Haiku Form. Joan Giroux
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 anecdote illustrates the Zen adept's avoidance of dialectic. Sosan went right to the heart of the problem. Who bound him? The disciple wanted to philosophize. He was seeking an excuse for his faults in his imagined lack of liberty. He was devious and unenlightened. The master of Zen, on the other hand, condemns convoluted thinking. For him, ordinary, everyday life and behaviour are the real way of Zen.
Lastly, a monk asked Joshu, "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?" The monk answered: "Mu." The answer mu or wu is the prefix "non" or "no," but it also imitates the "woof" that a dog might answer if asked the question. This mu or nothingness is the road to enlightenment.
While meditating on koan such as the anecdote of Joshu's dog, the monks used haiku, haiga (haiku pictures) and other arts as disciplines to foster enlightenment and awareness of essences; according to Asano Nagatake, Director of Tokyo's National Museum, "a new kind of artistic endeavor was born as disciples tried to express spiritual concepts in objective form."11 Earle Ernst explains the nature of existence as taught in Japanese Buddhism:
Existence consists in the interplay of a plurality of elements whose true nature is indescribable and whose source is unknown. Combinations of these elements instantaneously flash into existence and instantaneously disappear, to be succeeded by new combinations of elements appearing in a strict causality. . . . The only concrete reality is the moment, which like the image from a single frame of motion picture film is. . . followed by a new and different frame and image. The visible world is therefore flamelike, shifting and evanescent, possessed of no durable validity.12
It must be stressed that the Japanese artist, too, regards the world of perception as having no permanence, only brief flashes of actuality. He merely records; he does not interpret. He concentrates on single moments of time and space.
Bushido (the way of the warrior), based on Zen and Confucian principles, stresses frugality of life, benevolence and righteousness. Bushi means "samurai, warrior"; do means "way." Bushido is "the way of the samurai" or simply "chivalry." Loyalty to the warrior's lord is more important even than loyalty to the laws of the country or to the duties towards the family. If a conflict arose between the two, the duty to the lord should be performed, followed by seppuku (suicide by disembowelment) to atone for the offense against the law or against family ties. In modern Japan lifelong loyalty and service to one's employer go far beyond anything found in Western countries. Thus Basho, a young man from a samurai family, first became interested in haiku out of loyalty to his young lord, a haikai-lover who died at an early age. The Zen frugality and simplicity of living arrangements; the mingled sense of pride and tragedy flowing from the spirit of sacrifice epitomized by samurai suicides; these are the chief contributions of bushido to haiku.
The Zen Buddhist concept of life as a succession of moments, whose meaning is to be captured by openness to the significance of each event as it occurs, gave birth to many new arts. One of these is cha no yu (the tea ceremony). According to Asano, its purpose was "to look quietly into oneself and to appreciate nature while meditating within a rustic teahouse."13