Introduction to the Japanese Poems

BUDDHISM probably entered Japan in the fifth or sixth century via Korea, but the first great Buddhist teacher in Japan was Kūkai (774–835), who denounced Confucianism and Taoism before journeying to the T’ang dynasty capital of Ch’ang-an to study Buddhism in 804. When he returned to Japan a few years later, he established the “True Word” or “True Speech” (Shingon) school and became legendary. He was a renowned architect, painter, calligrapher, and sculptor, the author of fifty major essays who is also credited with inventing the Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana) and who is often called “the father of classical culture.” It was Kūkai who planted the roots of Buddhism’s place in Japanese arts, crafts, and letters.

There is perhaps the broth of elemental Zen in the poetry of monks like Mansei and Kengei and a few others, but Zen poetry and Zen practice didn’t begin to flourish until the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, following the influence of the “Five Mountains” school in Kyoto that produced, among others, such fine poets as Kōhō Kennichi and the indomitable Musō Soseki.

The history of Zen in Japan generally begins with Myōan Eisai (1141–1215) and his elder, Dainichi Nōnin, both of whom brought Chinese Zen practice to Japan, focusing sharply on the teachings of Bodhidarma (Daruma in Japanese). The “Daruma school” grew along with the Rinzai school that carried on the lineage of Chinese master Lin Chi, but neither grew very quickly or established a literary tradition at the beginning. Zen didn’t have a major literary teacher until Dōgen Kigen founded the Sōtō school in 1227, following several years of study in China.

Orphaned, Dōgen studied Tendai Buddhism while young and was clearly a remarkable child. It is said he read Chinese poetry at the age of four and knew all the classics by the age of ten. His major collection of essays on Zen practice, Shōbōgenzō, runs to ninety-five volumes. He believed that “Bodhi-mind [or Buddha-mind] neither existed from the beginning nor arose recently. It is neither one, nor many. It is not the essence of one’s self, nor of other selves. It does not arise spontaneously. It is not received from the Buddha or bodhisattvas, nor is it a product of our own making. Rather, it arises only through deep spiritual communion between sentient beings and the Buddha.”

He is the Japanese grandmaster advocating shikantaza, or “just sitting” in a state of non-meditation, a role almost comparable to Hui Neng’s role in Chinese Zen. If Dōgen wasn’t often a terrific poet, he was certainly Japan’s most influential Zen essayist of the last millennium, and his teachings often turn up in surprising ways in the poetry of Ryōkan and others.

By far the most influential poet in the Japanese Zen tradition wasn’t Zen at all, but a Jōdo-shū or “Pure Land” Buddhist before turning to the Shingon (“True Word”) school. Saigyō was a famous archer and poet, a monk whose use of sabi (“aloneness”) in his waka (short poems in syllabic lines of 5-7-5-7-7) often opened the eyes of poets and other Zennists to the essential solitariness of serious practice, the solitariness of working toward “enlightenment.” Saigyō was also a traveler who made pilgrimages and wrote poems that inspired generations that followed. However much he believed in the “Pure Land” or the “True Word,” his poetry holds to the very essence of Zen in its grasp of the “aloneness” of the journey toward realization. He made the tiny hut in the wilderness a grand metaphor as well as a palpable reality of his practice.

While Japanese Zen is a direct product of its Chinese wellspring, it is distinctly Japanese in its second cultural habitat. The Japanese tea ceremony bears little resemblance to the classical Chinese tea ceremony. Outside the temple or the zendō, the influence of Zen is seen everywhere in Japanese culture, from corporate gardens to the Noh theatre and musical arts, especially in shakuhachi (vertical bamboo flute), and even in modern butoh dance. It is in the tokonoma, the little alcove given for a scroll and a vase or statue in nearly every home. It lies at the heart of arranging a single flower in a vase, or in pruning a miniature pine in the garden or cultivating bonsai. It is in the straw-fired kilns that produce rough earthen bowls and cups even today. The Zen aesthetic permeates Japanese culture of the last millennium. And yet Zen practice in Japan, as in China, has never really held much appeal for the masses. It is too strict, too severe, allowing for no life after death, no god, no excuses or forgiveness, and no eternal paradise “until all sentient beings become enlightened.”

The short Japanese poem is remarkably different than its Chinese counterpart. It relies far more heavily upon refined sensibility than does the Chinese, which is more rooted in juxtaposed imagery. Chinese is written in kanji, “characters” that include pictographic elements, each word a single syllable pronounced with a rising, level, falling, or hooked tone. Japanese combines kanji that are pronounced differently, but mean the same thing, together with words presented in kana, the Japanese phonetic syllabary. Spoken Japanese is fairly level, with a few accented syllables. The standard classical Chinese poem is written in couplets and in lines of either five or seven syllables, in poems of four or eight lines, usually with a set rhyme scheme. The Japanese poem is usually five lines measured syllabically 5-7-5-7-7, with no set rhyme requirement. Most of the great Zen masters and poets of Japan wrote in both languages and styles, often turning to Chinese for their more didactic poems because in Chinese they could more easily include allusions to and paraphrases (honkadori) of Zen and poetic and philosophical classics, an important element of their art.

Of course poets like Bashō also used honkadori in tanka and haiku. Looking over a great Japanese battleground, Bashō remembers a famous fragment by Tu Fu about how a war had left “the whole country devastated,” and “only mountains and rivers remain.” Thinking on the nature of war, Bashō wrote:

Summer grasses:

all that remains of great soldiers’

imperial dreams

His poem is a brilliant indictment of the stupidity and cruelty of war, and an eloquently compassionate sigh. His echo of the ancient Chinese reminds the reader of just how little has been learned in a millennium. Tu Fu and Po Chu-i were Bashō’s Chinese masters, and Saigyō his literary and spiritual grandfather. In a lifetime of consciously perfecting his practice of both Zen and poetry, indeed of making them one seamless practice, Bashō constantly reexamined his aesthetics, elevating the three-line haiku into an art so clearly superior to anything that preceded or followed him that Japanese poets often remark, “Haiku was born and died with Bashō. Only Issa and Buson approach his standards.”

In selecting the poems for this anthology, I have kept monastic teaching poems to a minimum. Most require extensive footnoting for the Western mind to fully understand their content. Zen master Ikkyū Sōjun, for instance, wrote “Joy Amidst Suffering” in the fifteenth century:

Three cups of sake, and my lips are still dry.

Old Ts’ao-shan finds solace in poverty and loneliness.

But rushing into the burning house,

in one instant we comprehend ten thousand years of pain.

Ts’ao-shan was one of the founders of Sōtō Zen, a school advocating withdrawal from society in pursuit of monastic meditation. The poem refers to a story in which Ts’ao-shan tells a disciple, “You’ve had three cups of the best sake in China and still you complain that your lips are not wet.” The Lotus Sutra, the only sutra containing the direct teaching of the Buddha, refers to this life as “a burning house.” As scholar James Sanford points out, Ikkyū’s poem advocates facing the fire and entering it to “snatch enlightenment from the jaws of death.” The instruction is good, but truly coming to understand the poem requires a lot of Zen scholarship as well as practice. There are thousands and thousands of such poems in the Japanese tradition.

I have included a few instructional poems by Saigyō, Dōgen, Ikkyū, Ryōkan, and others, but have for the most part preferred poems that express Zen without talking about it directly, without instructing in practice or scholarship. Poems presented in couplets and quatrains were written in Chinese. Sanford has translated another poem by Ikkyū:

A NATURAL WAY

The Way of the wise is without knowledge.

How long will the pure scholars linger on?

No Sakyas, no Maitreyas, in Nature.

In place of ten thousand sutras, one song.

This, I believe, is closer to true Zen. Maitreya is the Buddha of all-encompassing love. The term Sakyas refers to the Shakya clan of Shakyamuni, the Buddha. Zen doesn’t promise bliss. It doesn’t promise a life without suffering of various kinds. And knowing ten thousand sutras is not as good as knowing the song in one’s own heart derived from Zen practice.

The “way of poetry” (kadō) of Bashō, the “way of letters” of all kinds, is often said to be more an obstacle than an expression of attainment. And yet poetry is useful in a hundred ways and, despite its Confucian insistence upon the “right words in the right order,” is one of the primary paths to enlightenment. Dōgen wrote, sounding very much like Lao Tzu:

Cast away all speech.

Our words may express it,

but cannot hold it.

The way of letters leaves no trace,

yet the teaching is revealed.