a little breeze.
Not all awakening poems are written in response to koan. Often a master, in normal conversation, will unconsciously challenge disciples to grapple with more general things. The subject of Time is much discussed in Zen communities. Takahashi once told me that the following lines came about that way.
Time
Time like a lake breeze
Touched his face.
All thought left his mind.
One morning the sun, menacing,
Rose from behind a mountain,
Singeing—like hope—the trees.
Fully awakened, he lit his pipe
And assumed the sun-inhaling pose:
Time poured down—like rain, like fruit.
He glanced back and saw a ship
Moving toward the past. In one hand
He gripped the sail of eternity,
And stuffed the universe into his eyes.
The American poet Richard Ronan, in his master’s thesis, “Process and Mastery in Bashō and Wallace Stevens,” dealt most convincingly with this and other Takahashi poems. He wrote:
The “lake breeze” is an allusion to the Hindu concept of nirvana, literally to be “blown away,” a concept from which the Japanese satori, enlightenment, is derived. Reaching nirvana/satori, one’s relativity is necessarily blown away, leaving only one’s essential nature, which is identical to that of the Void, the Buddhist Absolute. Having conquered the sun of Time, the speaker inhales it, absurdly smoking his pipe. He consumes the universe by seeing it for the first time as it is. “Devouring time” is devoured by the poet’s satori conquest of the relative.
The conquest of the relative, the leap from the conditioned to an unconditioned plateau of being, is the extraordinary goal of Zen, and it is the reigning paradox of Zen art that work so private, of “mutual understanding,” should have such broad appeal. In order for the Zenist to take the leap, he must attain a state of no-mind (wu-hsin in Chinese)—“All thought left his mind” in Takahashi’s “Time”—an essential precondition of muga, the full identification of observer and observed. The aesthetic term zenkan (pure seeing) has application to all Zen arts, and what it implies about the practitioner is startling: somehow he has won through, crushed the hungering ego, which in the unenlightened bars realization. The true Zen artist, of whatever medium, is a man risen from that smoldering.
Among modern poets, East and West, Shinkichi Takahashi was distinguished largely through the practice of zenkan, identifying effortlessly with all he observed, through which he ennobled not only his art but life itself. Like all awakened Zenists he found no separation between art and life, knowing the achievement of no-mind led not only to right art but to right living. He rarely used such general terms, but on occasion would explain what the practice of zenkan had meant to him. As an artist, he had engaged for years in intense, unobstructed observation. Things moving, stationary; one no more appropriate than another, no circumstance more or less favorable. He always cautioned, as he himself had been, against dualism, assuring that little by little one learns to know true seeing from false, that it was possible to reach the unconditioned. The world, he claimed, is always pure—we, with our dripping mind-stuff, foul it.
So puzzling to most of us. In the West some—Paul Valéry for one—without reference to Zen or other disciplines, turned in horror from the shifting mind, all a-wobble, twisted this way and that, filled with anxieties. Such men have spoken out of the need to subdue the mind, crush the ego, but where have they offered the way to make that possible? We don’t appreciate how wise we are when we speak of troubles being “only in the mind,” for born and heavily nourished there, they become giants that slay. When emptied of them and pointed properly, the mind is no longer a destructive agent: it is the only light we need. Zen has been saying this for fifteen hundred years, never more effectively than through its poets, among whom in our lifetime Shinkichi Takahashi was the most profound.
I last saw the poet in the summer of 1985. He had insisted on postponing entering the hospital so that we might meet at his home in Tokyo. Ten years had passed since our last meeting, in the very same room. Though much changed, so weak he could not stand, there was the same vitality in his voice, the old sparkle in his eyes. In the past we had met chiefly to discuss his poems, pieces I was attempting with Takashi Ikemoto’s help to render into English. Now we laughed together with his gentle wife, remembering old moments. When a common friend took out a camera, he begged him not to waste the film on him but to instead photograph his inka framed on the wall. Suddenly he looked up, smiled at me and said, “You have seen me on the path of life. Now I am on the path of death.” As he spoke, lines from his poem “Life Infinite” flashed through my mind:
Beyond words, this no-thingness within,
Which I’ve become. So to remain
Only one thing’s needed: Zen sitting.
I think, breathe with my whole body—
Marvelous. The joy’s so pure,
It’s beyond lovemaking, anything.
I can see, live anywhere, everywhere.
I need nothing, not even life.
Shinkichi Takahashi was a remarkable poet. Few in our time have encompassed so much, left such a bracing legacy. How he achieved so much will, I am confident, engage the minds and talents of future scholars, but this I will claim for him: he found early in life what his life most needed, lived it, and wrote it as no other could.
The poet died the night of June 4, 1987. I could only lift my head with gratitude for having known him, and I now offer to his memory a few words:
June 5, 1987
While I wash dishes to
Gregorian chants, what
started out a ho-hum
day—the usual round
of doodles, chores,
anxieties—explodes
with a bright swallowtail
joyriding by the window,
looping where by whitest
columbines a robin, head
cocked to love sounds,
watches as a squirrel
near the old pear tree
quivers astride his mate.
The phone rings, bringing
word Shinkichi Takahashi
died last night.
And so
the world goes on. Now
the squirrels scamper
through the branches,
making leaves dance
like the poet’s sparrows
wing-stroking an elegy in air.
LUCIEN STRYK