THE WORDLESS POEM: A STUDY OF ZEN IN HAIKU by ERIC W. AMANN

Reprinted, with a new bibliography, from the original 1969 edition © Eric Amann, 1978
The Haiku Society of Canada, 627 Broadview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario Canada M4K 2N9

CHAPTER ONE: THE WAY OF HAIKU

Old pond:
frog jump-in 
water-sound	BASHÔ

The poem on the preceding page, translated into English as literally as possible, is a haiku. Indeed, it is one of the most famous of all haiku. Written in 1686 by Bashô, a poet and Zen student, it is said to show his progress toward 'enlightenment', marking a turning point in his life and his art. . . . It is also the beginning of 'The Way of Haiku'.

For many Western readers, however, unfamiliar with Zen, this may not seem much of a beginning, and their reaction is more likely to be one of disappointment instead of enlightenment. As for poetry—what could be less poetic than the image of a frog leaping into water? And a reader accustomed to Wordsworth and Tennyson may well feel that Bashô should have a little more to offer us than this dribble of unfinished prose and his translator might have done more than turn it into pidgin English. As it stands, the entire poem consists of less than a dozen words, the grammar is fragmentary, the language seems to be stripped down to the bare bones; aside from the single, naked image, the poet does not give us the slightest clue as to why he saw fit even to record such a trivial event, let alone present it to the world as poetry.

Clearly a haiku is not a poem in the Western sense of the word. The haiku poet neither uses the same techniques, nor strives for the same effect as the Western poet. As long as we approach haiku with our conventional ideas about poetry, it will never become any more than a very plain, oversimplified picture in words. But if the haiku poet does not try to achieve a 'poetic effect', if the haiku is not primarily a ‘poem’, then what is it? R. H. Blyth, who devoted most of his life to the study of haiku, concluded that it was "a form of Zen" and that "haiku must be understood from the Zen point of view". Alan W. Watts, D. T. Suzuki and Eugen Herrigel, the three most widely known exponents of Zen in the West today, also treat haiku as primarily an expression of Zen in poetry. The next logical question, therefore, should be: "What is Zen?". But to expect a sensible answer to this question already shows our misunderstanding of Zen, for Zen holds that something which has been put into words is already a falsification of reality.

Thus it is far easier to say what Zen is not: just as haiku is not poetry in the Western sense of the word, so Zen is not religion or philosophy as we understand them. Zen has no dogmas and no doctrine; there is no theory or theology; no concept of 'God I or 'soul I such as we are familiar with; in fact, Zen has no concepts of any kind. It is concerned only with life, not with words about life. It is for this reason that the Zen masters,

when they were confronted with such questions as 'What is Zen?", invariably turned either to some nonverbal answers (such as hitting the questioner over the head), or gave such puzzling replies as:
"Three pounds of flax"
"The cypress tree in the courtyard"
"Three meals a day and a good night's sleep"

These apparently meaningless sayings have nevertheless two things in common: 1. Refusal to answer the question in the terms in which it was posed i.e. in intellectual terms); 2. Pointing instead to something perfectly plain and ordinary, some everyday thing or event in nature, thereby forcing the questioner's mind from the abstract to the concrete and from the intellectual to the actual.

And this is exactly how the masters of haiku handled questions about haiku. When asked what kind of training was necessary to become a poet, one master said: "The crescent moon over the moor. " And when Onitsura was asked about the essence of haiku, he replied: "A camellia tree is in bloom in the garden. "

From all this we may draw our first conclusion about haiku: unlike most other types of poetry, haiku is not concerned with expressing Truth or Beauty or any other type of idea, concept or symbol; it has no deep or esoteric meaning; it deals entirely with the here and now, with nature, with intuition arising from immediate sense experience, with the ordinary sights and sounds of this world. D. T. Suzuki has expressed this as follows: "A haiku does not express ideas, but puts forward images reflecting intuitions.”

The problem for the Western reader, therefore, is not to find the hidden meaning, the "symbolic significance' of a haiku, for there is none, but to reconvert the images of a haiku into his own intuitions. And the answer to that lies in the art of reading haiku. A haiku is not meant to be read like a longer poem. It is more of an object for contemplation. First we must empty our minds of all preconceived ideas and re-experience what the poet saw or heard or felt; we must allow the images to touch us, we must enter, for example, the stillness of the old pond, see/hear/feel the sudden leap of the frog, and allow the ripples to fade out slowly in our mind. Only if we thus put ourselves  in the poet's place, only if we experience the images directly and without intellectualization, only then—if the haiku is a good one—will it achieve its effect, evoking moods and memories, echoes and ripples of associations, playing on the mind as though it were an instrument where all the sympathetic strings resonate when a single note is struck. And the totality of that experience is the 'meaning' of a haiku.

In summary, a haiku is more than a ‘form’ of poetry. The same spirit pervades the paintings of Sesshu, the tea ceremony of Rikyu and the haiku of Bashô. A haiku is thus a manifestation of Zen and hence the expression of a particular state of consciousness: "Each true haiku is a swift record in words of one moment of 'satori', of the sudden flash of Enlightenment" (Harold Stewart). Each haiku is like the reply of a Zen master to a beginner's question about the meaning of life. And the answers will be seen to lie not in the ninth circle of heaven, nor on the lips of preachers and prophets, but scattered all around us, in myriads of forms, in the falling of a leaf no less than in the sting of a gnat, in the sound of a frog no less than in the song of a nightingale  and whether we chart a rocket to the moon or sit quietly in our garden with Bashô, the answers are the same. . . . the answers are everywhere . . . listen:

Old pond: 
frog jump-in
water-sound

CHAPTER TWO: WORDLESS

Not a word was said: 
the host, the guest 
and the white chrysanthemum		RYOTA

Alan Watts, in 'The Way of Zen', has called haiku "the wordless poem". Others have gone further and spoken of haiku as a "non-poem", or even an "anti-poem". Indeed, if we compare the haiku with most of Western poetry, we cannot escape the conclusion that the haiku poet seems to avoid words rather than display them.

A haiku is never a complete statement. Just as the Japanese ink brush artist tosses a few light strokes in one corner of the picture and leaves all the rest in emptiness, so the haiku master puts down a few simple words and leaves all the rest in silence. More is implied than stated, more hidden than apparent. A haiku is no more than a hint, a bare suggestion of a poem. Bashô himself said that those haiku are best that show less than half of their subject.

This utter brevity, this 'wordless', unfinished style that makes the haiku look more like a telegram than a poem, gives rise to another characteristic: sudden impact. While for Wordsworth poetry was "emotion recollected in tranquility", for Bashô it was like "the felling of a large tree, like the leaping on an enemy, like the slicing of a watermelon ". There is no time for artifice or ornament, for the careful selection of choice phrases and all the literary trimmings. It is true that some haiku show the exacting craftsmanship of lacquered jewel boxes, but the best ones are those that appear totally without contrivance, effortless and artless as nature herself:

Midday nap: 
my feet against the wall, 
how cool it is !			Bashô

The falling snow, 
and a 'To Let' sign 
that wasn't there yesterday!		Issa

Here the inspiration was sudden and the effect on the reader is also sudden. It is what Yasuda calls "a simultaneous happening". It has been compared to a slap in the face, a stroke of lightning, or the dropping of a pebble into a pond of unruffled water. Western haiku poets, too, have remarked on this. The English haiku poet Bill Wyatt, for example, has compared the effect of a haiku to "a blow on the head that leaves you dazed for a moment ".

	Thus, while most of Western poetry is sequential and linear, showing a more or less logical progression of thought and feeling, the haiku is sudden and instantaneous. It is so short it can be uttered in a single breath. It is so small on the page it can be absorbed by the eye with a single glance.

This quality of compression of language, this telegraphic brevity of the haiku is unfortunately lost in many of the earlier haiku translations. Here, for example, is how Peter Beilenson has translated Bashô's most famous haiku (Peter Pauper Press: 'Japanese Haiku') :

Old dark sleepy pool . . .
	Quick unexpected
	Frog
Goes plop! Watersplash!

	If we compare this with the literal translation of the same haiku as it appears on page one Of this book, we note that Beilenson has added like "dark", "sleepy", "quick", and "unexpected"  four words that do not appear at all in Bashô's poem! Nor can it be claimed that these words were justified for grammatical reasons, since all four of them are adjectives. As it happens, adjectives are rarely used by Japanese haiku poets. An adjective qualifies a noun, that is, it limits the meaning of the noun. An "old dark sleepy pond" is a much more restricted image than "old pond". In haiku, therefore, any added adjective has the tendency to limit the total meaning of the poem. As Yasuda has said: "We want no adjective to blur the impression. We seek no metaphor or simile to make the picture clear. " A haiku is "poetry of the noun" (Yasuda).

A translation such as the above by Beilenson, therefore, in which the translator has filled in with words those spaces which the poet deliberately left open becomes a Western style poem. it is no longer a real haiku " inasmuch as the essential qualities of haiku, namely its 'wordlessness, and openness of meaning do not survive the translation.

	But why all this insistence on remaining as 'wordless' as possible? Why all this fuss about saying everything with the minimum number of words, why all this mutilation of grammar for the sake of saving a few words ?

The reason is that haiku, like Zen "is not necessarily against words but is well aware of the fact that they are always liable to detach themselves from realities and turn into conceptions. And this conception is what Zen [and haiku] is against.. . . Zen insists on handling the thing itself and not an empty abstraction. " (D. T. Suzuki)

	"Handling the thing itself and not an empty abstraction"—that is also the essence of haiku. A language is a graveyard of dead words that have long lost their relationship to reality, yet continue to be used as if they had flesh and blood. This is especially true in the West: "In the beginning was the Word.... It  thus begins Western man Is fatal confusion of words with realities. The priest saves with words, the psychiatrist cures with words, contracts are sealed with words and the general impression prevails that all the evils of the world could be quickly solved if we could only get everybody to sit down and talk things over. Already in the last century Nietzsche warned that words can be illusory, that they give the impression that we have discovered something when we have only named it, that the existence of a word guarantees the existence of what it stands for: "Through words and concepts we are continually tempted to think of things as being simpler than they are, as separated from another, as indivisible, each existing in and for itself.”

The whole purpose, therefore, of the technique of 'wordlessness' and 'direct pointing' as we find it in both Zen and haiku, is to avoid this confusion between words and realities and the consequent illusion of the separateness of things. Like the Buddha, who gave the first example of 'wordless poetry, when one day he astonished his disciples by holding up a flower without uttering a single word, so the haiku poet holds up something for the reader without a single unnecessary word, without comment, without explanation, without placing any obstacles between the reader and the thing itself. In this sense 11 a haiku is not literature inasmuch as it disposes with words as much as possible. " (R. H. Blyth)

Of course this style of writing, in which the poet "disposes with words as much as possible", presents tremendous difficulties for the Western poet beginning to write haiku. Here are three examples of Western haiku where the poet has mastered the art of knowing where to stop:

Lily: 
   out of the water 
      out of itself .			Nicholas A. Virgilio

Emerging hot and rosy 
   from their skins  
      beets!			Anita Virgil

Here, using less than ten words each, two American poets have captured the 'wordless' quality of the haiku poem. Nothing stands between the reader and the thing; no causal relationship is stated or implied; the poems grow and emerge like the lily, like the beets—spontaneously, effortlessly and without artifice of any kind.

Listening . . .
   After a while
      I take up my axe again.		Rod Willmot

In this poem by a Canadian haiku poet a more personal experience is conveyed, yet by avoiding any comment, any mention of subjective feeling, the poem remains ‘open’, the poet allows the reader to take his place and respond directly to the experience. It is the cracking of a twig or the sound of distant thunder, the beating of our own heart, or some mysterious ‘something’ that suddenly makes us drop our humdrum activities and listen?

In summary, a haiku, in comparison with other poetry, is said to be 'wordless' inasmuch as the poet restricts himself to merely naming a few objects or sensations and allows the reader to respond to them directly. By avoiding subjective comment and unnecessary words he leaves the poem 'open' to the reader's intuition: "brevity and terseness of form and the fullest implication is the essence of haiku art." (Kametaro Yagi)

CHAPTER THREE: SUCHNESS

Among the grasses
an unknown flower
blooming white . . .					SHIKI

Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies; 
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 would know what God and man is.			Tennyson

Let us compare Tennyson's poem with that of Shiki: two poets are here looking at a simple flower, one with the analytic eyes of Western man, the other with the spirit of Zen; one writes a typically Western poem, the other a haiku.

Shiki's haiku is 'wordless' in the sense that it consists of only a single visual image: a nameless flower blooms in a field of grass. Aside from this image there is nothing in the haiku. There are no ideas, no expression of emotion, no intellectual commentary. Shiki merely points to something, but leaves it undisturbed.

Tennyson, on the other hand, not only points, but picks, tearing the flower from its soil and destroying it. His concern, of course, is not with this one flower, his encounter with nature is merely an occasion for speculations about 'God', 'man', and 'all. The poem begins with a simple almost haiku like image, but four lines later the poet is lost in a maze of intellectual rumination. He starts out by holding something real in his hand and ends lop juggling empty concepts in his brain.

Tennyson moves from sensation to ideation, from the objective to the subjective, from the concrete to the abstract. Shiki, on the other hand, remains all sensation, all objective, all concrete. Another way of saying this is that Tennyson's poem is 'ego-centered, and 'anthropo-centered' (meaning 'self-' and 'man-centered'), whereas in Shiki's haiku the center of the poem lies outside the poet, outside man, outside the limited human frame of reference.

This characteristic of placing the center of the poem beyond the poet's personal life and not to intrude with ideas and intellectual commentary is typical of haiku as a whole:

The willow is green, the flower is red:
In haiku leave things just as they are!
Going to Paradise is a good thing,
But to fall into Hell is also a matter of congratulation!	—Sonojo

"In haiku leave things just as they are"—in other words, keep your rationalizing, moralizing mind out of the poem, do not clutter up the poem with your own thoughts, feelings and explanations, but show all things in their uniqueness, their own particular state of being, their 'suchness'.

This state of consciousness in which we see reality without distortion has often been likened to a mirror:

“If a flower comes it reflects a flower, if a bird comes it reflects the bird . . . Everything is revealed just as it is. There is no discriminating mind or self consciousness on the part of the mirror.” —Zenkei Shibayama

For the Western poet writing haiku, this need to show things "just as they are", to keep the mind like "an unclouded mirror" presents many difficulties, mainly because our customary Western poetic process demands the exact opposite. In the West the original poetic experience plus the poet's intellectual and emotional reactions equal the finished poem. But in haiku the original experience minus the poet's personal reaction equals the finished haiku.

The important difference lies in the fact that the Western poet tends to add , while the haiku poet subtracts or rather extracts. The Western poet talks a about the experience, while the haiku poet gives us the experience itself. The Western poet leaves a lengthy record of words in which the original experience and his reaction to it are inextricably interwoven; the experience has already been 'pre-digested' for the reader who can then only react to the poet's reaction. "Our respect is not for the subject-matter, but for the creative power of the artist, for that which he is capable of adding to his subject from himself; or, in fact his capacity to dispense with external subjects altogether." (Ezra Pound) In haiku on the other hand, the poet only gives us the circumstances that evoked his reaction, not the reaction itself. Here the reader must supply his own reaction, relying on his own poetic resources.

Moreover, in the process of 'adding' to his original experience, the Western poet uses a whole range of so called 'poetic devices' which are alien to the spirit of haiku. Because they are so ingrained in our poetic tradition that to us poetry without them seems almost unthinkable, we must examine them more carefully.

1. THE SIMILE. The simile is a poetic device in which one thing is compared directly with another:
	
Fluttering birds splash
   In fountains . . . like old ladies
      Preening silk dresses			Anna L. Butler

This is very typical of the thousands of 'pseudo-haiku' that appear yearly in Western haiku magazines. On closer examination we see that it is not really a haiku at all, but merely a Western-type poem artificially sliced into 5/7/5 syllables. The first line records the original experience: the poet sees fluttering birds splash in fountains. This is valid enough and might well lead to a proper haiku. In the second part, however, the subject undergoes a typically Western poetic process: the poet add s something to the original experience, in this case an artificial and fanciful comparison. The center of the poem lies not in nature but in the poet's imagination. The reader can only admire her ingenuity or deplore her lack of taste, he can no longer participate in the original experience.

2. THE METAPHOR. A metaphor is an implied comparison in which a word or phrase usually and primarily used for one thing is applied to another:

On spring's green altar
   Yellow flames of candlelight
      Daffodils aglow
Here the original inspiration was the sight of daffodils shining in a field of spring. Left to themselves, these images might have become an excellent haiku. As it is, the images undergo elaborate changes in the poet's fantasy: the spring field becomes "spring's green altar" and the daffodils become converted into "yellow flames of candlelight". Instead of leaving the images alone, she mixes reality with fantasy and thereby destroys the poem as a haiku. When two things are compared in a haiku or placed side by side, it is never in the sense that one is real and the other imaginary. In haiku “. . . the two parts that make up the whole are compared to each other, not in simile or metaphor, but as two phenomena, each of which exists in its own right.” (H. G. Henderson)

3. PERSONIFICATION. This is a very common Western poetic device in which some aspect of nature is endowed with human qualities or attributes. Although a few examples of personification can be found in haiku this poetic device usually ruins a haiku because it seeks to humanize nature instead of 'naturalizing' man.

4. SYMBOLISM. Very often Westerners are tempted to interpret haiku symbolically. One translator, for example, felt that in Bashô's Is famous haiku the 'old pond' is meant to represent 'eternity', while the jump of the frog is regarded as a 'symbol of life'. This attempt to extract some symbolic significance from haiku is a typically Western effort to find the abstract behind the concrete, to discover the spiritual hiding in the physical. As we have already seen, however, this is quite foreign to the haiku poets themselves. As Shiki has said of Bashô's poem: "The meaning is just what it says, it has no other, special meaning."  

We may summarize this chapter by saying that the haiku poet presents things "just as they are"  the 'suchness' of things. He gives us only the circumstances of an event, and of these only the barest minimum. "Touch and let go 11 is the secret of haiku art. Poetic devices such as the simile, metaphor, personification and symbolism are rarely used in haiku, inasmuch as they change and distort the original sense-experience.

In conclusion, here are some poems by Western writers, which show the qualities of haiku we have discussed in this chapter:

On this still hot day, 
only the breaking of soft grass 
in the beaks of ducks.		Claire Pratt

First gray light of dawn: 
empty baskets upside down 
in the market stalls.			Joanne Borgesen

The fullness of the moon: 
into the icy well 
someone has thrown a coin.		Nancy McDowell

CHAPTER FOUR: N0THING SPECIAL

A one-foot waterfall: 
it, too, makes noises, 
and at night is cool . . .		ISSA

One of the objections many Western readers voice against haiku is that it deals with things which are not generally regarded as ‘poetic’ in Western literature. Indeed, haiku seems to overemphasize the apparently trivial, the most ordinary, everyday moments of life:

Melons: 
mud spattered 
in the morning dew . . .		Bashô

Even here 
a little sunshine, 
and some socks drying . . .		Ichirinso

The old pond: 
a sandal sticks to the bottom 
   the falling sleet . . .			Buson
Dirty melons, socks drying in the sun, and old sandals—is this enough to make poetry? Issa and his hundreds of haiku about flies, mosquitoes and grasshoppers—what possible literary value could there be in these?

The answer, again, lies in the basic difference between the Western and the Eastern point of view. For Western man the realm of the intellect is of a higher order than the world of pure sensation, the mundane events of our everyday lives; we place the spiritual above the material, the metaphysical above the physical, things of the mind above things of the body. We put our highest values on what Nietzsche calls "the emptiest concepts, the last evaporating fumes of reality

Precisely the opposite view is taken in Zen:

"Nothing can be compared with the wearing of clothes 
 Nothing can be compared to the eating of food: 
 Besides this, there is no god, no buddha."

This same view of the world is reflected in haiku. A one-foot waterfall is as good as a roaring cataract. A crow digging for mudsnails, a caterpillar silently eating a rice-plant, a leaf sticking to a mushroom or a man hoeing his field all have the same significance as a temple full of Buddhas or visions of the galaxies over the Island of Sado:

Freshly washed 
how chill they look 
the white leeks!		Bashô

Behind the azalea pot: 
a woman tearing up 
dried codfish . . .		Bashô

Frozen mackerel: 
the belly split open 
white foamy roes . . .		Mitsui Tamai

The haiku poet does not seek out the rare and precious moments of life, he does not go in pursuit of the True and the Beautiful, he does not discover God in a grain of sand, but looks at the grain of sand itself for its own sake. Sometimes, like a Zen master, he deliberately jolts us out of our intellectual preoccupation and brings us back to earth where we belong:

Sneezing 
I lost sight 
of the skylark!		Yayu

Right to the end of life:
I travel
I cut my toenails!		Santoka

Haiku poems, therefore, are not a "thing of beauty" and "a joy forever", they are "not delicacies, not a feast, but poems that taste like our daily meals". (Takuboku) They deal with 'wu-shi I meaning: 'nothing special'.

But we must go even a step further. The "unclouded mirror" of the poet's mind reflects with equal detachment what we generally call the good and the evil, pleasure and pain, the ugly along with the beautiful. The poet does not strain his experiences through a moral or aesthetic sieve to filter out Truth and Beauty, but embraces with an undivided mind even those aspects of reality that are shunned in most of Western literature.

This usually comes as an unpleasant shock to those Western devotees whose idea of haiku is derived from greeting card verse, or the poetry section of The Ladies Home Journal. It is true, of course, that many haiku deal with still moments of beauty that seem as unreal, as far away from the everyday world as the traditional tea ceremony:

Evening moon: 
Cherry blossoms 
fall upon my lute . . .			Shiki

A pear tree in bloom: 
and in the moonlight 
a woman reading a letter		Buson

There is, however, another side to haiku which is less readily found in the more popular translations, just as there is another side to life, and the haiku poet draws no distinction between them:

Thrown out 
into the winter river: 
the dog's carcass!			Shiki

Fleas, lice 
and a horse pissing 
close to my pillow!			Bashô

Lung hemorrhage: 
How vivid the family faces 
this autumn evening!			Shihaku

In Western poetics pear trees, cherry blossoms and moonlight are familiar and acceptable poetic images, but lung hemorrhages, dogs' carcasses, fleas and lice are decidedly not. Nineteen centuries of Judeo-Christian tradition have conditioned our minds to think in terms of good versus evil, heaven versus hell, truth against falsehood. This dualistic way of thinking, which divides the universe into opposing camps in irreconcilable conflict with each other, pervades most of Western religion , philosophy and literature. It reached its climax in the last century, when it obsessed even the most enlightened men of the age. Thoreau, for example wrote: “Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.”

Now it is commonly held that the twentieth century has outgrown these traditions. This seems to me to be largely wishful thinking. By far the vast majority of the masses today, while manipulating twentieth century apparatus, remain Victorian in outlook and mores. This is also reflected in literature. For example, a 'haiku' such as:

Rain pools are mirrors, 
reflecting proof of heaven, 
miracle on earth			D.J. Gibson

is pure Victoriana.

There is, of course, a reaction. Marshal McLuhan has said that the West is becoming increasingly "Orientalized". But already in the last century Nietzsche wrote:

"We are necessary, we are a piece of fate, we belong to the whole, we a r e the whole—there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole  . . . For nothing exists apart from the whole!”

This is surprisingly close to the Zen point of view:

"If you want to get at the truth 
Do not be concerned with right and wrong: 
The conflict between right and wrong 
Is a sickness of the mind!”

This, however, must not be understood to mean that there are no laws or rules of conduct. It means that laws and rules are relative to the human frame of reference, they are not reflected by the universe or nature as a whole. To deify them, to abstract them into 'principles' and 'absolutes' and to project these abstractions onto the universe as God or Satan , absolute Good and absolute Evil, this is, indeed a "sickness of the mind".

In Zen, what we call good and evil, beauty and ugliness, pure and impure are like the right and left hand of God, they are inseparable elements of the same unity. Their interplay is not the deadly combat between the forces of light and darkness, but like the ebb and tide, like night and day—interrelated, mutually interdependent, and ultimately harmonious 

Under one roof: 
prostitutes, too, lie sleeping, 
Bush clovers and the moon . . .		Bashô

There is no moral condemnation in this haiku. There is no distinction drawn between Bashô the man of Zen and poetry, and the pleasure women of the 'floating world'. All are the same under the moon. Underlying their divergent lives there is a common unity that embraces them all.

It is obvious that the appreciation of haiku demands a radical transformation of consciousness on the part of the Western reader and poet who venture into this field. What is necessary is almost a reversal of our traditional value system, a complete change of perspective. Only when we have stopped looking for Truth and Beauty, only when we have stopped analyzing and moralizing. Only when we have wined the mirror clear will we realize that beauty is everywhere:

Winter snow: 
a harlot 
scraping soot from her saucepan.		Issa

Religion is everywhere:

My old home: 
The face of a snail 
is the face of Buddha!			Issa

Poetry is everywhere:

Behind the market, 
searching through garbage cans: 
a face of sores. 				J. W. Hackett

In summary: a haiku poet describes 'ordinary things in ordinary words’ (R.H. Blyth); or, as Bashô said: “A haiku is simply what is happening in this particular place and at this particular time.”

CHAPTER FIVE: SEASON W0RD

“The thoughts that fill my heart, of the beauty of things, that come and go with each season, are like endless songs, as numerous as grains of sand on the beach, and those that express such thoughts with compassion are the true sages of this world.” —BASHÔ

Another feature peculiar to haiku is the 'season-word'. It means that traditionally every haiku is related to one of the four seasons by means of the so-called ‘season-word’, and the haiku derives, in part, its mood from that seasonal reference. This reference may be either direct, e.g. "autumn moon" or "winter wind", or it may be merely implied: for example mention of butterflies and skylarks in a haiku indicates spring, while crickets and chrysanthemums suggest autumn. A s certain brushstrokes in traditional ink-brush painting are fixed, named and codified, so in haiku the season-words have become standardized; many anthologies of haiku are arranged according to season-words and many thousands of haiku are yearly written about such popular season-words as "fallen leaves" or "the withered moor".

The season-word serves essentially as a poetic shorthand. Because of the brevity of haiku the poet has no space to gradually build up a mood or atmosphere. Instead, by merely mentioning a season-word, usually in a single line, using one or two words only, he can evoke a particular mood in readers who are familiar with haiku convention. Very often this mood of the season acts as a background feeling against which the other parts of the haiku are set either in harmony or in contrast.

On a withered branch 
a crow has settled: 
autumn nightfall . . .		Bashô

In this haiku the season-word is "autumn nightfall". it creates an overall atmosphere of early darkness and cold, a feeling of the slow decline of the year, perhaps a tinge of sadness and gloom.

This general aura is enhanced and deepened by the more specific image of the solitary bird on a barren branch. Everything in the poem serves to heighten the mood of gloom, of solitude and desolation.

A sick monk 
sweeping the garden: 
blossoms of the plum tree . . .	Sora

Here the season-word is "plum tree", indicating spring. The general mood of the haiku, therefore, tends to be joyous and light-hearted. The image of the sick monk sweeping the garden does not enhance this mood but contrasts sharply with it. We find here a juxtaposition of images that is very common in haiku. Note that the poet makes no comment; he does not seek to relate the two contrasting images in any way, but leaves them suspended, as it were, in our mind. The sick monk, painfully doing his work, and the blossoms of the plum-tree at their peak of youth and beauty form a powerful paradox, yet are part of the same spring, the same world, the same moment of time.

This way of evoking a mood by merely mentioning a season-word often fails to affect the Western reader. For many of us the seasons themselves have lost all relationship to our lives. Industrialized and urbanized man does not experience the darkness of a winter day, the first warm sunshine of spring, the heat of mid-summer or the autumn rain with the same intensity as these were felt by men of former ages. The rhythm of our lives is not the natural rhythm of the sun and moon, but the mechanical rhythm of clocks and calendars. For technological man the occurrence of an April shower, a November snow flurry or autumn haze, far from being poetic or bearing any relationship to his inner life, are merely hindrances to the smooth performance of his daily routine.

Yet in spite of this, many Western haiku poets have made good use of the season-word, as the following examples show:

Gold of harvest moon 
white chrysanthemum in vase 
for the young mother.			Helen Chenoweth

The season-word here suggests autumn, yet the mood is quite different from Bashô's autumn haiku. "Harvest moon" suggests light, radiance, ripeness and fulfillment. This mood is further amplified and enhanced by the delicate resonance of colors: gold moon, gold harvest; white chrysanthemum; white face; the slenderness of the vase suggests the slenderness and smoothness of the woman’s body.

My fingers feel 
our baby move in your womb . . .
this winter room			Julien Masseron

Here the season-word occurs, almost unexpectedly, in the third line. Yet it changes and enlarges the whole poem. A human event is related to a larger event in nature. We feel the stillness of the room, the darkness of the winter day. The whiteness of the woman's body suggests white slopes of snow outside. And in the very depth of winter there is a promise of spring and of new life.

In the winter of 1969 Haiku Magazine held the first haiku contest in the Western world with a specific seasonal theme, in this case: "New Year's Day". Over a thousand haiku were received from all over the English speaking world. A few of the best are given below to illustrate how well Western haiku poets have made use of the season-word:

First morning. . . 
Over the snow, a washing 
steams on the line			Rod Willmot

The gnarled old bush 
with its burden of snow—
and now the New Year.		Cornelia Draves

The old year ends; 
a flight of starlings 
over the oak trees.			Lorraine Harr

Here in Central Park 
roasting the New Year's chestnuts 
still the same old man.		Edmund Miller

CHAPTER SIX: SELFLESS

The long night:
the round of the water 
says what I think!		Gochiku

The subject of the present chapter is the relationship of the poet's Self with his subject. In much of Western poetry the poet writes primarily about himself, his private thoughts, emotions, and ideas. The haiku poet, in comparison, remains very impersonal.

To understand this attitude we must again turn to Zen Buddhism. Here man is not viewed as the 'Lord of Creation', he stands neither apart nor above the rest of nature, but is an indivisible part of it. The individual is not regarded as an absolute entity endowed with an immortal soul, but as a cell in the body of the Great Self. A man is not born into the world, he grows out of it like a tree, like a flower he blossoms and blooms and passes away to be transformed into another manifestation of this greater reality. Our identity is a case of mistaken identity. Our subject-object relationships are only illusions, a kind of social game, although many of us play it with deadly seriousness. The dualism between reason and instinct, between Self and Other, is in part conditioned by the very structure of the language we speak: “European languages in general begin with a subject-noun whose action is expressed in an active verb. Some apparently permanent element is separated from the general process, treated as an entity, and endowed with active responsibility for a given occurrence.” (L. L. White) The concept of continuity between the Self and the world around it is being rediscovered by modern man in the West, in part due to increasing contact with Oriental ideas and ways of life. When Freud wrote "The ego-feeling we are aware of now is only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraces the universe and expresses an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world", he only translated into analytic jargon what had been one of the basic beliefs of Mahayana Buddhism for many centuries. How close the speculations of Western psychology and philosophy come to Zen may be seen from Norman Brown's latest book: 'Love's Body'. "Civilized objectivity is non-participating consciousness, consciousness as separation, as dualism, distance, definition; as property and prison . . . The distinction between Self and external world is not an immutable fact but an artificial construction.”

With this background of thought let us look at the following haiku:

Autumn stillness: 
a chestnut leaf
sinks into clear water		Shokaku

In the coolness 
of the empty boat: 
the shell of a crab		Kikaku

Quiet afternoon: 
water shadows 
on the pine bark		Anita Virgil

Haiku such as these, taken both from the East and the West, seem strangely 'impersonal' to most Western readers. There is no trace of the poet's temporal self, of his personal 'ego'. The reason for this is that the poet's Self has been totally submerged in the object; in other words, the poet and the object have become one. This process is described by Bashô as follows:

“Learn from the pine about the pine, from the bamboo about the bamboo. But always leave your old Self behind, otherwise it will get between you and the object. Poetry springs out of its own when you and the object have become one, when you have looked deep enough into nature to see the hidden gleam. No matter how well-worded your poems may be, if the feeling is not natural, if you and the object have not become one, your poems are not true haiku, but merely imitations of reality.”

It is obvious from this statement that Bashô regarded haiku as much more than a form of poetry. He saw in it a special way of seeing, hearing and feeling, a special state of consciousness in which we grasp intuitively the identity of man and nature and the continuity between ourselves and the larger cosmos. This does not necessarily mean a retreat from society and the world of men; but rather a new perspective, in which we are aware of our social relationships as a kind of illusion, a game we are engaged in playing with each other, which ultimately is of no significance: “A hermit or an ascetic imposes seclusion or abstinence upon himself. Bashô, on the other hand does not reject the things of the world; he only advises us to look at them from a distance, without committing ourselves. The haiku poet's attitude toward life is that of a bystander.” (Makoto Ueda) The haiku, therefore, rarely deals with strong emotions or passionate concerns. It always reflects an awareness that transcends the game.

Winter sea, 
still waving in my body 
on the pier.		Masako Ombe

This haiku is by a contemporary Japanese poet, yet it records the same intuition of one-ness, of unity and continuity that Bashô described. The rhythms and waves of the sea, its ebbs and tides, flow in us and in every living being. The haiku is a point of intersection between man and nature.

We have seen that the haiku tends to be impersonal and 'objective' and that, according to Bashô, the poet must completely merge with the subject of his poem. This is true for the great majority of haiku. There are, however, a number of haiku, even by Bashô himself, where the poet clearly expresses his personal emotion:

Released from pain, 
through the open screen 
I look at the roses . . .		Shiki

This autumn, 
how old I'm getting: 
the clouds! the birds!		Bashô

Not easy 
to be a man: 
autumn evening			Issa

Offended 
I returned: 
the willow in the garden . . .		Ryota

In each of these four haiku an intense emotion is expressed. Yet in each case the third line brings about a sudden transformation. There is a shift, often quite unexpected, from the closed perspective of the poet's personal grief, or anguish) or anger to a larger and wider viewpoint in nature. The roses, the autumn evening, the clouds, the birds and the willow are not separate from the poet and his private feelings, they are part of them, not in human and metaphorical terms, but in terms of participation in the great cycles of birth and death, transformation and change. The third line of haiku such as these is of supreme importance, because it is never merely the continuation or logical conclusion of the first two lines, but the moment of awakening, a sudden transformation of consciousness, a flash of awareness that transforms a private emotion into a feeling of universal communion. The 'crustacean armor' of the ego breaks, the closed feeling of the individual dissolves in the impersonal, infinite being of the greater Self, where joy and grief, pleasure and pain, love and anger cancel each other out.

It is undoubtedly true that with increasing mechanization of life and the subjugation of the individual to technology this feeling of the continuity of man and nature will become more and more difficult to attain. More and more the ego becomes its own prisoner, cut off from participation in the greater universe. Hence contemporary man's increasing isolation, his depression, his boredom and desperate search for a way out.

Here haiku, like Zen, offers a 'Way of Liberation'. Each haiku is a finger pointing in the right direction, each haiku is a re-union with things from which we have been parted too long.

In conclusion here are a few examples of Western haiku that illustrate what we have discussed in this chapter. Haiku such as these, while quite Western in tone and imagery, yet express the spirit of Zen, which is not Chinese Zen or Japanese Zen, but Universal Zen:

Dakota landscape—
even the evening sun 
the color of wheat.		John H. Wills

The year's last sunset: 
watching it  thinking only 
"the year's last sunset"	Robert Spiess

First thing heard: 
the snowplow truck. 
A year of white.		William J. Higginson

Sunset dying 
at the end of a rusty 
beer can . . .		Gary Hotham

CHAPTER SEVEN: ONENESS

Heaven and earth and I are of one root
The ten thousand things and I are of one substance	—sojo

We have already seen in an earlier chapter that the haiku poet often employs the juxtaposition of different images in the same poem—the small speck of a solitary crow is contrasted with the infinite horizon of an autumn evening, the sick monk is set against the plum-blossoms in bloom. The point, in each case, is to awaken the reader to the unity underlying all things. In the words of the Zen saying:

“Identity is  difference—difference is identity”

It is this experience of the identity of things, of man and of nature, which is the core of haiku. Haiku seeks to arouse a type of 'cosmic consciousness' that knows nothing of separation, and in which the most divergent elements are part of the same unity.

Railroad tracks, 
and a flight of geese above them 
in the moonlit night . . .		Shiki

A lonely 
railway station: 
lotus flowers in bloom . . .		Shiki

In each of these two haiku two, worlds seem to meet head-on: the old and the new, the Industrial and the Aesthetic, the utilitarian and the artistic. This juxtaposition of strikingly different images gives the haiku 'polarity'. The two contrasting images are like the poles of a charged battery. A state of tension exists between them and this tension is not resolved in any way in the poem. Shiki draws no conclusion, asserts no personal preference, gives us no comment or connection, but merely sets the two things side by side. Haiku such as these, where two apparently unrelated images are placed side by side without their relationship being specified, are said to be in a state of 'unresolved tension'.

Here are two more examples in which this tension is even more pronounced:

Eventide: 
spikes of rhubarb 
and a whistling train!		Takako
Sound of a rat 
on the dishes: 
Ah, the cold!		Buson

What do the spikes of rhubarb have to do with the train-whistle? In what way is the sound of a rat on a plate related to the feeling of chill? There is no rational answer to these questions. Here the haiku becomes a 'collision of images'; it begins to resemble the 'koan'. A 'koan' is a statement or question that Zen masters give to their students to meditate on. The point is, however, that the koan has no logical answer or explanation, hence the student tries in vain to come to an understanding of it through the use of his reasoning powers. The koan is 'solved' only when, often after many years, the student abandons all attempt at reason or logic and grasps its meaning intuitively.

R.H. Blyth regarded every haiku as "a koan, a question in Zen, an open door that looks shut", and the American poet W. C. Cohen has called haiku simply “poetic adaptations of the koan.” Harold Stewart, another translator of haiku has expressed the same thought: "Just as in the koan, the nonsensical and solutionless problem used in Zen meditation., the period of paradox and puzzlement leads to a rational impasse and a blockage in our free flow of existence; so, too, in the haiku: just when every avenue of escape from the dead-ends of logic and individual will seems closed or shut off, quite suddenly the instantaneous lightning of Satori flashes forth—and we see our way out. "

Thus the haiku resembles a koan in that we look in vain for a logical connection between the juxtaposed images. The 'explanation I lies in a deeper level of consciousness than the logical mind. It lies at a level where the discriminatory influences of our minds have ceased to function and things are perceived in their totality, where railroad tracks and wild geese, rhubarb and train-whistles, rats and cold strike a common chord and are part of the same continuum.

Now let us look at some examples of English haiku:

Resting in the grass, 
butterfly and bulldozer, 
yellow together.		Paul 0. Williams

Here, too, we have a juxtaposition, a collision of ideas: the butterfly is set against the bulldozer and a state of unresolved tension exists between these two so different images. The last line, however, unfortunately has the effect of resolving the paradox and releasing the tension by connecting the two images. The poet has 'explained' the paradox to the reader instead of letting the reader experience the tension and attempt to resolve it within himself.

Here are a few haiku by the British haiku poet John Esam, where the poet has left the paradox unexplained and the tension unresolved:

     In a letter 
she touches her grandmother's hair;
     flying crows call out.

     A sunshower marches 
across the fields; 
     two girls laughing somewhere.

     Who am I? What 
am I? The sound of the woodcutter’s 
     axe.

I touch her back; 
     a stone bell sounds 
somewhere.

In summary: a haiku is said to resemble the 'koan' in Zen teaching, inasmuch as it makes use of paradox, 'unresolved tension' and the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated images, forcing the reader into an intuitive rather than an intellectual perception of reality.

CONCLUSION

“Zen naturally finds its readiest expression in poetry rather than in philosophy because it has more affinity with feeling than with intellect; its poetic predilection is inevitable.” (D. T. Suzuki) The main point of this essay has been to show that haiku is not to be regarded primarily as a 'form of poetry, as is commonly assumed in the West, but as an expression of Zen in poetry, a living 'Way', similar to the 'Way of the Brush' and other manifestations of Zen in the arts and in literature. It touches, therefore, upon much more than poetry in the limited Western sense of the word, it touches upon philosophy, religion, psychology and many other subjects. It touches above all upon life itself. I have taken examples both from classical and modern haiku poets, from East and West, to show that this ‘Way of Haiku’ is not exclusive to any one place or any one time, but is ageless and universal.

There are many poets in the West today who use haiku as only a form, pouring into it whatever they like. This is like using the utensils for the traditional tea ceremony to have an afternoon coffee and donut session.

Bashô said that there are two styles of haiku: there is one that lasts a thousand years and one that lasts only a little while, yet both are the same essentially as long as the 'poetic spirit' of the haiku comes through. This 'poetic spirit', as I have attempted to show, demands a little more than syllable counting and admiring nature in the form of a friendly neighborhood chipmunk. The 'Way of Haiku' demands a new view of poetry, of the world, of nature, of society and of our relationship to them:

“A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature: it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, our Buddha nature. It is a way in which cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night become truly alive, share in our humanity and speak their own silent and expressive language.” R. H. Blyth

Unless the poets in the Western world writing haiku today appreciate this wider perspective and are willing to express some of this true 'spirit of haiku', not by way of imitation, but as a spontaneous and genuine experience of life, haiku poetry will fail to have any rejuvenating effects on the impoverished literature of our age, and the 'Way of Haiku' will become no more than a 'Cult of Haiku', one of the infinite, constantly changing superficial diversions of a bourgeois consumer culture.