8
The Morning Glory
In the latter half of 1949 and 1950, Suzuki spent a great deal of time in the United States, lecturing at the University of Hawaii and subsequently at Claremont College. As evidenced by his letters and interview accounts from that period, the haiku central to this article, Chiyo’s “Asagao,” was a frequent topic of consideration for Suzuki. This reflection on the import of Chiyo’s haiku is representative in several important ways of much of Suzuki’s postwar writings on Asian religion and culture, the most prominent of which is Zen and Japanese Culture, which was published in 1959. (See Jaffe, “Introduction.”) As with much of Suzuki’s writing on Japanese culture, including “The Role of Nature in Zen Buddhism,” which is included in this volume, “The Morning Glory” shares the flaws that have been heavily criticized by the scholars who were mentioned in the introduction to this volume. In particular, those problems include Suzuki’s tendency to present Japanese culture in an overly idealized, essentialized, romantic, and static fashion in opposition to a technocentric, rational, and monolithic West. Without question, Suzuki’s claims about traditional Japanese culture must be weighed carefully and evaluated against the contexts in which Suzuki was writing, which include the push in the pre–Pacific War period to establish Shinto as the basis of Japanese identity, the devastation across Asia that culminated with Japan’s complete defeat in 1945, and the rise of comparative East-West philosophy in the postwar period that was stimulated by the East-West Conferences hosted by the University of Hawaii. Nonetheless, there is much of value that can be gleaned from Suzuki’s eloquent reflection on “The Morning Glory.” Read obliquely, not as a source of information about Japanese cultural history, but, rather, as an examination of the relationship between poetic language and religious experience as well as a reflection on the nature of awakening, we can learn much from this essay. For Suzuki the concision and tolerance for paradox characteristic of much poetry bear a close resemblance to the expressions of awakening in Buddhism, including Zen and Pure Land. In giving expression to one’s deep feelings, poetry, according to Suzuki, is similar to the language used in Zen. “Language, in case they [Zen masters] resort to words, serves as an expression of feelings or moods or inner states, but not of ideas, and therefore it becomes entirely incomprehensible when we search its meaning in the words of the masters as embodying ideas. Of course, words are not to be entirely disregarded inasmuch as they correspond to the feelings or experiences” (Suzuki, Zen Essays [First Series], 274). In his description in this essay of the noetic, conative, and affective dimensions of awakening, we have one of the most concise and clearest expressions of Suzuki’s thought concerning the nature of realization.
Written in July 1950, “The Morning Glory” first was published in The Way, the journal of the Higashi Honganji Young Buddhist Association in Los Angeles in two parts: Way 2, no. 6 (November 1950): 1–4; and 3, no. 1 (January 1951): 2–6. The article was reproduced in two parts that same month in Busshin, the journal of the Sōtō denomination Los Angeles temple, Zenshūji, in the February (pp. 1–7) and March (pp. 1–5) issues. The essay has not previously appeared in an anthology or been translated into Japanese.
• • •
Each country of each climate has its own beautiful flowers, admired by the people of that country. Among other flowers I like the morning glory, which is blooming now in Japan, I believe. The plant is not native to the Japanese climate; originally, I am told, it came somewhere from the tropical zone and likes the sun and heat very much. But the bright sunlight is too strong for its flowers and their beauty is best in the early morning, hence the name “morning glory”; in Japanese it is called “morning face” (asagao).
Some of the flowers are as large as seven inches in diameter, and of various colors. Of whatever colors they may be, they look, before the sun is fully up, so fresh, vivid, and beautiful, especially when they are laden with dew-drops. They are not fragrant as is the rose or the violet; but the vivid freshness of the color takes one’s mind away from earthly things.
As new flowers bloom every morning, they are always pure and altogether unspoiled. They look like the celestial maidens (devi) just out of a bath. It is such a pleasure to look at them very early in the morning as soon as one gets out of bed. The air is fresh and cool and invigorating; psychologically, physiologically, and perhaps, if I may say so, meteorologically, the conditions of a summer morning in Japan are suited to the appreciation of the beauty of the morning glory.
The morning glory reminds me of the haiku composed by Chiyo, woman-poet of Kaga, which is my native country. In Japanese it reads:
Asagao ya,
Tsurube torarete
Morai mizu.
Literally translated into English, it is something like this:
Oh, morning glory!
The bucket taken captive,
Water begged for.
The idea is this: One summer morning Chiyo the poetess got up early in the morning wishing to draw water from the well, which is outdoors, as visitors to the rural districts of Japan must have noticed. She found the bucket entwined by the blooming morning glory vine. She was so struck with the beauty of the flower that she forgot all about her business and stood before it thoroughly absorbed in contemplation. The only words she could utter were, “Oh, morning glory!”
At the time, the poetess was not conscious of herself or of the morning glory as standing against her. Her mind was filled with the flower, the whole world turned into the flower, she was the flower itself. In fact, here she saw something more than the morning glory, she felt reality in its aspect of beauty. When she regained her consciousness the only words she could utter were, “Oh, morning glory!” in which all that she experienced found its vent.
With the return of her consciousness she remembered what she was after. She could easily disengage the vine, perhaps without even hurting the flower; but she did not feel like doing this, she had no desire to disturb or soil the flower with her human hands. She just wished to see beauty left in its absolute purity. So, she went to a neighbor to get the water needed for her earthly work that morning.
We can say that Chiyo’s seventeen-syllable haiku is no more than the statement of one of the commonest events which takes place in Japanese country life, and that there is in it nothing specifically appealing to one’s poetic imagination. But poetry is in things of our daily experience, and it is the mind that detects or feels poetry in them. It was Chiyo’s mind that discovered the celestial purity for the first time in the morning glory and gave expression to it in the form of a haiku.
The first line, “Oh, morning glory!” does not contain anything intellectual in it, nothing explanatory of the feeling the author cherished at the time; it is the feeling, pure and simple, and we may interpret it in any way we like. The following two lines, however, determine the nature and depth of what was in the mind of the poetess: when she tells us about going to the neighbor for water we know that she just left the morning glory as she found it. She does not go to any length of explanation as to why she left the flower undisturbed. If she did, the haiku would lose all of its charm and suggestiveness.
Tennyson has a noted little verse on a flower:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies:—
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all
I should know what God and man is.1
Compare this with Chiyo’s haiku, and we notice at once how intellectual the Western poet is, and also how murderous. While Chiyo leaves the flower alone, Tennyson plucks it, root and all, and wants to know what God is, what man is. The knower stands away from the object and subjects the latter to analysis, which is the most cruel and indirect way of knowing reality. This is, however, characteristic of the Western mind. Tennyson’s attitude is the scientific approach to reality; it is true that he does not dissect the flower as the scientist would, for Tennyson tries to read the mysteries of nature by plucking the flower from the crannies, holding it before him, and intensely gazing at it. On the other hand, the Japanese poetess does nothing of the sort, she does not even dare touch the flower, much less pluck it, for in her inmost consciousness there is the feeling that she is perfectly one with reality; this consciousness may still remain deeply buried in her Unconscious, but unless she had not felt it, however dimly, she would never have left the flower blooming on the vine. Very likely she might have been tempted to pluck it and arrange it in her flower-vase—this is probably what most Japanese would do.
In Chiyo’s mind there was something akin to the sentiment felt by one of the ancient Japanese thirty-one syllable uta poets:
These wild flowers
Blooming in profusion
I would not pluck;
I dedicate them as they are
To all Buddhas in the ten quarters.
The morning glory Chiyo discovered one summer morning was a perfect symbol of Buddhahood, like the lotus-flower in the Pure Land of Amitābha Buddha. In the Japanese feeling for nature there is something closely approaching the religious sentiment. There was a Zen monk reciting Namu-amida-butsu for each weed he plucked, and I believe there are still some horticulturists, even in modern Japan, who perform a Buddhist mass for plants sacrificed for the cultivation of a better breed.
Bashō, the greatest haiku poet of the Tokugawa era, in fact the founder of modern haiku poetry of Japan, has this:
When closely seen
It is the nazuna plant blooming
Along the hedge.
The nazuna is an insignificant flowered weed, ordinarily passed unnoticed. But it did not escape Bashō’s poetic scrutiny. While walking by the hedge, not very well taken care of, Bashō happened to notice certain colored objects somewhat distinct from the green; he stooped to examine them and found them to be the flowering nazuna plants. They were indeed insignificant enough, and not at all pretty in any special way. But Bashō perceived in them something more than our ordinary matter-of-fact minds could. Whether or not pretty, they were doing their best in accordance with what Nature assigned to them. They are not so rich and gorgeous as the tree-peony, they are not so refined and aristocratic as the chrysanthemum, and they are not at all as fragrant as the rose; but as far as they are of Nature, they are just as perfect and beautiful as any other flower. More than that, they have the enviable virtues of being humble and unpretentious, which is far more than any of the above-mentioned flowers can claim. Once off human standards which are valid only on the plane of relativity, the nazuna weeds match well with the peonies and roses, the dahlias and chrysanthemums. Bashō of course did not reason like this; he was a poet, he intuited all this and simply stated: “When closely seen, it is the nazuna plant blooming.” From the human point of view, we are always ready to destroy anything, including ourselves.
We never hesitate to slaughter one another and give this reason: there is one ideology which is absolutely true, and anything and anybody, any group or any individual, who opposes this particular ideology deserves total annihilation. We are blatantly given up to the demonstration of self-conceit, self-delusion, and unashamed arrogance. We do not seem nowadays to cherish any such feelings as inspired Bashō to notice the flowering nazuna plant on the roadside, or Chiyo to notice the morning glory by the country well. We trample them underfoot and feel no compunction whatever. Is religion no longer needed by modern man?
Bashō and Chiyo were not only poets but religiously inspired souls. Those who can appreciate Nature and her beauty are also those who can understand religions, especially Buddhism and the teaching of Christ in which he makes special reference to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.
Truth and good are objectively definable, I believe, but beauty is beyond definition. It is not because it is subjective, but there is in beauty an element which goes beyond the plane of relativity and intellection, and in this respect it belongs to religion. As religion is not simply a matter of feeling, so is beauty not purely subjective and individual. When beauty is expressed in terms of Buddhism it is a form of self-enjoyment of suchness of things. Flowers are flowers, mountains are mountains, I sit here, you stand there, and the world goes on from eternity to eternity; this is the suchness of things. A state of self-awareness here constitutes enlightenment, and a state of self-enjoyment here constitutes beauty. Enlightenment is the noetic aspect of prajna-intuition, beauty is its affective aspect, and the great compassionate heart is its conative aspect. In this way we can probably understand what is meant by the doctrine of suchness.
When Chiyo was learning haiku from her teacher, she was told to compose a poem on the cuckoo. The cuckoo is noted for its peculiar call heard only at night. Chiyo wanted to hear it so that she could feel something to write about it. She waited all night to catch its call, but in vain, and then finally she noticed the morning light through the window. From out of her disappointment and the struggle to get some sound out of the cuckoo, the following burst forth:
Calling the cuckoo, cuckoo,
’Tis dawn already!
She took this to the teacher, who approved it greatly, commenting that haiku is no more than giving utterance to one’s genuine feeling.
This haiku does not directly deal with the cuckoo, but it expresses Chiyo’s poetic struggle to take hold of something genuine in her reaction to reality. Poetry does this on the affective side of human consciousness, while religion is on the side of conation and noeticism. In truth, religion synthesizes all these factors and transcends them, and for this reason when religion is understood poetry naturally comes into it. The Pure Land of Amitābha Buddha may be called a poetic vision, though in the highest possible sense of the term. Poetry sees a world not belonging to the realm of relativity and causation; while its materials are taken from the latter, it is a new creation revealed to the poetic mind. It is this mind also that sees into the suchness of realities. When the mind attains to a state of absolute sincerity, it sees into the meaning, “root and all,” of the flower plucked by Tennyson and knows “what God and man is.” Chiyo’s haiku on the cuckoo touches upon this point and reflects her mind’s sincerity, gleaned from a night-long meditation. Her haiku thus also prepares the road to the Buddhist enlightenment. Sincerity means to be true to one’s own nature, to realize suchness, to attain a state a single-mindedness or “one-pointed-ness” (ekāgratā). Psychologically, we may call this the highest limit of intensification, and when this limit is passed we have enlightenment or a state of self-awareness. Chiyo the poetess, as her mind was concentrated on the cuckoo, blurted out in the way she did. As Buddha was meditating on the self, his utterance was “O tent-designer, thou art seen!” According to another legend, it was “Heavens above, heavens below, I alone am the honored one.” All these are statements of absolute sincerity, or one-pointedness, which is suchness of things.
Bashō was more objective in the following haiku, which he composed on the night of the full-moon in mid-autumn. The moon is then known in Japan as well as in China as “the renowned moon,” because of its unparalleled brightness and because of many historical associations. The haiku reads:
Oh, this renowned moon!
Walking around the pond
All night long!
This means that Bashō walked along the pond, probably in the dilapidated garden of an old mountain monastery, looking at the full-moon which happened to be cloudless that night. Absorbed in deep contemplation, he must have walked and walked around the pond ever so many times until dawn; then suddenly the above-quoted haiku flashed through his consciousness.
Being the shortest form of poetry, haiku does not waste words, much is left to the experience, insight, and imagination of the reader. If the reader has no breadth and depth of imagination, he cannot be expected to understand the poet, especially the latter’s insight into and sympathy with suchness of reality. Bashō, in his haiku, does not give the particulars of what was in his mind as he walked along the pond, gazing sometimes at the moon in the sky, sometimes at its reflection in the water; occasionally the moon must have led his mind far beyond this world of transiency and history, leaving him all alone in the infinite light of the Unknown; it is likely that he often felt like Kanzan (Hanshan), a hermit-poet of the Tang dynasty: “My mind is like the autumnal moon; how can I express myself to others?” Again, it is possible that Bashō felt something like Banzan (Panshan), a Zen master also of the Tang dynasty, who sings: “The mind-moon, perfect in form, shines in loneliness, Its light swallowing up the ten thousand objects.” Did Bashō find himself to be one of these objects swallowed up in the shadowless light of the moon of reality? Or was he so entirely absorbed in it that he did not know whether he was the moon or the moon was he? His haiku does not give us the remotest inkling of the things that occupied his mind under the autumnal full-moonlight. Perhaps it is not necessary to detail all these things; when we recite the haiku over and over again, we, according to our own experience and imagination, will have the required imageries awakened in us and the haiku will be our own composition. We would then be Bashō himself.
We all know that reality itself always eludes our grasp, because it is itself when left to itself and when we try to find it we set it before us as if it were one of those objects which stand against the senses and the intellect. Reality, however, is not that kind of entity. If it is to be grasped, it ought to be grasped integrally beyond the bifurcation of subject and object. At least one way to reach reality will thus be the objective way of haiku, the method adopted by Bashō and Chiyo and others. The “walking around the pond all night long” may give us nothing definite, objectively determinable, regarding reality itself. We must, however, remember that objectivity is not always the surest way to reach reality, and that subjectivity as understood by Kierkegaard means far more than we generally allow to it. The haiku way, I may state, takes us much nearer to reality than science and philosophy. In one sense the haiku way is also the Zen way.
The seven wise ladies of Buddhist India visited the cemetery (sitarana)2 in Magadha; one of them, pointing at a corpse, asked, “The form is here, and where is the person?” The eldest one said, “Where?! Where?!”3 At this all the other ladies are said to have attained a state of enlightenment. This “where?” or “what?” is at once an interrogation and an ejaculation, it does not imply anything intellectual, yet there is something of self-awareness in it. If the wise lady had said, “Here is the person!” pointing at the one who asked the question, she would have committed herself intellectually, and there would have been no Zen understanding. She could remain silent, but silence is too conventional. And then, as long as there is a state of self-awareness in every one of us as human beings, this ought to be given expression, and the wise lady uttered “where?!” using the word of the questioner herself, which was most appropriate for the occasion. The situation corresponding to this kind of “where?!” not suggestive of anything intellectual yet implying an orientation must have come to the mind of Bashō, who, gazing at the moon, was lost in the infinite light of the Unknown. In Zen dialectic we say that when a question is asked the answer is already there, that the questioning is the answering, that the mind awakened toward enlightenment is enlightenment itself, and that the ordinary mortal (bonbu in Japanese, bāla in Sanskrit) cherishing the desire to be born in the Pure Land is already embraced in the arms of Amitābha Buddha. Those who are engaged in the great quest, saying “where? where?” or “whither? whither?” or “whence? whence?” are already where they want to be.
Chōsha Keishin (Changsha Jingcen in Chinese) was one of Nansen’s great disciples. Nansen is not the name of the master himself, it is the name of the district in Chi Province where Fugan (Puyuan, 746–834), the master, had his monastery; but, as in the case with almost all the noted masters, he is best known by his locality, Nansen. Now Chōsha, after his master’s death, made one of his monks go to Sanshō (Sansheng) and ask him this question: “Where is Nansen gone after his death?” Sanshō, a contemporary of Chōsha, was a disciple of Rinzai (Linji, ?–867)4 and noted for his Zen understanding. The idea of asking him this question was to see how much of Zen Sanshō had. In those early days of Zen in the Tang era, the masters did much questioning of each other.
“Where is Nansen gone after his death?” Sanshō answered, “Sekitō (Shitou) was still a young shami (śrāmaṇera) when he saw the sixth patriarch.” The monk said, “I am not asking you about Sekitō having been a shami, but I want to know where Nansen is gone after his death.” Sanshō then said, “That makes one think.” (Sekitō, 700–790, was another great Zen master of the Tang dynasty.)
This is one of the most important and profound mondo in Zen literature. The Chinese term here used for “think” is jinshi (xunsi), meaning “to inquire and reflect.” But the term as it is used here by Sanshō has nothing to do with intellection. As in the case of the wise lady’s remark “where? where?,” this “making one think” is not to be understood on the plane of logical or metaphysical inquiry; we must go beyond this to understand what Sanshō meant. For it is where reality itself becomes conscious and knows what it is by crossing over the stream of birth and death, by transcending the dichotomy of subject and object, that is, by thinking the unthinkable.
Keats in “An Ode to a Grecian Urn” sings: “Thou, silent form! doth tease us out of thought as doth eternity.” The Zen master’s “That makes me think” has something similar to it; his “thinking” is a kind of thinking out of thought. As long as we are on the relative plane of thought, there is intellection, and intellection is governed by laws of thought, and it is impossible for us to be “out of thought.” But when we face problems of ultimate reality, we are indeed “teased out of thought,” yet we cannot altogether quit thinking, for some kind of thinking clings to us. This cannot be called by the old name; thinking beyond thinking belongs in the realm of prajna-intuition, which is thinking out of thought, thinking the unthinkable, repeating “where? where?” without actually and determinatively being orientated. Let me quote another mondo.
Yakusan Igen (Yaoshan Weiyan, 751–834)5 of the Tang dynasty was one day found sitting in meditation, and a monk asked him, “What are you thinking, so intently sitting?” “I am thinking the unthinkable.” “How can the unthinkable be thought?” The master said, “Unthinkable!”
The Chinese term here used for “to think” is shiryō (siliang in Chinese), and “unthinkable” is fushiryō (busiliang) in the first and second use of the term, while the last one is hishiryō (feisiliang). Hi and fu (bu and fei) are both negative particles, and in most cases almost indiscriminately used. As far as negation is concerned, there is no difference between fushiryō and hishiryō, but in the master’s use of the term hishiryō instead of fushiryō there is a specific meaning attached to it, which we must understand; for the significance of the whole mondo depends on the last “unthinkable,” hishiryō. Hishiryō is thinking the unthinkable, going out of thought, and to be one with reality—rather, to be reality itself.
This master’s “Unthinkable!,” the preceding one’s “That makes one think,” and the wise lady’s “Where?!”—they all mean the same thing. When any one of them is understood, the rest are also understood. They are all expressions of prajna-intuition.
We can now go back to Chiyo’s morning glory, and state that the genuine appreciation of the beautiful has something in it intimately associated with religious experience, and that they both belong in the realm of the unthinkable which is also the home of truth. As far as the aesthetic aspect of it is concerned, Keats is quite right in declaring this:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.