Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to illustrate doctrine—such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)--this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. (Like “haiku” itself, the term was a later coinage of Shiki [Poetics 52].) Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Though composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leave an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô, and over many of its translators.

To further illustrate the dual perspective contained by haiku, let us examine some individual poems. Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道 and the first recorded after Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry; the fish’s eyes are tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or temporal theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “Yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the relationships of the Platonic forms, this relationship is extra-temporal. Any and all going springs may attract such bird’s cries. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and temporal world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the timeless and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobi-komu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as a comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one (some commentators consider oto onomatopoeic). Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, whereas the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the eternal and the world of the temporal, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô 西行法師: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. The point is not that all haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something particular about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the eternal and the temporal, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka can be intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the temporal and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal objective reverberations of the poem as well as the merely subjective ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

(:title “The Eternal and the Temporal in the Dynamics of Haiku.”:) (:toc Sections:)

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. One key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that haiku has unique features in its literary heritage that make it especially suited to manifesting these two views of the world simultaneously, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. Strictly speaking, a haiku should have groups of 5 then 7 then 5 syllables divided by a cutting word and contain a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When properly employed, these rules allow the creation of a poem that transcends the eternal and temporal aspects of life. This ability is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

In its purest form, temporal seeing begins with the hypothesis that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no external structure that can order experiences. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane underlying essence to the world, Aristotle’s focus on substance as a combination of matter and form that corresponding to the potential and actuality of an object led later thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot have experience the forms, they cannot directly impact us, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.

For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experiences of the world and then draw inferences about what, if any, substructure supports experience. The temporal scholars are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we experience are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It seems impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from without, and our prior knowledge of such a framework is necessary for right understanding of the world. The external framework that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them and are themselves unchanging though they underlie our changing experience.

For the purposes of this paper, “eternal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and then attempting to derive working knowledge by proceeding from that schema to our personal experience of the world. Those who emphasize the eternal aspect of experience divide the world into essence and accident and work from system to sensation by placing an emphasis on the unseen template which undergirds the recurrent order that we are able to experience.

The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue of defining a distinction between the eternal and temporal for use here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where it was left. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it does go by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. As human beings, we find ourselves engaged in both sorts of activities. Even the mystic must eat, and even the laborer must dream. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully, because both play a part in human nature and human understanding. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because these poems are clearly structured in such a way that they are well suited to speak to the basic condition of humans in our search to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.

Haiku inherits a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consisted of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by an ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka—the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse—became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole.

Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. (Though occasionally, some poets worked alone.) In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form and had numerous rules about the topics to be used and the means for linking verses, haikai cut itself loose and used haigon 俳言, colloquial or vulgar language, Chinese loan words, and other terms banned by the rules of waka, and haikai experimented with different means of connecting verses.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was usually composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. Here is part of a sequence contained in Bashô’s Saru Mino 猿蓑:

By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was meant to also stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, because these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was its inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. The writing of hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. (Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both a connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.)

There were a number of cutting words historically, but the most common are ya, keri, and kana. Ya is a kind of exclamation or cry and is frequently translated “oh!” or “ah!” Keri is a classical form of the past tense, though in some texts it functions only as an emphasizer. Kana has come to mean, “I wonder…” in modern Japanese, but in classical texts, it quietly intensifies attention on the preceding word.

Season words in Japanese are too numerous to list here, and by the time of Bashô, there had already been a thousand years of written codification of such terms and their proper usage and associations. Traditionally, haiku are grouped according to the five seasons—New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter—each having its own set of characteristic flowers, birds, festivals, foods, and so on. There are a few poems with two seasons or none, but these are less common. Even in modern Japan, casual observers can remark that the love of seasonality displayed by average people is quite pronounced compared to Americans. The key quality of kigo is that they allow a wealth of associations to be transmitted by only a few words. They are “a kind of poetic algebra or shorthand, enabling poets to speak to one another open secrets” (Haiku 336). Thus, for example the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû 新古今集 (Poetics 34). These associations not only keep haiku’s brevity from undermining it, they also provide a powerful resource for creating rich interpretive frameworks.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Blyth says of humor in haiku, “it is some indispensable element without which haiku can hardly exist” (Haiku 313). Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be it between refined or vulgar subject matters. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verses that they created together.

As a simple example of the humor in individual haikai verses, here is a verse by Kikaku that Bashô quotes in his Saga Nikki 嵯峨日記: “Accused her of faithlessness/ and forgave her on Abstinence Day” (Essential Haiku 66). Seeing the first line, the reader has the expectation that drama will follow, perhaps a violent quarrel with the lover or the author’s withdrawn loneliness. Instead, there is a quick reconciliation that takes place on a day set aside for refraining from physical affection.

The eternal can be seen in haiku in the incorporation of Shintô elements. Though Blyth downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought in Haiku, devoting just three pages to it, Shintô is in fact a central influence on the nature of haiku. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of a haiku. However, when understood as a folk religion (rather than as the state religion imposed during much of Blyth’s lifetime), Shintô circumscribes the topic under consideration but not the propositions within that context. Thus, Shintô should not ordinarily be a topic for particular examination. Rather, Shintô is the means by which particular topics are manifest.

In particular, the kigo that is required for haiku is advanced in part by Shintô considerations. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between kigo and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

(:quote:) bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization. (225)

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we realize that the choice of words in haiku is not merely a product of human convention, but it is also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are the inhabited manifestations of the kami that act on this world. Each mountain has a name, and that name works by invoking the spirit of the mountain. The motion of spirits is seen as a vital aspect of language. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. (More about the rice planting calendar as a center of life in the four seasons.)

Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly. Seasons, for example, can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate. The ancient Japanese may have attributed these recurrent trends to the working of kami, while we attribute it to the motion of the earth’s axis. However, in either case, the recognition that these separate experiences are driven by a common source is an acknowledgment of the impact of the eternal aspect on life. Our experience is driven by the eternal principles underlying orbital mechanics and heating dynamics. Their experience is driven by the shear will of harusame and shigure. In either case, as Hume suggested, causality is invisible to experience qua experience. Hence, it is only our rational inference of an eternal principle’s existence that illuminates its theoretical workings.

The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are key components to Koji Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase using kigo or waka calls into mind some eternal precept. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. It is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event. The superimposed section gives that scene a context by juxtaposing an evocative phrase in a surprising fashion. Together, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to illustrate doctrine—such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)--this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. (Like “haiku” itself, the term was a later coinage of Shiki [Poetics 52].) Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Though composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leave an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô, and over many of its translators.

Nevertheless, it is in the base section that haiku create a unique and specific picture of the world as it is. The great poets attempt to cast off how the world should look and capture how it is actually experienced. Along with the superimposed section, haiku now contains both an eternal aspect concerned with past and future expressions of the world and a temporal aspect concerned with the world as it is in this instant.

Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct his skill not toward merely punning by means of kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as was done in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world. It was common for waka to have two or more separate meanings hinging on the interpretation of some pivot words. This trend continued somewhat in haiku. More important was the way that this tradition created a culture that was comfortable with superimposing multiple meanings on texts.

Also significantly for the interpretation of haiku, the hiraku in renga and haikai no renga is meant to change meanings as it changes groupings, as was shown before. The poem can be interpreted as being set in morning or evening, fall or spring, under happy or sad conditions depending on the framework established by reading it along with the poem either before or after it. The intriguing point about haiku is how its masters were able to take a single hokku and condense the dual perspectives of hiraku triplets into a single verse. Just as one hiraku is meant to be juxtaposed with another, one haiku is meant to contain two or more images in simultaneous juxtaposition.

The brevity of haiku and the nature of the Japanese language itself both conspire to make the interpretation of haiku somewhat difficult. Bashô’s disciple Kyorai recorded an incident in which he and Shadô, another of Bashô’s pupils, were quarreling about the meaning of Kyorai’s verse, “The tips of the crags—/ Here too is someone,/ Guest of the moon,” 岩鼻やこゝにもひとり月の客 (Essential Haiku 246). Shadô felt that the accompanying moon-viewer should be a monkey. Kyorai, however, states the verse recorded his seeing another poet along a mountain ridge one night. Bashô corrects them both by saying the subject of the verse should be Kyorai himself. However, Bashô does not suggest any revision to the verse, and furthermore he includes it as is in one his publications. Blyth remarks about the incident, “we have here the entertaining picture of Bashô telling Kyorai, not what he ought to have said, but what he ought to have meant by what he said” (343). The point is that this single verse contains multiple interpretations—poet, monkey, or self as the subject—and none of them crowd out the others. A genius like Bashô is able to see the highest interpretation but other interpretations also have their validity. Going further, not only can this poem be seen as illustrative of Kyorai’s individual, temporally existent situation, but also it can be seen as encapsulating the eternal unity that underlies all lonesome climbers who glance another with a smiling heart. As with kakekotoba or connected hiraku, there are two poems here. In one, each traveler is a guest of the moon. In the other, Kyorai alone has traveled, and reflects on his own solitude as a guest of the moon.

To further illustrate the dual perspective contained by haiku, let us examine some individual poems. Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道 and the first recorded after Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry; the fish’s eyes are tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or temporal theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “Yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the relationships of the Platonic forms, this relationship is extra-temporal. Any and all going springs may attract such bird’s cries. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and temporal world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the timeless and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobi-komu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as a comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one (some commentators consider oto onomatopoeic). Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, whereas the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the eternal and the world of the temporal, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô 西行法師: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[1]. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. The point is not that all haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something particular about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the eternal and the temporal, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka can be intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the temporal and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal objective reverberations of the poem as well as the merely subjective ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between the eternal and the temporal by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the earth to the heavens and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life, haiku must use and then cast off both empiricist and rationalist dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

The distinction drawn in this essay has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the forms.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue eternal thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences outside of pure cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is a potentially untrustworthy experience. Even if one’s conclusions seems logical to oneself, knowing that the insane feel equally unshakeable in their beliefs brings us room for uncertainty.

Even ignoring this uncertainty, no understanding of the relation of ideas, no matter how detailed, is of any value if such a schema cannot be correlated with the external world in a meaningful way. For example, it is a widely held ethical belief that “it is wrong to murder.” However, great confusion persists about the exact meaning of the term “murder.” Some hold that it is murder to abort a fetus, others object. Some say that killing in war is justified, others dispute. Some approve of euthanasia, others disapprove, and no universal consensus exists about whether the relevant factor in classifying something as murder is the intelligence of the victim or the victim’s genetic status as human. Even if such consensus did exist, there are no doubt still further complications and edge cases to be considered, all of which point to the fact that to hold a simple statement to be true is of little use without a stable means of determining the relevance and relationship of that truth to present experience.

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô, and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since pure experience is prior to either eternal or temporal understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Carter explains that, for example, to understand that an object is red, one must know what red is compared to other colors. Hence, one must know about the concept of colors already. However, the concept of colors is merely a compound formed of our knowledge of individual colors. This leads to a seeming paradox.

When we examine our knowledge of a color, we are left with the paradox that we must know them before we can know them. Similarly in haiku, we are encouraged to recognize the paradox that underlies haiku. The particular bustling market of Edo illustrates the eternal going-spring, but the going-spring is composed merely of hundreds of scenes like the one that took place in Edo’s bustling market for Bashô. Because of the brevity and tension contained in the poem, we are inclined to interpret it as Carter and Nishida demand we should—by recognizing the contradictory tension in our knowledge itself. We must recognize that the eternal and the temporal are interdependent in haiku and elsewhere.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is to show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. As per the oracle’s motto, the goal of the poet is to “know thyself.” So, while a novelist writing about naval warfare who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist or poet can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way experience can be split into eternal and temporal aspects that are simultaneously manifest.

As the Zenrinkushû says of the poet, “入林不動草、入水不立波,” meaning, “Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple” (Haiku 27). The poet does not disturb the world around, because the poet enters not through body, but through mind. Though the mind does not have full knowledge of either itself or the world, by playing (the meaning of haikai) but playing seriously (as per Bashô’s example), we can gain knowledge, not of the external, but of the internal. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. It is through poetry that we are allowed to experience two modes of thinking simultaneously via the double aperture.

Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time before our eyes, ears, and nose. We capture what we see, hear, smell, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience itself can never be captured. All that we can record are seventeen syllables that can be used later as a tool to open our minds once more to dual perspectives of nature, both in its ordinariness and sublimity.

Works cited

Carter, Steven D. On a Bare Branch: Basho and the Haikai Profession. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1997), pp. 57–69.

Kato, Kazumitsu. Review: Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. VII by R. H. Blyth. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 82, No. 3. (Jul. – Sep., 1962), pp. 459–462.

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô, and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since pure experience is prior to either eternal or temporal understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time — the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Carter explains that, for example, to understand that an object is red, one must know what red is compared to other colors. Hence, one must know about the concept of colors already. However, the concept of colors is merely a compound formed of our knowledge of individual colors. This leads to a seeming paradox.

(:quote:) The many particular colors express the color system, and the color system integrates the many. In order to know, we must take both perspectives at one and the same time. Hence, color is many, yet one. It is a contradictory entity. (33) (:endquote:)

When we examine our knowledge of a color, we are left with the paradox that we must know them before we can know them. Similarly in haiku, we are encouraged to recognize the paradox that underlies haiku. The particular bustling market of Edo illustrates the eternal going-spring, but the going-spring is composed merely of hundreds of scenes like the one that took place in Edo’s bustling market for Bashô. Because of the brevity and tension contained in the poem, we are inclined to interpret it as Carter and Nishida demand we should — by recognizing the contradictory tension in our knowledge itself. We must recognize that the eternal and the temporal are interdependent in haiku and elsewhere.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. One key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that unique features of haiku’s literary heritage make it especially suited to manifesting these two views of the world simultaneously, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. Strictly speaking, a haiku should have groups of 5 then 7 then 5 syllables divided by a cutting word and contain a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these rules allow the creation of a poem that transcends the eternal and temporal aspects of the life. This ability is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

In its purest form, temporal seeing begins with the hypothesis that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no external structure that can order experiences. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane underlying essence, Aristotle’s focus on substance as combination of matter and form that embody the potential and actuality of an object led later thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot have experience the forms, they cannot impact us directly, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.

Since all that can be seen to exist is the world as it is present before us, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world. On this basis, those philosophers who inherit Aristotle’s temporal means of seeing have downplayed the importance of prior systematization compared to the importance of interpreting experience on its own.

For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experiences of the world and then draw inferences about what, if any, substructure supports experience only by working out from them. The temporal scholars are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we experience are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It seems impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from outside, and our prior knowledge of such a framework is necessary for right understanding of the world. The external framework that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them and are themselves unchanging though they underlie our changing experience.

The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal for use here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where it was left. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it does go by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. As human beings, we find ourselves engaged in both sorts of activities. Even the mystic must eat, and even the laborer must dream. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully because both play a part in human nature and human understanding. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because their poems are clearly structured in such a way that they are well suited to speak to the basic condition of humans as simultaneously seeking to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form and had numerous rules about the topics to be used and the means for linking verses, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms banned by the rules of waka (collectively known as haigon 俳言) and experimented with different means of connecting verses.

There were a number of cutting words historically, but the most common are ya, keri, and kana. Ya is a kind of exclamation or cry, and is frequently translated “oh!” or “ah!” Keri is a classical form of the past tense, though in some texts it functions only as an emphasis. Kana has come to mean, “I wonder…” in modern Japanese, but in classical texts, it quietly intensifies attention on the preceding word.

Season words in Japanese are too numerous to enumerate here, and by the time of Bashô, there had already been a thousand years of written codification of such terms and their proper usage and association. Traditionally, haiku are grouped according to the five seasons — New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter — each having its own set of characteristic flowers, birds, festivals, foods, and so on. There are a few poems with two seasons or none, but these are less common. Even in modern Japan, casual observers can remark that the love of seasonality displayed by average people is quite pronounced compared to Americans. The key quality of kigo is that they allow a wealth of associations to be transmitted by only a few words. They are “a kind of poetic algebra or shorthand, enabling poets to speak to one another open secrets” (Haiku 336). Thus, the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû 新古今集 (Poetics 34). These association not only keep haiku’s brevity from undermining it, but also provide a powerful resource for creating rich interpretive frameworks.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Blyth says of humor in haiku that “it is some indispensable element without which haiku can hardly exist” (Haiku 313). Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be it between refined or vulgar subject matters. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verses that they made together.

The eternal can be seen in haiku in the incorporation of Shintô elements. Though Blyth downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought in Haiku, devoting just three pages to it, Shintô is in fact a central influence on the nature of haiku. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of haiku. However, when understood as a folk religion (rather than as the state religion imposed during much of Blyth’s lifetime), Shintô circumscribes the topic under consideration but not the propositions within that context. Thus, Shintô should not ordinarily be a topic for particular examination. Rather, Shintô is the means by which particular topics are manifest.

In particular, the kigo that is required for haiku is advanced in part by Shintô considerations. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

(:quote:)bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization (225).

Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly. Seasons, for example, can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate. The ancient Japanese may have attributed these recurrent trends to the working of kami, while we attribute it to the motion of the earth’s axis. However, in either case, the recognition that these separate experiences are driven by a common source is an acknowledgment of the impact of the eternal aspect on life. Our experience is driven by the eternal principles underlying orbital mechanics and heating dynamics. Their experience is driven by the shear will of yudachi and shigure. In either case, as Hume suggested, causality is invisible to experience qua experience. Hence, it is only our rational inference of an eternal principle that illuminates its theoretical workings.

Haiku is also aided in the expression of complex meaning in limited space by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka, as seen before with “autumn nightfall.” With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood, and these associations can in turn be seen as an eternal essence underlying individual poetic experiences.

The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are key components to Koji Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase using kigo or waka calls into mind some eternal precept. The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. Together, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to illustrate doctrine — such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11) — this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. (Like “haiku” itself, the term was a later coinage of Shiki [Poetics 52].) Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Though composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô, and over many of its translators.

Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intentionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the transcendent profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. In other words, one is tempted to view them only from the eternal aspect. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, examination of a haiku is best informed by beginning with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding to reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv).

In The Poetics of Haiku, Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it.

Nevertheless, it is in the base section that haiku create a unique and specific picture of the world as it is. The great poets attempt to cast off how the world should look and capture how it is actually experienced. Along with the superimposed section, haiku now contains both an eternal aspect concerned with past expression of the world and a temporal aspect concerned with the world as it is in this instant.

Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct his skill not toward merely punning by means of kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as was done in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world. It was common for waka to have two or more separate meanings hinging on the interpretation of such pivot words. This trend continued somewhat in haiku. More important was the way that this tradition created a culture that was comfortable with superimposing multiple meanings on texts.

Also significantly for the interpretation of haiku, the hiraku in renga and haikai no renga is meant to change meanings as it changes groupings, as was shown before. The poem can be interpreted as being set in morning or evening, fall or spring, under happy or sad conditions depending on the framework established by reading it along with the poem either before or after it. The intriguing point about haiku is how its masters were able to take a single hokku and condense the dual perspectives of hiraku pairs into one verse. Just as one hiraku is meant to be juxtaposed with another, one haiku is meant to contain two or more images in simultaneous juxtaposition.

The brevity of haiku and the nature of the Japanese language itself both conspire to make the interpretation of haiku somewhat difficult. Bashô’s disciple Kyorai recorded an incident in which he and Shadô, another of Bashô’s pupils, were quarreling about the meaning of Kyorai’s verse, “The tips of the crags—/ Here too is someone,/ Guest of the moon,” 岩鼻やこゝにもひとり月の客 (Essential Haiku 246). Shadô felt that the accompanying moon-viewer should be a monkey. Kyorai, however, states the verse recorded his seeing another poet along a mountain ridge one night. Bashô corrects them both by saying the subject of the verse should be Kyorai himself. However, Bashô does not suggest any revision to the verse, and furthermore he includes it as is in one his publications. Blyth remarks about the incident, “we have here the entertaining picture of Bashô telling Kyorai, not what he ought to have said, but what he ought to have meant by what he said” (343). The point is that this single verse contains multiple interpretations — poet, monkey, or self as the subject — and none of them crowd out the others. A genius like Bashô is able to see the highest interpretation but other interpretations also have their validity. Going further, not only can this poem be seen as illustrative of Kyorai’s individual, temporally existent situation, but it can be seen as encapsulating the eternal unity that underlies all lonesome climbers who glance another with a smiling heart. As with kakekotoba or connected renku, there are two poems here. In one, each traveler is a guest of the moon. In the other, Kyorai alone has traveled, and reflects on his own solitude as a guest of the moon.

To further illustrate the dual perspective contained by haiku, let us examine some individual poems. Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first recorded after Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry; the fish’s eyes are tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or temporal theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “Yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the relationships of the Platonic forms, this relationship is extra-temporal. Any and all going springs may attract such bird’s cries. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and temporal world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the timeless and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one (some commentators consider oto onomatopoeic). Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, whereas the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the eternal and the world of the temporal, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô 西行法師: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ’^[1]^’. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. It is not that haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something particular about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the eternal and the temporal, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the temporal and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal objective reverberations of the poem as well as the merely subjective ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue eternal thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences outside of pure cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is a potentially untrustworthy experience. Even if one’s conclusions seems logical to oneself, knowing that the insane are equally unshaken in their beliefs brings us room for uncertainty.

Now suppose that one seeks to devote one’s self exclusively to the temporal, with no statement accepted that is not the subject of experience. Here, the problem raises itself again: how can we affix labels onto undifferentiated experience? To even say, “I am looking at a sunset today,” presupposes the categories of “I,” “looking,” “sunsets,” and “today.” All of this is before one can even extrapolate, “thus I will probably see another sunset tomorrow.” What experience tells us that “red discs on the horizon are sunsets”? How can we even say that “red is red” and “discs are discs” without already presuming something from outside of mere experience itself? Without our evolved pre-categorizations for the world, there are only sounds and colors without names. We are left wordless in William James’s “big blooming buzzing confusion.”

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is to show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. As per the oracle’s motto, the goal of the poet is to “know thyself.” So, while a novelist writing about naval warfare who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world experience can be split into eternal and temporal aspects which are simultaneously manifest.

In our own lives, we lose ourselves in abstract theory, and we lose ourselves in routine. Haiku, as a bridge between those realms, has the ability to bring the poetic into our lives. Haiku, in its simplicity, invites participation. Indeed, no hokku by the great masters was meant to be left without compliment from other renga poet-participants.

Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time before our eyes, ears, and nose. We capture what we see, hear, smell, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience itself can never be captured. All that we can record are seventeen syllables that can be used later as a tool to open our minds once more to dual perspectives of nature, both ordinary and sublime.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô 西行法師: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ’^[1]^’. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. It is not that haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something concrete about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the eternal and the temporal, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the temporal and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely subjective ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between the eternal and the temporal by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both empiricist and rationalist dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the forms.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue eternal thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences that come prior to cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is a potentially untrustworthy experience.

Now suppose that one seeks to devote one’s self exclusively to the temporal, with no statement accepted that is not the subject of experience. Here, the problem raises itself again: how can we affix labels onto undifferentiated experience? To even say, “I am looking at a sunset today,” presupposes the categories of “I,” “looking,” “sunsets,” and “today,” even before one should like to extrapolate, “thus I will probably see another sunset tomorrow.” What experience tells us that “red discs on the horizon are sunsets”? How can we even say that “red is red” and “discs are discs” without already presuming something from outside of mere experience itself? Without our evolved pre-categorizations for the world, there are only sounds and colors without names. We are left wordless in William James’s “big blooming buzzing confusion.”

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since pure experience is prior to either eternal or temporal understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Haiku is such an aperture.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is to show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. So, while a novelist writing about naval warfare who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world experience can be split into eternal and temporal aspects which are simultaneously manifest.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. One key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that unique features of haiku’s literary heritage make it suited at simultaneously manifesting these two views of the world, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define a central division within Western thought, the division between philosophers who prioritize the temporal, like Aristotle, and those who prioritize the eternal, like Plato. Though neither philosopher perfectly embodies their respective category, their association with these ways of seeing remains strong due to the strength of their inquiries and the continuing influence of their work on later philosophy.

In its purest form, temporal seeing begins with the assumption that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no structure external to what is experienced that can order experiences themselves. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane structure to characteristics of things, Aristotle’s focus on substance as combination of matter and form representing the potential and actuality of an object led later thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot have experience the forms, they cannot impact us directly, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.

Since all that can be seen to exist is the world as it is present before us, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world. On this basis, those philosophers who inherit Aristotle’s temporal means of seeing have downplayed the importance of prior systematization when compared to the importance of interpreting experience on its own.

For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and draw inferences about what, if any, substructure supports experience only by working out from it. The temporal scholars are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we experience are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It is impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from outside, and our prior knowledge of such a framework is necessary for understanding the world. The external framework that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them and are themselves unchanging though they underlie our changing experience.

For the purposes of this paper, “eternal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and then attempting to derive working knowledge by proceeding from that schema to our personal experience of the world. Those who emphasize the eternal aspect of experience divide the world into essence and accident and work from system to sensation by placing an emphasis on the unseen order which undergirds recurrent order in the world.

The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal for use here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where it was left. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully because both play a part in human nature and human understanding. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because their poems are clearly structured in such a way that they are well suited to speak to the basic condition of humans as simultaneously seeking to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.

To understand the ability of haiku to connect the temporal and eternal, it is useful to have an understanding of its literary origins, which allow it to make allusions to past works, yet break with reader expectations. It is also helpful to contrast haiku with other forms of Japanese poetry, in order to see the uniqueness of its ability to make such connections.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form and had numerous rules about the topics to be used and the means for linking verses, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms banned by the rules of waka (collectively known as haigon 俳言) and experimented with different means of connecting verses.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was usually composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. (Though occasionally, some poets worked alone.) Here is part of a sequence contained in Bashô’s Saru Mino 猿蓑:

By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. The writing of hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. (Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.)

There were a number of cutting words historically, but the most common are ya, keri, and kana. Ya is a kind of exclamation or cry, and is frequently translated “oh!” or “ah!” Keri is a classical form of the past tense, though in some texts it functions only as an emphasis. Kana has come to mean, “I wonder…” in modern Japanese, but in classical texts, it quietly focuses attention on the preceding word.

Season words in Japanese are too numerous to enumerate here, and by the time of Bashô, there had already been a thousand years of written codification of such terms and their proper usage and association. Traditionally, haiku are grouped according to the five seasons — New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter — each having its own set of characteristic flowers, birds, festivals, foods, and so on. There are a few poems with two seasons or none, but these are less common. Even in modern Japan, casual observers can remark that the love of seasonality is quite pronounced compared to America and perhaps most other countries. The key quality of kigo is that they allow a wealth of associations to be transmitted by only a few words. They are “a kind of poetic algebra or shorthand, enabling poets to speak to one another open secrets” (Haiku 336). Thus, the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû 新古今集 (Poetics 34). These association not only keep haiku’s brevity from undermining it, but also provide a powerful resource for creating rich interpretive frameworks.

Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself later when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the expressive capacity of haiku itself.

Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. Due to the history of haiku, part of its basic definition is to combine these two ways of seeing into a simultaneous tension. The seasonal element presents an eternal picture, while the rest of the haiku creates a specific scene. The genius of haiku is that neither perspective crowds out the other, but both perspectives are held together in tension by the reader. As Bashô says, “One should know that a hokku is made by combining things,” and, “The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world” (Essential Haiku 234). In other words, the key to haiku is the juxtaposition and suspension of contradictory images.

Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly. Seasons, for example, can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate. The ancient Japanese may have attributed these recurrent trends to the working of kami, while we attribute it to the motion of the earth’s axis. However, in either case, the recognition that separate experiences are driven by a common source is an acknowledgment of the impact of the eternal aspect on life.

Haiku is also aided in the expression of complex meaning in limited space by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka as seen before with “autumn nightfall.” With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood, and these associations can in turn be seen as an eternal essence underlying from the outside individual poetic experiences.

Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to illustrate doctrine — such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11) — this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. (Like “haiku” itself, the term was a later coinage of Masaoka Shiki [Poetics 52].) Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô and its translators in the early 20^th century.

Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct his skill not toward merely punning by means of kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as was done in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

The brevity of haiku and the nature of the Japanese language itself both conspire to make the interpretation of haiku somewhat difficult. Bashô’s disciple Kyorai recorded an incident in which he and another of Bashô’s pupils were quarreling about the meaning of Kyorai’s verse, “The tips of the crags—/ Here too is someone,/ Guest of the moon,” 岩鼻やこゝにもひとり月の客 (Essential Haiku 246). Shadô felt that the accompanying moon-viewer should be a monkey. Kyorai, however, states the verse recorded his seeing another poet along a mountain ridge one night. Bashô corrects them both by saying the subject of the verse should be Kyorai himself. However, Bashô does not suggest any revision to the verse, and furthermore he includes it as is in one his publications. Blyth remarks about the incident, “we have here the entertaining picture of Bashô telling Kyorai, not what he ought to have said, but what he ought to have meant by what he said” (343). The point is that this single verse contains multiple interpretations — poet, monkey, or self as the subject — and none of them crowd out the others. A genius like Bashô is able to see the highest interpretation but other interpretations also have their validity. Going further, not only can this poem be seen as illustrative of Kyorai’s individual, temporally existent situation, but it can be seen as encapsulating the eternal unity that underlies all lonesome climbers who glance another with a smiling heart.

To further illustrate the dual perspective contained by haiku, take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first recorded after Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry; the fish’s eyes are tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or temporal theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the relationships of the Platonic forms, this relationship is extratemporal. Any and all going springs may attract such bird’s cries. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and temporal world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the timeless and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one (some commentators consider oto onomatopoeic). Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the eternal and the world of the temporal, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Similar analyses can be performed on most haiku by seeing the connection between the dynamic base section and the static superimposed section. Since most haiku have a seasonal element, there should be at least one eternal aspect to any haiku. The inclusion of a more ephemeral section in the haiku is not as mandatory, but many of the good haiku juxtapose such an image, while the great haiku create a space for the mind to use both means of seeing non-exclusively.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô 西行法師: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ’^[1]^’. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. It is not that haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something concrete about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the Rational and the Empirical, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Carter, Steven D. On a Bare Branch: Basho and the Haikai Profession. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1997), pp. 57–69.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. IOne key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that haiku’s unique heritage allows it to simultaneously manifest these two views of the world, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Ways of seeing

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define a central division within Western thought, the division between traditions in philosophy that prioritize the temporal, like Aristotle, and those that prioritize the eternal, like Plato. Though neither philosopher perfectly embodies their categories, their association with these ways of seeing remains strong due to the strength of the inquiries and their continuing influence on later philosophy.

Temporal

Temporal seeing begins with the assumption that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no structure external to what is experience that can order experiences themselves. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane structure to characteristics of things, Aristotle’s focus on substance as combination of matter and form representing the potential and actuality of an object led latter thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot experience the forms, they cannot impact us directly, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.

Since all that can be seen to exist is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world. On this basis, those philosophers who inherit Aristotle’s temporal means of seeing have downplayed the importance of prior systematization when compared to the importance of interpreting experience on its own.

For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

Eternal

Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It is impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from outside. The outside that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them.

For the purposes of this paper, “eternal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and then attempting to derive working knowledge by proceeding from that schema to our personal experience of the world. Those who emphasize the eternal aspect of experience divide the world into essence and accident and work from system to sensation.

On the utility of the distinction

The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal used here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where I left it. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

(:quote:) The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4) (:endquote:)

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because their poems are structured in a way that clearly speaks to the basic condition of humans as simultaneously seeking to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.

Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as an influence towards eternal perspective, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an influence towards temporal perspective. Thus, it is appropriate to see the connection between the eternal and temporal parts of a haiku and explore the ways that these parts strengthen its impact.

Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. Due to the history of haiku, part of its basic definition is to combine these two ways of seeing into a simultaneous tension. The seasonal element presents an eternal picture, while the rest of the haiku creates a specific scene. The genius of haiku is that neither perspective crowds out the other, but both perspectives are held together in tension by the reader. As Bashô says, “One should know that a hokku is made by combining things,” and, “The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world” (Essential Haiku 234). In other words, the key to haiku is the suspension of contradictory images.

The brevity of haiku and the nature of the Japanese language itself both conspire to make the interpretation of haiku somewhat difficult. Bashô’s disciple Kyorai recorded an incident in which he and another of Bashô’s pupils were quarreling about the meaning of Kyorai’s verse, “The tips of the crags—/ Here too is someone,/ Guest of the moon,” 岩鼻やこゝにもひとり月の客 (Essential Haiku 246). Shadô felt that the accompanying moon-viewer should be a monkey. Kyorai, however, states the verse recorded his seeing another poet one night. Bashô corrects them both by saying the subject of the verse should be Kyorai himself. However, Bashô does not suggest any revision to the verse itself, and further he includes it in one his publications. Blyth remarks about the incident, “we have here the entertaining picture of Bashô telling Kyorai, not what he ought to have said, but what he ought to have meant by what he said” (343). The point is that this single verse contains multiple interpretations — poet, monkey, or self as the subject — and none of them crowd out the others. A genius like Bashô is able to see the highest interpretation but other interpretations also have their validity. Going further, not only can this poem be seen as illustrative of Kyorai’s individual situation, but it can be seen as encapsulating the eternal unity that underlies all lonesome climbers who glance another with a smiling heart.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[1]. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. It is not that haiku must be shasei, pictures drawn explicitly from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something concrete about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the Rational and the Empirical, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since pure experience is prior to either Rational or Empirical understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Plato presents a criticism of the poet in Book X of The Republic. Socrates asks, how is it that a poet can write about horses without being a horseman? The gods know the form of riding a horse, and a horseman can approximate that knowledge. The cobbler and the metalworker can learn from the horseman if the tools they make are good or not, but the painter and the poet are almost without hope, because their imitations are three times removed from real source of things as copies of the outward appearance. Surely, to write poetry about all subjects in the world, there must be something that the poet knows. Yet, Socrates cannot find what it could be and in the end, he concludes that poetry must be banned from the Republic until a reasonable defense can be made for this dangerous art that overwhelms reason and potentially gives reign to the basest part of the soul with no real knowledge to guide it.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is to show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. So, while a novelist writing about naval warfare who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world experience can be split into Rational and Empirical aspects which are simultaneously manifest.

As the Zenrinkushû says of the poet, “入林不動草、入水不立波,” meaning, “Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple” (Haiku 27) . The poet does not disturb the world around, because the poet enters not through body, but through mind. Though the mind does not have full knowledge of either itself or the world, by playing (the meaning of haikai) but playing seriously (as per Bashô’s example), we can gain knowledge, not of the external, but of the internal. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. It is through poetry that we are allowed to experience two modes of thinking simultaneously via the double aperture.

Carter, Robert E. The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarô. University of Hawaii Press, Second edition, 1997.

Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Vol. I Eastern Culture. Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, Paperback edition, 1981.

Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, & Issa. Harper Collins, NY, 1994.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. One key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that haiku’s unique heritage allows it to simultaneously manifest these two views of the world, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. IOne key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that haiku’s unique heritage allows it to simultaneously manifest these two views of the world, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction. In this paper, I will argue that haiku’s unique heritage allows it to simultaneously manifest these two views of the world, and that doing so has advantages both philosophically and personally.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. Here is part of a sequence contained in Bashô’s Saru Mino 猿蓑:

Shihô:

As if it is going to snow,
The north wind of the cold islands.

Kyorai:

When it darkens
They climb up to the temple on the peak
To light the lantern.

Bashô:

The hototoguisu have all
Sung their last song. (Haiku 129)

Worth noticing is that the meaning of the center verse changes depending on its grouping with the verse before or after. As a pair, the first two verses take place in winter, but pairing the second verse with the last results in a summer scene. Also the setting changes from the peak of an island temple to an isolated forest one. In this way, it was common for middle verses of haikai to have variable meanings.

By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Blyth says of humor in haiku that “it is some indispensable element without which haiku can hardly exist” (Haiku 313). Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be it between refined or vulgar subject matters. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verse that they made together.

As a simple example of the humor in individual haikai verses, here is a verse by Kikaku that Bashô quotes in his Saga Nikki 嵯峨日記: “Accused her of faithlessness/ and forgave her on Abstinence Day” (Essential Haiku 66). Seeing the first line, the reader has the expectation that drama will follow, perhaps a violent quarrel with the lover or the author’s withdrawn loneliness. Instead there is a quick reconciliation that takes place on a day set aside for refraining from physical affection.

Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the expressive capacity of haiku itself.

Ways of seeing

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define a central division within Western thought, the division between traditions in philosophy that prioritize the temporal, like Aristotle, and those that prioritize the eternal, like Plato. Though neither philosopher perfectly embodies their categories, their association with these ways of seeing remains strong due to the strength of the inquiries and their continuing influence on later philosophy.

Temporal

Temporal seeing begins with the assumption that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no structure external to what is experience that can order experiences themselves. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane structure to characteristics of things, Aristotle’s focus on substance as combination of matter and form representing the potential and actuality of an object led latter thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot experience the forms, they cannot impact us directly, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.

Since all that can be seen to exist is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world. On this basis, those philosophers who inherit Aristotle’s temporal means of seeing have downplayed the importance of prior systematization when compared to the importance of interpreting experience on its own.

For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

Eternal

Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It is impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from outside. The outside that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them.

For the purposes of this paper, “eternal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and then attempting to derive working knowledge by proceeding from that schema to our personal experience of the world. Those who emphasize the eternal aspect of experience divide the world into essence and accident and work from system to sensation.

On the utility of the distinction

The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal used here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where I left it. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

(:quote:) The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4) (:endquote:)

Haiku is also aided in the expression of complex meaning in limited space by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû 新古今集 (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood. As stated before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons.

Significantly, the hiraku in renga and haikai no renga is meant to change meanings as it changes groupings, as was shown before. The poem can be interpreted as being set in morning or evening, fall or spring, under happy or sad conditions depending on the framework established by reading it along with the poem either before or after it. The intriguing fact of haiku is that its masters were able to take a single hokku and condense dual perspectives of hiraku pairs into one verse.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our temporal and eternal understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction.

Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. Strictly speaking, a haiku should have groups of 5 then 7 then 5 syllables divided by a cutting word and contain a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these rules allow the creation of a poem that transcends the eternal and temporal aspects of the life. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the temporal and eternal aspects of life is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

To understand the ability of haiku to connect the temporal and eternal, it is useful to have an understanding of its literary origins, which allow it to make allusions to past works, yet break with reader expectations. It is also helpful to contrast haiku with other forms of Japanese poetry, in order to see the uniqueness of its ability to make such a connection.

Ways of seeing

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define a central division within Western thought, the division between traditions in philosophy that prioritize the temporal, like Aristotle, and those that prioritize the eternal, like Plato. Though neither philosopher perfectly embodies their categories, their association with these ways of seeing remains strong due to the strength of the inquiries and their continuing influence on later philosophy.

Temporal

Temporal seeing begins with the assumption that the empirical world is the only world that can be said to exist and that there is no structure external to what is experience that can order experiences themselves. Aristotle is widely taken to have strongly influenced the development of this view by articulating his opposition to Plato’s teachings about the forms. While Plato was willing to postulate an extra-temporal and extra-mundane structure to characteristics of things, Aristotle’s focus on substance as combination of matter and form representing the potential and actuality of an object led latter thinkers to emphasize that even if Plato’s proposed realm of forms does exist, its separation from our ability to experience it directly makes it ethereal to the point of non-interference in the world. In other words, if we cannot experience the forms, they cannot impact us directly, and thus whether they exist or not is irrelevant.

Since all that can be seen to exist is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world. On this basis, those philosophers who inherit Aristotle’s temporal means of seeing have downplayed the importance of prior systematization when compared to the importance of interpreting experience on its own.

For the purposes of this paper, “temporal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

Eternal

Eternal seeing is the contrasting view of the world that takes its root largely from Plato’s dualism. This view holds that things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. On its own, empirical experience is a jumble that cannot provide any meaningful guide to its own structure, or the ways in which we should comport ourselves within it. It is impossible for a structure to define itself from within, so a framework must be imposed from outside. The outside that Plato proposed was a separate and eternal realm of the forms. The forms exist separately from human understanding of them.

For the purposes of this paper, “eternal understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and then attempting to derive working knowledge by proceeding from that schema to our personal experience of the world. Those who emphasize the eternal aspect of experience divide the world into essence and accident and work from system to sensation.

The skeptic of this paper may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal used here and accuse it of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where I left it. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly. Seasons, for example, can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate. The ancient Japanese may have attributed these recurrent trends to the working of kami, while we attribute it to the motion of the earth’s axis, however in either case, the recognition that separate experiences are driven by a common source is an acknowledgment of the impact of the eternal aspect on life.

Haiku is also aided in the expression of complex meaning in limited space by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood. As stated before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons.

The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are key components to Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase using kigo or waka calls into mind some eternal precept. The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. Together, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a later coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô.

Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the transcendent profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. In other words, one is tempted to view them only from the eternal aspect. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, examination of a haiku is best informed by beginning with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding to reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv).

In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it.

In any case, it is in the base section that haiku create a unique and specific picture of the world as it is. The great poets attempt to cast off how the world should look and capture how it is actually experienced. Along with the superimposed section, haiku now contains both an eternal aspect concerned with past expression of the world and a temporal aspect concerned with the world as it is in this instant.

Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as was done in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Change your interpretation, says the monkey.…

From haiku

Similar analyses can be performed on most haiku by seeing the connection between the dynamic base section and the static superimposed section. Since most haiku have a seasonal element, there should be at least a Rational aspect to any haiku. The inclusion of a more ephemeral section in the haiku is not as mandatory, but many of the good haiku juxtapose such an image, while the great haiku create a space for the mind to use both means of seeing non-exclusively.

From waka

Practical applications

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our Rational and Empirical understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction.

Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. Strictly speaking, a haiku should have groups of 5 then 7 then 5 syllables divided by a cutting word and contain a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these rules allow the creation of a poem that transcends the eternal and temporal aspects of the life. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the Rational and Empirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Brief history of haiku

To understand the ability of haiku to connect the temporal and eternal, it is useful to have an understanding of its literary origins, which allow it to make allusions to past works and encourage breaking with reader expectations. It is also helpful to contrast haiku with other forms of Japanese poetry, in order to see the uniqueness of its ability to make such a connection.

Haiku inherits a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consisted of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by an ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms banned by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, proved vital to the composition and understanding of haiku.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be it between refined or vulgar subject matters. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verse that they made together.

(the haikai thing in blyth)

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy. Plato found a way through the dilemma of the many and the one using a concept first elucidated by his teacher, Socrates. “The Forms” are the eternal patterns that give shape to the world. Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. Objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another. This allows objects to be both subject to change and difference, yet acknowledges their underlying sameness, without which classification is impossible. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

This basic notion of a dual natured universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has troubled some Western philosophers since Plato, and many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle is held to represent the first departure from the notion of a separation between the eternal and our ability to experience it. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

For the purposes of this paper, “Empirical understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

On the utility of the distinction

The skeptic may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal used here and accuse this paper of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where I left it. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because their poems are structured in a way that clearly speaks to the basic condition of humans as simultaneously seeking to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.

Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as an influence towards eternal perspective, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an influence towards temporal perspective. Thus, it is appropriate to see the connection between the eternal and temporal parts of a haiku and explore the ways that these parts strengthen its impact.

Dynamics of haiku

Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. Due to the history of haiku, part of its basic definition is to combine these two ways of seeing into a simultaneous tension. The seasonal element presents an eternal picture, while the rest of the haiku creates a specific scene. The genius of haiku is that neither perspective crowds out the other, but both perspectives should be seen by the reader.

The eternal aspect in haiku

The eternal can be seen in haiku in the extent to which haiku incorporate Shinto elements. Though Blyth downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought in his study Haiku, devoting just three pages to it, Shintô is in fact a central influence on the nature of haiku. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of haiku. However, when understood as a folk religion (rather than as the state religion imposed during much of Blyth’s lifetime), Shintô circumscribes the topic under consideration but not the propositions within that context. Thus, Shintô should not ordinarily be a topic for particular examination. Rather, Shintô is the means by which particular topics are manifest.

In particular, the kigo that is required for haiku is a topic advanced in part by Shintô considerations. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

(:quote:)”bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225). (:endquote:)

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely a product of human convention, but it is also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are the inhabited manifestations of the kami that act on this world. Each mountain has a name, and that name works by invoking the spirit of the mountain. The motion of spirits is seen as a vital aspect of language. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. (More about the rice planting calendar as a center of life in the four seasons.)

Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly.

Seasons can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate.

The temporal aspect in haiku

Their simultaneous tension

Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Significantly, the hiraku in renga and haikai no renga is meant to change meanings as it changes groupings. The poem can be interpreted as being set in morning or evening, fall or spring, under happy or sad conditions depending on the framework established by reading it along with the poem either before or after it. The intriguing fact of haiku is that its masters were able to take a single hokku and condense dual perspectives of hiraku pairs into one verse.

Change your interpretation, says the monkey.

Brief History of Haiku

About Rational and Empirical Understanding

The Rational

The Empirical

On the Utility of the Distinction

Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the expressive capacity of haiku itself.

What is the virtue in creating this distinction?, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction only so I can speciously proceeded to “find it” precisely where I left it? No, this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Empirical theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filial piety, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Rational world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Empirical world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Similar analyses can be performed on most haiku by seeing the connection between the static base section and the active superimposed section. Since most haiku have a seasonal element, there should be at least a Rational aspect to any haiku. The inclusion of a more ephemeral section in the haiku is not as mandatory, but many of the good haiku juxtapose such an image, while the great haiku create a space for the mind to use both means of seeing non-exclusively.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[1]. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. It is not that haiku must be shasei 写生, pictures drawn from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something concrete about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the Rational and the Empirical, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Empirical and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between the Rational and the Empirical by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both Empirical and Rational dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue Rational thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences that come prior to cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is a potentially untrustworthy experience.

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since experience is prior to either Rational or Empirical understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Plato presents a criticism of the poet in Book X of The Republic. Socrates asks how it is that a poet can write about horses without being a horseman? The gods know the form of riding a horse, and a horseman can approximate that knowledge. The cobbler and the metalworker can learn from the horseman if the tools they make are good or not, but the painter and the poet is almost without hope, imitating as three times removed from real source of things by copying the outward form of real horses. Surely, to write poetry about all subjects in the world, there must be something that the poet has knowledge of. Yet, Socrates cannot find what it should be and in the end, he concludes that poetry must be banned from the Republic until a reasonable defense can be made for this dangerous art that overwhelms reason, potentially giving reign to the basest part of the soul with no real knowledge to guide it.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. So, while a novelist writing about sailing who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world experience can be split into Rational and Empirical aspects which are simultaneously manifest.

(:title “The Rational and the Empirical in the Dynamics of Haiku.”:) (:toc Contents:)

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our Rational and Empirical understandings of the world. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word and a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse transcendent of both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and “bridging the worlds of Plato and Aristotle.” This ability to serve as such a bridge between the Rational and Empirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Background

Brief History of Haiku

Haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with unexpected connections, be they between the refined and the vulgar or the mundane and esoteric. Comedy generally works by establishing a natural path of expectations for the viewer’s mind to follow, then violating those expectations. Haikai did so through a variety of techniques. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verse that they made together.

Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the poetic capacity of haiku itself.

About Rational and Empirical Understanding

The Rational

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to review a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be but already was. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Like Buddha Gautama, he declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. The only constant is logos, the set of laws that, like karma, governs the eternal flow of elements.

For the purposes of this paper, “Rational understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and attempting to derive understanding by working from that schema to our personal experience of the world. The Rational are those who divide the world into Essence and Accident and those who work from system to sensation.

The Empirical

For the purposes of this paper, “Empirical understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual and those who work from sensation to system.

On the Utility of the Distinction

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers; from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals, much of Western thought can be classified through its affinity for either Plato or Aristotle. The Rational, broadly speaking, start from an objective understanding of the eternal; the Empirical start from a subjective experience of the emprical. The Rational are theologians, and the Empirical are scientists.

What is the virtue in creating this distinction?, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction only so I can speciously proceeded to “find it” precisely where I left it? No, this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications of this are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

(:quote:) The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4)

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the Rational, and the return to it is the Empirical. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully. Although these terms were certainly unknown to the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage the Rational and Empirical, because these means of understanding are also in evidence in the influences on the poets. Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as a Rational influence, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an Empirical influence. Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. The combination of these two ways of seeing is part of the basic definition of haiku, so it is appropriate to see the connection between these parts and their Western analogs and to explore the ways that these parts strength the impact of the haiku.

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Empirical theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelian world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the Rational and the world of the Empirical, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[1]. Burton Watson translates it thus, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the Rational and the Empirical, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Of course, the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Empirical and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between the Rational and the Empirical by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both Aristotelian and Platonic dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

Philosophically

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the Forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the Forms.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue Rational thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences that come prior to cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is potentially untrustworthy.

Even ignoring this uncertainty, no understanding of the relation of ideas, no matter how detailed, is of any value if such a schema cannot be correlated with the external world in a meaningful way . For example, it is a widely held ethical belief that “it is wrong to murder.” However, great confusion persists about the exact meaning of the term “murder.” Some hold that it is murder to abort a fetus, others object. Some say that killing in war is justified, others dispute. Some approve of euthanasia, others disapprove, and no universal consensus exists about whether the relevant factor in categorizing of murder is the intelligence of the victim or the victim’s genetic status as human. Even if such consensus did exist, there are no doubt still further complications and edge cases to be considered, all of which pointing to the fact that to hold a simple statement as true is of little use without a stable means of determining the relevance and relationship of that truth to present experience.

Now suppose that one seeks to devote one’s self exclusively to the Empirical, with no statement accepted that is not the subject of experience. Here, the problem raises itself again: how can we affix labels onto undifferentiated experience? To even say, “I am looking at a sunset today,” presupposes the categories of “I,” “looking,” “sunsets,” and “today,” even before one should like to extrapolate, “I will probably see another sunset tomorrow.” What experience tells us that “red discs on the horizon are sunsets”? How can we even say that “red is red” and “discs are discs” without already presuming something from outside of mere experience itself? Without our evolved pre-categorizations for the world, there are only sounds and colors without names. We are left wordless in William James’s “big blooming buzzing confusion.”

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since experience is prior to either Rational or Empirical understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Personally

Plato presents a criticism of the poet in Book X of The Republic. Socrates asks how it is that a poet can write about horses without being a horseman? The gods know the form of riding a horse, and a horseman can approximate that knowledge. The cobbler and the metalworker can learn from the horseman if the tools they make are good or not, but the painter and the poet is almost without hope, imitating as three times removed from real source of things. Surely, to write poetry about all subjects in the world, there must be something that the poet has knowledge of. Yet, Socrates cannot find what it should be and in the end, Socrates concludes that poetry must be banned from the Republic until a reasonable defense can be made for this dangerous art that overwhelms reason, potentially giving reign to the basest part of the soul with no real knowledge to guide it.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in general is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. So, while a novelist writing about sailing who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world can be split into Rational and Empirical essences which are simultaneously manifest.

As the Zenrinkushû says of the poet, “入林不動草、入水不立波,” meaning, “Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple” (Blyth 27) . The poet does not disturb the world around, because the poet enters not through body, but through mind. Though the mind does not have full knowledge of either itself or the world, by playing (the meaning of haikai) but playing seriously (as per Bashô’s example), we can gain knowledge, not of the external, but of the internal. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. It is through poetry that we are allowed to experience two modes of thinking simultaneously via the double aperture.

In our own lives, we lose ourselves in abstract theory, and we lose ourselves in routine. Haiku, as a bridge between those realms, has the ability to bring the poetic into our lives. Haiku, in its simplicity, invites participation. Indeed, no hokku by the great masters was meant to be complimented by other renga poet-participants.

Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time before our eyes, ears, and nose. We capture what we see, hear, smell, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience itself can never be captured.

Works Cited

Kato, Kazumitsu. Review: Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. VII by R. H. Blyth. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 82, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1962), pp. 459–462.

(:*toc Table of Contents:)

(:toc:)

Introduction

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, and yet paradoxically it is also one of the most complex and nuanced. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語), but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse whose surface is sharp and clear but whose depths can be fathomless and murky. The key to this flexibility, I will argue, is its the emergence of haiku from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, which provides its ability to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and bridge the worlds of Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and the distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Brief History

Haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing. Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki coined the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

Philosophical Underpinnings

Before anything can be said about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be but already was. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Like Buddha Gautama, he declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. The only constant is logos, the set of laws that, like karma, governs the eternal flow of elements.

Seeing the absurdity of each declaration, but also the logical arguments that compelled both conclusions, Plato found a way through the dilemma using a concept first elucidated by his teacher, Socrates. “The Forms” are the eternal patterns that give shape to the world. Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. Plato answers Parmenides assertion that nothing could come into being from non-being, by concurring that nothing exists now that was not already in existence as a Form. Similarly, Plato agrees with Heraclitus that everything we perceive is subject to change, because the objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

This basic understanding of the dual nature universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has underpinned Western philosophy in all the centuries since Plato, though many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle was the first to attempt to escape the dualism of his master, if only in a limited way. The Forms, contended Aristotle, cannot exist in an eternal realm separate from human experience. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers; from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals, much of Western thought can be classified through its affinity for either Plato or Aristotle. The Platonists, broadly speaking, start from an objective understanding of the eternal; the Aristoteleans start from a subjective experience of the emprical. These distinctions can also be used in understanding Shintô, Confucianism, and Buddhism, the three main religious influences on haiku.

Influences in Haiku

R. H. Blyth in his landmark series, Haiku, downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought, devoting just three pages to it. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of haiku. However, the power of Shintô over the Japanese mind almost always acts in a near subconscious manner, framing a debate rather than endorsing a position. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo of haiku and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely a product of human convention, but it is also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are the inhabited manifestations of the kami that act on this world. Each mountain has a name, and that name works by invoking the spirit of the mountain. The motion of spirits is seen as a vital aspect of language. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. (More about the rice planting calendar as a center of life in the four seasons.) Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should is clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly.

Confucianism also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucian thought is to ensure that one’s relationships always properly reflect the obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and friend and friend. An understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” (More about how the golden age is a platonic form.) Confucian ethics mostly inform haiku through the poetics of its pronouncements. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hoso-michi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius when praising the honesty of an innkeeper. Blyth further explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…” (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation is obvious. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism. That is to say, both show a desire to see not just the world that is but also the world that should be.

(More from Blyth about Zen & haiku.)

Dynamics of Haiku

Having seen the relationship between the religious influences of haiku and Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we can now examine the relationship between those religious components and haiku in more detail. Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the transcendent profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, examination of a haiku is best informed by beginning with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding to reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it. The goal in haiku is not merely to sketch what is, but to create a collection of words that are able to create inside the mind of the viewer a scene as rich with detail and meaning as that held by the author, even if it is impossible to recreate it with anything approaching exactness.

Recreating the whole of an experience might be an impossible task for a mere seventeen syllables, except that haiku is aided by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood. As we saw before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons. The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are key components to Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase calls into mind some eternal precept. Together, as we shall see, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

Examples

From Haiku

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Aristotelian theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelian world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of Plato and the world of Aristotle, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

From Waka

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[3]. Burton Watson translates it thus, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of Plato and Aristotle, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Of course, the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[4]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Aristotelian and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Practical Applications

What is the virtue in this, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction and then speciously proceeded to “find it” where I left it? No. The applications of this are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

(:quote:) The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4) (:endquote:)

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history, there remains much to be admired in his approach to life. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same approaches to life which this essay has been engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is Plato, and the return to it is Aristotle. In our own lives, we lose ourselves in abstract theory, and we lose ourselves in routine. Haiku, as a bridge between those realms, has the ability to bring the poetic into our lives. Haiku, in its simplicity, invites participation. Indeed, no hokku by the great masters was meant to be left without compliment from other renga poet-participants. Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time. We capture what we see, hear, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience can never be captured.

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the Forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the Forms. Postmodernism is another system that shows us that the Forms are in an important sense man-made. However, despite the artificiality of the systems which bind us, resistance to them frequently only strengthens their normative value. The only escape is the escape offered by haiku. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. … more …

(:title "Relating Bashô to Plato and Aristotle: The Dynamics of Haiku.":)

Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Vol. I Eastern Culture. Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, Twenty-third printing, 1976.

Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, & Issa. Harper Collins, NY, 1994.

Kawamoto, Kôji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse. trans. Steve Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt. University of Tokyo Press, 2000.

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.

(:title Relating Bashô to Plato and Aristotle: The Dynamics of Haiku.:)

(:quote:)”bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225). (:endquote:)

(:quote:)”bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225).(:endquote:)

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism.

12pt; padding-left: 20%; padding-right:20%;””bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225).enddiv

“Relating Bashô to Plato and Aristotle: The Dynamics of Haiku.”

Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it, with the verse taking on a completely different meaning depending on its pairing. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki coined the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably.

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism.

Recreating the whole of an experience might be an impossible task for a mere seventeen syllables, but haiku is aided enormously by the great backlog of associations opened to it by traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood. As we saw before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons. The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are, in turn, very important to Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase calls into mind some eternal precept. Together, as we shall see, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

“Relating Bashô to Plato and Aristotle: The Dynamics of Haiku.”

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, and yet paradoxically it is also one of the most complex and nuanced. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (typically such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語), but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse whose surface is sharp and clear but whose depths can be fathomless and murky. The key to this flexibility, I will argue, is its emergence from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, and thus its ability to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and serve as, we shall see, a bridge between the worlds of Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical is one of the most important properties of a good haiku and source of much of its power.

Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted intorenga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. Inrenga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it, with the verse taking on a completely different meaning depending on its pairing.renga, in turn, finally evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style ofrenga from which haiku emerged. Whererenga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms ofrenga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai orrenga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki coined the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably.

Before anymore can be said about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Accordingly, he, like Buddha Gautama, declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same.

Seeing the absurdity of each declaration, but also the logical arguments that compelled both conclusions, Plato found a way through the dilemma using a concept first elucidated by his teacher, Socrates. “The Forms” are the eternal patterns that give shape to the world. Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. Plato answers Parmenides assertion that nothing could come into being from non-being, by concurring that nothing exists now that was not already in existence as a Form. Similarly, Plato agrees with Heraclitus that everything we perceive is subject to change, because the objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. Similarly, human actions move between good and bad reflections of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

This basic understanding of the dual nature universe, the temporal world being a subset of an eternal order, has underpinned Western philosophy in all the centuries since Plato, though many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s student Aristotle was the first to attempt to escape the dualism of his master, if only in a limited way. The Forms, contended Aristotle, are not some eternal realm separate from human experience. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. Since all that exist is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of some eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events.

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers; from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals, much of Western thought can be classified through its affinity for either Plato or Aristotle. These distinctions can also be used in understanding Shintô 神道, Confucianism, and Buddhism, the three main religious influences on haiku.

R. H. Blyth in his landmark series, Haiku, downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought, devoting just three pages to it. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of haiku. However, the power of Shintô over the Japanese mind almost always acts in a near subconscious manner, framing a debate rather than endorsing a position. Looking closer, a comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo of haiku and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism.

Confucian thought also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucianism is to ensure that one’s relationships always reflect the proper obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and between friends. A proper understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” Confucian ethics mostly inform haiku through the poetics of its pronouncements. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius when praising the honesty of an innkeeper. Blyth further explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…” (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation should be obvious. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism.

Though both Shintô and Confucian ideals have a profound, if subtle, influence on the tone of haiku, the influence of Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism on haiku is quite explicit. At its most basic level, Buddhism is the teaching that everything in the world continually undergoes change, and therefore one will suffer in life as objects of desire pass away, if one does not abandon all desires and attachments. To this observation, Zen Buddhism adds the insight that all language must ultimately fail to describe the world, since a reference can never be truly identical to its referent. Because of this, our attachment to particular words, terms, or concepts will, like other attachments, ultimately hinder our progress toward enlightenment, since static words can never capture the flowing world. Buddhism places its emphasis on the reality of both the world and our suffering within it, and its conclusions about human suffering are drawn from empirical observation rather than theoretical deduction. Like Aristotelian thought, Buddhism insists that as residents of the real world, not the ideal world, we must focus our efforts on understanding the world as it is through observation, instead of dreaming of a perfect world that can never come to be.

Having seen the relationship between the religious influences of haiku and Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we can now examine the relationship between those religious components and haiku in more detail. Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it seems very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the strange profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, a proper examination of a haiku should begin with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it. The goal in haiku is not merely to sketch what is, but to create a collection of words that are able to create inside the mind of the viewer a scene as nearly identical to one created in the mind of the viewer by experiencing the scene described in the poem.

Recreating the whole of an experience might be an impossible task for a mere seventeen syllables, but haiku is aided enormously by the great backlog of associations opened to it by traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood. As we saw before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons. The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are, in turn, very important to Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase calls into mind some eternal precept. Together, as we shall see, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Aristotelian theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. To him, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events observed by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelian world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds above and the fish below all suggest to him the sorrow of life in this world. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furuike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furuike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of Plato and the world of Aristotle, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, Saigyô Hôshi: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ. Burton Watson translates it thus, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene can be observed by any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of Plato and Aristotle, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world. Of course, the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Consider the following translation, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Aristotelian and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between Plato and Aristotle by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both Aristotelian and Platonic dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

Works Cited

Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Vol. I Eastern Culture. Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, Twenty-third printing, 1976.

Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, & Issa. Harper Collins, NY, 1994.

Kawamoto, Kôji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse. trans. Steve Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt. University of Tokyo Press, 2000.

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, and yet paradoxically it is also one of the most complex and nuanced. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (typically such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語), but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse whose surface is sharp and clear but whose depths can be fathomless and murky. The key to this flexibility, I will argue, is its emergence from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, and thus its ability to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and serve as, we shall see, a bridge between the worlds of Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical is one of the most important properties of a good haiku and source of much of its power. Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it, with the verse taking on a completely different meaning depending on its pairing. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into renga no haikai 連歌の俳諧, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics, 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect either to a verse before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, all other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki coined the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably. Before anymore can be said about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelean philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Accordingly, he, like Buddha Gautama, declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. Seeing the absurdity of each declaration, but also the logical arguments that compelled both conclusions, Plato found a way through the dilemma using a concept first elucidated by his teacher, Socrates. “The Forms” are the eternal patterns that give shape to the world. Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. Plato answers Parmenides assertion that nothing could come into being from non-being, by concurring that nothing is that was not already in existence as a Form. Similarly, Plato agrees with Heraclitus that everything we perceive is subject to change, because the objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. Similarly, human actions move between good and bad reflections of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues. This basic understanding of the dual nature universe has underpinned philosophy in all the centuries since Plato, though many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Aristotle was the first to attempt to escape the dualism of Plato, if only in a limited way. The Forms, contended Aristotle, are not some eternal realm separate from human experience. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. Since all that exist is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of some eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of temporal events. These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals. These distinctions can also be used in understanding Shintô 神道, Confucianism, and Buddhism, the three main religious influences on haiku. R. H. Blyth in his landmark series, Haiku, downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought, devoting just three pages to it. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô very rarely is the explicit subject of haiku. However, the power of Shintô over the Japanese mind almost always acts in a near subconscious manner, framing a debate rather than endorsing a position. Looking closer, a comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo of haiku and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of Shintô tradition. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits which eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism. Confucian thought, an even more explicit influence on haiku, also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucianism is to ensure that one’s relationships always reflect the proper obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and between friends. A proper understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” Confucian ethics mostly inform haiku with the poetics of its own mandates. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius praising the honesty of an inn keeper. Blyth further explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…” (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation should be obvious. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism. Though both Shintô and Confucian ideals have a profound, if subtle, influence on the tone of haiku, the influence of Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism on haiku is quite explicit. At its most basic level, Buddhism is the teaching that everything in the world continually undergoes change, and therefore one will suffer in life as objects of desire pass away, if one does not abandon all desires and attachments. To this observation, Zen Buddhism adds the insight that all language must ultimately fail to describe the world, since a reference can never be truly identical to its referent. Because of this, our attachment to particular words, terms, or concepts will, like other attachments, ultimately hinder our progress toward enlightenment, since static words can never capture the flowing world. Buddhism places its emphasis on the reality of both the world and our suffering within it, and its conclusions about human suffering are drawn from empirical observation rather than theoretical deduction. Like Aristotelean thought, Buddhism insists that as residents of the real world, not the ideal world, we must focus our efforts on understanding the world as it is through observation, instead of dreaming of a perfect world that can never come to be. Having seen the relationship between the religious influences of haiku and Platonic and Aristotelean thought, we can now examine the relationship between those religious components and haiku in more detail. Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it seems very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the strange profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, a proper examination of a haiku should begin with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it. The goal in haiku is not merely to sketch what is, but to create a collection of words that are able to create inside the mind of the viewer a scene as nearly identical to one created in the mind of the viewer by experiencing the scene described in the poem. Recreating the whole of an experience might be an impossible task for a mere seventeen syllables, but haiku is aided enormously by the great backlog of associations opened to it by traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the language of haiku is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. This matrix of associations can be referred to as “the language of haiku.” As we saw before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons. The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are, in turn, very important to Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase calls into mind some eternal precept. Together, as we shall see, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind. Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Aristotelean theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. To him, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this is a relationship that is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events observed by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelean world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds above and the fish below all suggest to him the sorrow of life in this world. Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furuike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furuike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of Plato and the world of Aristotle, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka—the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse—became particularly popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets would show their wit by composing verses that linked that recast the verse before in a different light than its pairing with the verse yet before it. Thus, each verse could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into renga no haikai 連歌の俳諧, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics, 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect either to a verse before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, all other verses were known as hiraku 平句 or flat verses. What helped distinguish distinguish hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Hokku would thus exist as a mere sub-discipline for the haikai master for hundreds of year before Masaoka Shiki in the Meiji Era coined the term haiku 俳句 to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably. It should be clear from this brief description of the origins of haiku that its unique genesis as the starting point for a collaborative endeavor would lend it a peculiar character. Since a haiku was meant to feed into another verse, on its own it seems to tell only half a story, leaving an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the strange profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Robert Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this is not exclude the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, a proper examination of a haiku should begin with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). Later in this essay, I will argue that seeing haiku from these two viewpoints, the earthly and the otherworldly, is the source of their strange allure.

Though both Shintô and Confucian ideals have a profound, if subtle, influence on the tone of haiku, the influence of Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism on haiku is quite explicit. At its most basic level, Buddhism is the teaching that everything in the world continually undergoes change, and therefore one will suffer in life as objects of desire pass away if one does not abandon all desires and attachments. To this observation, Zen Buddhism adds the insight that all language must ultimately fail to describe the world, since a reference can never be truly identical to its referent. Because of this, our attachment to particular words, terms, or concepts will, like other attachments, ultimately hinder our progress toward enlightenment, since static words can never capture the flowing world. Buddhism places its emphasis on the reality of both the world and our suffering within it, and its conclusions about human suffering are drawn from empirical observation rather than theoretical deduction. Like Aristotle, Buddhism insists that as residents of the real world, not the ideal world, we focus our efforts on understanding the world as it is through observation, instead of dreaming of a perfect world that can never come to be. Because of their stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto criticizes this formulation, saying that, “Specifcally, the source of the misunderstanding rests in the notion that a poet need only treat the external objects ‘as they are’ and without mediation. In other words, Shiki errs in assuming that these objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53).

Confucian thought, an even more explicit influence on haiku, also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucianism is to ensure that one’s relationships always reflect the proper obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and between friends. A proper understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” Blyth explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…” (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation should be obvious. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism. Though both Shintô and Confucian ideals have a profound, if subtle, influence on the tone of haiku, the influence of Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism on haiku is quite explicit. At its most basic level, Buddhism is the teaching that everything in the world continually undergoes change, and therefore one will suffer in life as objects of desire pass away if one does not abandon all desires and attachments. To this observation, Zen Buddhism adds the insight that all language must ultimately fail to describe the world, since a reference can never be truly identical to its referent. Because of this, our attachment to particular words, terms, or concepts will, like other attachments, ultimately hinder our progress toward enlightenment, since static words can never capture the flowing world. Buddhism places its emphasis on the reality of both the world and our suffering within it, and its conclusions about human suffering are drawn from empirical observation rather than theoretical deduction. Like Aristotle, Buddhism emphasizes that as residents of the floating world we should focus our efforts understanding the world as it is through observation, instead of dreaming of a perfect world that can never come to be.

Carl Johnson ”Bashô, Plato, and Aristotle.” Dr. Shusuke Yagi

Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it, with the verse taking on a completely different meaning depending on its pairing. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into renga no haikai 連歌の俳諧, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics, 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, all other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki coined the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably.

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of Shintô tradition. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism.

Confucian thought, an even more explicit influence on haiku, also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucianism is to ensure that one’s relationships always reflect the proper obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and between friends. A proper understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” Confucian ethics mostly inform haiku with the poetics of its own mandates. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius praising the honesty of an innkeeper. Blyth further explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…” (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation should be obvious. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism.

Having seen the relationship between the religious influences of haiku and Platonic and Aristotelean thought, we can now examine the relationship between those religious components and haiku in more detail. Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it seems very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the strange profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, a proper examination of a haiku should begin with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it. The goal in haiku is not merely to sketch what is, but to create a collection of words that are able to create inside the mind of the viewer a scene as nearly identical to one created in the mind of the viewer by experiencing the scene described in the poem.

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Aristotelean theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. To him, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events observed by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelean world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds above and the fish below all suggest to him the sorrow of life in this world.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furuike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furuike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of Plato and the world of Aristotle, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, Saigyô Hôshi: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ. Burton Watson translates it thus, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene can be observed by any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of Plato and Aristotle, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world. Of course, the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Consider the following translation, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Aristotelean and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between Plato and Aristotle by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world.

Works Cited

Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Vol. I Eastern Culture. Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, Twenty-third printing, 1976.

Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, & Issa. Harper Collins, NY, 1994.

Kawamoto, Kôji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse. trans. Steve Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt. University of Tokyo Press, 2000.

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.

R. H. Blyth in his landmark series, Haiku, downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought, devoting just three pages to it. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô very rarely is the explicit subject of haiku. However, the power of Shintô over the Japanese mind almost always acts in a near subconscious manner, framing a debate rather than endorsing a position. Looking closer, a comment by Hass suggests a primordial connection between the kigo of haiku and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits which eternally reside in it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism. Confucian thought, an even more explicit influence on haiku, also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucianism is to ensure that one’s relationships always reflect the proper obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and between friends. A proper understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” Blyth explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…’ (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation should be obvious. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hosomichi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism.

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the Twentieth century Analytics and Continentals. These distinctions can also be used when classifying religious influences on the ideals of haiku, those of Shintô 神道, Confucianism, and Buddhism. R. H. Blyth in his landmark series, Haiku, downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought, devoting just three pages to it. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô very rarely is the explicit subject of haiku. However, the power of Shintô over the Japanese mind almost always acts in a near subconscious manner, framing a debate rather than endorsing a position. Looking closer, Hass sees a primordial connection between the kigo of haiku and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

“bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225). Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely human convention, but also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are inhabited by kami that control them. Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits which eternally reside in it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should then be clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to live life within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, and yet paradoxically it is also one of the most complex and nuanced. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate and entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (typically such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語), but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse whose surface is sharp and clear but whose depths can be plumbed almost infinitely. The key to this flexibility, I will argue, is its emergence from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, and thus its ability to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and serve as, we shall see, a bridge between the worlds of Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical is one of the most important properties of a good haiku and source of much of its power.

It should be clear from this brief description of the origins of haiku that its unique genesis as the starting point for a collaborative endeavor would lend it a peculiar character. Since a haiku was meant to feed into another verse, on its own it seems to tell only half a story, leaving an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the strange profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this is not exclude the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, a proper examination of a haiku should begin with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). Later in this essay, I will argue that seeing haiku from these two viewpoints, the earthly and the otherworldly, is the source of their strange allure. Before anymore can be said about the dual nature of haiku, earlier comments about “the worlds of Plato and Aristotle,” “the rational and the empirical,” and “the earthly and the otherworldly” must be explained. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Accordingly, he, like Buddha Gautama, declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. Seeing the absurdity of each declaration, but also the logical arguments that compelled both conclusions, Plato found a way through the dilemma using a concept first elucidated by his teacher Socrates. “The Forms” are the eternal patterns that give shape to the world. Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. Thus, though Parmenides tried to show could come into being from non-being, Plato concurs that nothing is that was not already in existence as a Form. Similarly, Plato agrees with Heraclitus that everything we perceive is subject to change, because the objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. Similarly, human actions move between good and bad reflections of justice, courage, moderation, etc. This basic understanding of the dual nature universe has underpinned philosophy in all the centuries since Plato, though many attempts have been made to escape from it. Notably, Aristotle was the first to attempt, in what some criticize as an overly limited way, to escape Platonic dualism. The Forms, contended Aristotle, are not some eternal realm separate from human experience. Forms exist only to such an extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their existence in a particular. There is no “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classed together as iron-type objects and rust-type objects. Since all that exist is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of some eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of temporal events. These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers from

Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka—the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse—became particularly popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets would show their wit by composing verses that linked that recast the verse before in a different light than its pairing with the verse yet before it. Thus, each verse could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into renga no haikai 連歌の俳諧, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics, 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect either to a verse before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, all other verses were known as hiraku 平句 or flat verses. What helped distinguish distinguish hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Hokku would thus exist as a mere sub-discipline for the haikai master for hundreds of year before Shiki in the Meiji Era coined the term haiku 俳句 to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably. It should be clear from this brief description of the origins of haiku that its unique genesis as the starting point for a collaborative endeavor would lend it a peculiar character. Since a haiku was meant to feed into another verse, on its own it seems to tell only half a story, leaving an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the strange profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this is not exclude the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, a proper examination of a haiku should begin with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). Later in this essay, I will argue that seeing haiku from these two viewpoints, the earthly and the otherworldly, is the source of their strange allure.

Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka—the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse—became particularly popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets would show their wit by composing verses that linked that recast the verse before in a different light than its pairing with the verse yet before it. Thus, each verse could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into renga no haikai 連歌の俳諧, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other term proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words were known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics, 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect either to a verse before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well. Accordingly, all other verses were known as hiraku 平句 or flat verses. What helped distinguish distinguish hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Hokku would thus flourish as a sub-discipline for the haikai master for hundreds of year before Shiki in the Meiji Era coined the term haiku 俳句 to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably.

Carl Johnson ”A Finger Pointing at the Moon” Dr. Shusuke Yagi

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, and yet paradoxically it is also one of the most complex and nuanced. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate and entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (typically such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語), but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse whose surface is sharp and clear but whose depths can be plumbed almost infinitely. The key to this flexibility, I will argue, is its emergence from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, and thus its ability to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and serve as, we shall see, a bridge between the worlds of Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge is one of the most important properties of a good haiku and source of much of its power. Historically, haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka—the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse—became particularly popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets would show their wit by composing verses that linked that recast the verse before in a different light than its pairing with the verse yet before it. Thus, each verse could be read as a pair with either the verse before or after it. Renga, in turn, finally evolved into renga no haikai 連歌の俳諧, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. Where renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and .This long tradition, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect either to a verse before or after it, the hokku was meant to stand on its own as well.