are both particularly influenced by Chinese poetry. Basho absorbs the Chinese influence completely and then produces his own new and different poetry with almost no borrowing, as can be seen by comparing Basho's haiku with Lao-tsu's saying (see p. 30). Buson takes whole phrases from Chinese poets but puts them into new settings and gives them new meaning.
Shosho no
Kari no namida ya
Oboro-zuki
Tears
For the wild geese of Shosho;
A hazy moon.
This poem was written by Buson, as he states, while listening to the lute one evening. It echoes verses by the famous Chinese poet Senki:
—Returning Wild Geese—
Why do they so blindly depart from Shosho?
The water is blue, the sand is white, the moss on both banks green;
Should the lute of twenty-five strings be played, on a moonlit night,
With the overwhelming emotion will they not return?
Blyth states that the lute of 25 strings was played by Gao and Joei, the two daughters of Gyo, who both died at this spot. The "tears" of Buson's verse are connected with the two sisters.6
Chinese art, as well as Chinese poetry, reflects religion and influences haiku deeply. The romantic Chinese paintings are Taoistic in that they show men as very small beings amid overpoweringly intense landscapes. By comparison the sumi-e (black-and-white ink drawings) introduced into Japan by Zen priests are extremely simple. These intuitive drawings express the essence of the subject in a few rough, uncorrected brush strokes. This essence is more important than technique or beauty. From sumi-e developed haiga, small pictures in black and white or in simple colours on the same paper as a haiku. They either illustrate the haiku,, saying the same thing in a different way, or they reinforce it by introducing a new concept, thus deepening the meaning of the haiku. It was Zen which appropriated both Chinese art and Chinese poetry and placed them at the disposal of haiku.
SHINTO
Having gathered richness and depth in China, Mahayana Buddhism was to encounter further enriching and deepening influences: the indigenous Japanese religion, Shinto, and the Japanese genius for absorbing alien cultural strains and adding its own characteristics to them. The word Shinto means "the way of the gods." Maurius B. Jansen, Professor of History at Princeton University, describing Shinto, writes that
the spontaneous response to nature and beauty found an early and enduring focus in the cult of Shinto, with whose gods the Japanese first peopled their island home. Conceived as a relatively simple expression of awe and gratitude before the forces of nature, Shinto ritual invoked the spirits helpful to agricultural pursuits. The Sun Goddess was the highest of a myriad of deities who had brought forth the divine land of Japan. Since she was the progenitress of the Imperial clan, her cult associated religion with government and provided an important point of continuity throughout Japanese history. Shinto taught little of morality or worship, and its gods were approached by ceremonial purification and ablution.
The purification festivals are popular to this day. Recent student demonstrations by young men and women may be said to be an echo of those religious processions (in which, however, young men only took part). Jansen sees the Shinto cult as essentially
the work of an agricultural people who saw in natural settings and phenomena the condition of their survival. The association of religion with cleanliness, the seasonal communal festivals, the expression of communal joy and gratitude ... all were aspects of the joyous and uncomplicated response to nature . . . made through Shinto.7
The communal aspect of Shinto did dovetail nicely with the Utopian theories of Confucianism. But the Shinto word kami (translated into English by "gods") really indicates the animism which is the essence of Shinto. Animism is a primitive belief which endows even inanimate things with both life and spirit to explain two phenomena: first, the difference between a living man and a corpse (described as caused by the disappearance of life from the body), and secondly, the existence of dreams (explained as the ability of the spirit to move about.) Shinto, with its belief in the many kami or minor deities of mountains, streams and trees, is a religion of nature worship. This fact is reflected in the large part played by nature in Japanese haiku.
ZEN AND ZEN ARTS
Although Buddhism as it arrived in Japan included six sects, the Zen sect, emphasizing the practical application of doctrine, had the greatest influence on haiku.
The word Zen means "meditation." The central and most strongly stressed teaching was that through meditation one could attain satori (enlightenment), intuitive insight into what transcends logical distinctions. An aid to the attainment of satori was meditation on koan paradoxes like, "Thinking not of good, thinking not of evil, what is your own original face, which you had before you were born?"8 Only by ridding the mind of conscious logical distinctions and by reaching into the unconscious could one solve the koan. The intuition of Zen was not to be found by research into books. Indeed, books were frowned upon as distractions. Although the koan explanations and poems were written by Zen masters, there is a famous incident of a monk burning books because his disciples were becoming preoccupied with them. He claimed that instead of looking at the moon they were looking at the finger which was pointing to the moon. It cannot be overemphasized that false intuition, contrived insight and mere cleverness were abhorred in the practice of Zen and in the arts, as will be seen later. An analogy exists in the concept that while piety and love are great virtues, false piety and false love are great vices.
Illustrations of the spirit of Zen may be shown by three anecdotes.
The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life.
A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a good store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.
This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harrassment at last named Hakuin.
In great anger the parents went to the master. "Is that so?" was all he would say.
After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else the little one needed. A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth—that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask his forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back again.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he would say was: "Is that so?"9
Hakuin was detached from his reputation. He had an enlightened view of the true value of things in this life. Like the resurrected Lazarus in Browning's poem "The Epistle," he was undisturbed by events which would upset an unenlightened man. For Hakuin, contradictions and disturbances were harmonized in a unity of a higher order.
A second anecdote concerns the master Sosan. His disciple Doshin asked him how to become free. Sosan in turn asked Doshin who bound him. The disciple had to admit sheepishly that no one bound him. "Why then do you seek freedom?" said the master.10
This
