Posted by: hokku | April 19, 2008

ZEN AND HOKKU

It has become quite fashionable in modern haiku to disparage R. H. Blyth’s strong emphasis on Zen in his books relevant to hokku.  That is very much in keeping with the course modern haiku has taken since the mid 20th century, a course that has led it farther and farther away from hokku, because of course hokku has its spiritual roots in Zen. 

Are you seeing a pattern here?  First there is the anachronistic re-naming of hokku as haiku; then there is the changing of the verse form to fit individual notions of what a haiku should be (which is why it cannot be easily defined — it has lost definition), and then there is the cutting of the spiritual roots of haiku, which makes it simply a few lines on most any topic.  With each step those guiding the course of modern haiku have removed it more distantly from hokku.

Some may, therefore, legitimately say that there is no Zen connection in modern haiku.   But it is simply incorrect — historically inaccurate — to say that about hokku, which is the verse form prior to Shiki, and which still exists after Shiki in the hokku tradition that today is quite separate from haiku.

Just as one can easily demonstrate that calling the old hokku “haiku” is anachronistic and inaccurate, it is also easy to demonstrate the historical connection of Zen not only with hokku, but with the meditative arts in general as they developed in Japan.

Toshimitsu Hasumi, in his book Zen in Japanese Art (Philosophical LIbrary, 1962) writes:

“Undoubtedly the artistic formation and way of thinking of the Japanese, based as it is on the wholeness and self-contained nature of human existence, is deeply indebted to the influence of Zen.”

The writer goes on to explore how Mahayana Buddhist influence, and Zen in particular, set the aesthetics for the arts from tea to painting, from pottery to poetry.

We find, for example ( Munsterberg’s The Arts of Japan, Tuttle, 1957) in regard to pottery, that a potter made a trip to Japan “as an attendant of the Zen priest Dogen, and ever since the Kamakura period there has been a close connection between Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, and Japanese pottery.”

Further, while speaking of the Rinzai sect of Zen, Munsterberg writes, “even people who have never studied Zen are profoundly influenced by its spirit of restraint, its emphasis upon contemplation, and its distrust of ritual and dogma, as well as the many things it brought in its wake, such as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and the cult of ink painting.“

And we have already seen in a previous posting the statement of Shôei Andô that “…it is almost impossible to disregard the influence of Zen, when we consider any aspect of Japanese culture after the Kamakura Perod.  In fact, Zen may be said to lie at the inmost heart of Japanese culture (Zen and American Transcendentalism, Hokuseido, 1970).

It is important to remember, however, that when speaking of Zen in hokku, we are making a distinction between Zen as an organized religious division of Mahayana Buddhism, and Zen as a wider spiritual principle.  Japanese culture was steeped in Mahayana Buddhism, of which organized Zen was a part; and as Blyth writes (Eastern Culture), “Zen is the putting into practice, the realizing (making real) of Mahayana Buddhism in daily life.”

In short, Zen is not a religious dogma or limited to the Zen sect of Buddhism; Zen is a spiritual state of mind and activity.  The aesthetics we find in hokku grow out of this spiritual state of mind.  And it is in that sense that we speak of Zen in hokku, or as I prefer to put it today, the intimate connection between hokku and spirituality, a fundamental characteristic of hokku.

It can easily be seen, then, that one need not have been literally an adherent of the Zen sect of Buddhism in old Japan to have been influenced by Zen in a culture permeated by Mahayana Buddhism and tinged with Zen aesthetics (though some writers of hokku were); and today one need not be a Zen Buddhist to write modern hokku, but one does have to have the same aesthetic attitude. 

So let those in haiku who want to disparage Blyth and his important connection between hokku and spirituality go their own way and write whatever they want to write and call it haiku – they hold an untenable position historically, and the loss is theirs.  We preserve the link between hokku and spirituality in our writing today, keeping our practice connected to the spiritual roots that nourish it and give it life.

David

 

Posted in Bashô, R. H. Blyth, Shiki, environment, haikai, haiku, hokku, nature, writing, zen

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Responses

Hi David:

I’m one of those who thinks that the influence of Zen on Hokku, and Japanese arts in general, has been overemphasized. Here are a few reasons:

The Discourses of Mahayana Buddhism that are the basis of Zen (including the Lankavatara, the Diamond Sutra, and the Lotus Sutra) have nothing in them that leads to a love of nature, or that views nature as a source of wisdom. This is true of Buddhist Discourses in general. One can go for thousands of pages and never find a reference to the natural world. This is because Buddhism is profoundly introspective and takes the mind as the source of suffering and the reform of the mind as the basis for liberation.

Compare the Thangka art of Tibet to the landscape painting of China and East Asia. Thangkas are symbolic and metaphysical; they lack any kind of orientation towards the natural world. In contrast, East Asian painting is primarily landscape art. But this elevation of landscape art, and landscape poetry, grew out of East Asian spirituality in general, rather than Buddhism specifically.

If I were to point to sources for nature centered orientations in East Asia I would suggest Taoism in China and Shinto in Japan. Since we are talking about hokku, I’ll stick to Shinto. Shinto tends to see landscape as a manifestation of deity, or deity itself. In addition, Shinto and Buddhism were thoroughly intermixed for many centuries before Zen; they permeated each other. But this mix is not confined to Zen, it is pervasive in Japanese Buddhism and was present long before the Zen tradition took root in Japan, particularly in its esoteric forms such as Shingon and Tendai Mikkyo.

I’m not saying Zen has had no influence, rather I think that Zen is just one influence among many and I doubt that it was pivotal.

Best wishes,

Jim
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Thanks for your comments, Rengajim.

Keep in mind that when speaking of the influence of Zen on hokku, we are speaking primarily of its aesthetic and “philosophical” influence — and as you no doubt recall, traditionally Zen is considered a “transmission outside the scriptures,” (words traditionally ascribed, whether correctly or not, to Bodhidharma, considered the “first patriarch” of Zen). Further, Zen (or Ch’an in China) is the result of the meeting of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Daoism, and Daoism was always very much related to Nature, and that became a part of Ch’an as it was expressed in the arts, which in turn was transmitted to Japan and became known there as Zen. That is why we find such an emphasis on Nature in Chinese poetry, and consequently in Japanese poetry, which was heavily influenced by Chinese verse, particularly that of the Tang Dynasty.

You are quite correct that Buddhism, including Mahayana, recognizes suffering as inherent in existence. That feeling forms an essential part of hokku in its emphasis on transience — the knowledge that nothing lasts, nothing remains, nothing can be firmly and finally grasped. Add to that the sense of non-separation between the individual and other things, what Blyth calls “the Mahayana doctrine of the identity of difference,” and the equivalence of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.

Zen as it expressed itself in the culture of China (as Ch’an) and in Japan is, as you note, very different than the manner in which Mahayana is expressed in Tibetan art. That is because Tibetan Buddhism does not have the heavy influence of Daoism that occurred in China, an influence transmitted as part of Chinese cultural influence to Japan. Blyth writes that “Zen may be the practical application of Taoist [Daoist] ideals, grafted on to the Buddhist tree of religion.” That is a rather good description of how the meeting of Indian Buddhism and Chinese Daoism resulted in Ch’an / Zen.

And of course you are not wrong that there was some animistic influence in Japan from Shinto. But keep in mind that in the East, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in China and Buddhism and Shinto in Japan were not as rigidly separate as people in the West often consider different “religions” to be. You seem to think far more in compartmentalized categories than was the actual situation.

David

By: rengajim on April 19, 2008
at 2:58 pm

hi david,

i am in agreement with most of your views on hokku and hokku vs. haiku; i am sincerely grateful to you for opening my horizons to hokku and taking the pains to point out the world of difference, both through your lovely website and in personal mails. however, i find some of your arguments (not in this one but in your earlier posts) a bit troubling.

i am glad you brought this topic (zen) up and wrote about it. i think that, if at all, the zen influence has been understated and that is witnessed in the state of most “haiku” today. if you are familiar with zen, which you seem to be, and, better yet, practise it, there are parallels here. there are many famous koans on what is buddha (or buddha nature) and two famous masters have said “shit on a stick” and “three pounds of flax” respectively referring to their activity when posed the question but more fundamentally pointing to the ultimate reality of here and now. this business of defining what is nature and what is not is a dangerous one just like defining what nirvana is or enlightenment is. it is best pointed with minimal use of language or using language to merely point.

the conventional haiku establishment is as much attached to emptiness as you are to form. by saying this is Dao, it is no longer Dao (as the first line of Tao te ching goes). your arguments would be stronger if you simply pointed to hokku (as you have) but not cheapen your arguments by trashing others or prescribing rules just as no zen master would say this is zen and that is not. that is a self-contradiction (or should i say non-self)

while i understand your basic aim and angst in trying to educate people that modern haiku is very different from the classic hokku tradition with its zen roots, there is a danger of falling into dogma just as the zen branches itself occasionally have in its long course over millennia. for example, while your stress on right punctuation is logical and necessary, i find the “rule” that every line should start with a capital letter dogmatic. it is like comparing “use your breath to come back to this moment” as an anchor in meditation to a rule that “every meditator should sit in full lotus”. the former is an expedient tool, the latter unnecessary but fine if someone wants to do it anyway.

maybe its time for all of us to take a deep breath and revisit the classic koan “does a dog have buddha nature?” you are damned if you say yes and damned if you say no.

rengajim, i would urge you to read robert aitken roshi’s “a zen wave” where he discusses basho’s haiku [sic] in the style of classic koan commentaries. it was also fashionable in japan to learn classical chinese and practise the chinese arts and even dogen wrote a large corpus in classical chinese. it is not surprising that they also picked up landscape painting which some of their chan masters excelled at.

bows,

manoj saranathan

—————————————————–
David responds:

You wrote:
“this business of defining what is nature and what is not is a dangerous one just like defining what nirvana is or enlightenment is.”

What we are doing is not defining Nature in a universal sense, but rather defining it as it is understood in hokku. A lot of what I have to do here relates to the undoing of misperceptions and exaggerations. When modern haiku (in general terms) says that Nature is “everything,” one can easily understand what is meant by that. It seems self-evident, and in some fields it may even be the useful working definition. But that is the understanding of the intellect. I can remember when a large local park suddenly installed an outdoor sculpture that included a bench. Both sculpture and bench were of shiny, very thick brushed steel. When the sun rose in the sky, the light glared off the metallic surface, and the bench heated up until it would burn the legs of anyone who sat on it. Compare that with sitting on a bench made of a split log. In that circumstance, which would a child feel to be “natural”? The answer is obvious. In hokku we go with the inherent human understanding of Nature, which turns out, oddly enough, to also be a very environmental understanding, which is not surprising, considering the roots of hokku in Zen and consequently Daoism, which was very concerned with the harmony of the natural world. So there is really no danger in defining what Nature means in hokku.

You also wrote:
“the conventional haiku establishment is as much attached to emptiness as you are to form.”

That is like saying that an apple picker is “attached” to the form of a bucket, or that a stream is “attached” to the form of its banks. Form is important, because it serves a function. Harmony of form and function is not attachment, but rather common sense.

You also wrote:
“your arguments would be stronger if you simply pointed to hokku (as you have) but not cheapen your arguments by trashing others or prescribing rules just as no zen master would say this is zen and that is not.

I think you misperceive correcting errors as “trashing others.” As I always say, people have a right to their preferences. Some people prefer modern haiku to hokku, and they have every right to do that. But because so many people who read my site come to it from modern haiku, and have lots of confusion about hokku picked up from books and articles and web sites, one must directly address those issues, and doing that sometimes means that one has to point out where those whom readers have formerly regarded as trustworthy authorities fail when they attempt to address the issue of hokku, and specifically hokku as I teach it. You would be amazed at the number of people who come here after knowing about haiku for much of their lives, but never having known the simple fact that Bashô did not write haiku, or that there are substantial differences between what Bashô and those after him did write compared to what is being written today in the modern haiku community. Correcting such mistakes and misperceptions involves of necessity shattering some of the illusions promulgated by certain figures considered authoritative in modern haiku. But that has nothing to do with personalities or with “trashing” anyone. It is simply pointing out that while they may know about modern haiku, they often know little or nothing about modern hokku, and thus tend to completely misunderstand and misrepresent it. To say that Thomas Jefferson, for example, was absolutely wrong in his assertion that stones do not fall from the sky is not to “trash” Jefferson, but merely to point out where and why he was wrong (stones do fall from the sky as meteors and are found as meteorites).

You wrote:
“while i understand your basic aim and angst in trying to educate people that modern haiku is very different from the classic hokku tradition with its zen roots, there is a danger of falling into dogma just as the zen branches itself occasionally have in its long course over millennia. for example, while your stress on right punctuation is logical and necessary, i find the “rule” that every line should start with a capital letter dogmatic.”

There is a specific reason for that practice. Aside from being a nod to traditional English poetry, it prevents all the endless bickering that arises when there is no common standard among a group of writers. It works very well, it was the common practice when hokku first came West, and it does absolutely no harm, but acts as a unifying factor among writers of hokku, who, freed from the bickering over form so rife in the modern haiku community, are left free to concentrate on content. And of course it cannot become “dogma,” because those who do not like it will simply go somewhere else and do something else. But over time it demonstrates its benefits and usefulness. This issue of capitalizaton may be a touchy point specifically for you, because I note that you have a particular aversion to capitalization. In such a case, adopting correct capitalization and the hokku form would be a lesson in giving up attachments, which seems something else on which you reflect. The notion that doing whatever one wishes to do, and abandoning whatever does not specifically meet one’s attachments, is somehow “Zen” is a serious misconception introduced into American thought during the “Beat” period, but it is a complete misunderstanding of Zen.

Finally, though hokku certainly has its roots in Zen, it is not a good idea to dwell on it too long or to talk too much about Zen. Talking about it is only talking about it. One can write hokku without ever having heard of Zen Buddhism, but one cannot do so without sharing the underlying spiritual attitude, and the aesthetics to which it gives birth, and that is universal, not restricted to any one country or language or climate.

David

By: anagrammarian on April 20, 2008
at 2:02 pm

Hi David:

On the matter of Zen and its influence on Japanese arts, I don’t sense a basic difference. I would say, though, that Zen is just one among many influences, and I would suggest that it is not pivotal. Consider, for example, that Issa was a Pure Land Buddhist, as, if I remember correctly, so was Buson. And many of the landscape artists of early modern Japan, the woodblock artists, were Nichiren Buddhists.

My point here is that what we in the west have identified as “Zen” is really a pervasive part of Japanese culture, how Japanese culture interacts with and interprets the natural world, and how it refines that understanding in poetry. This basic cultural attitude preceded the establishment of Zen in Japan and that is one reason why I say it is not a specifically Zen view. It is a view that Japanese Zen has, along with most Japanese Buddhist traditions and with Shinto, as well as many modern secular Japanese.

Sincerely,

Jim

————————
David responds:

I have often pointed out the influence of Pure Land Buddhism on Issa’s hokku. What we are speaking of here, however, is the predominant influence that set the tone for the meditative arts in general, and that was Zen, whether in painting, Tea, Nô, Ikebana, haikai or what have you. That does not of course mean that only adherents of Zen practiced these arts, simply that Zen set what came to be considered the defining aesthetic. But again, beware of compartmentalizing, because though Westerners today tend to think of “religion” in compartmentalized terms, that was not the case in China or in Japan.

David

By: rengajim on April 20, 2008
at 10:43 pm

Thanks David for the detailed response.

My basic point was that if hokku has a certain Zen aesthetic and is rooted in the expressing the here-and-now, then problems of defining nature or buddha nature in zen apply here as well. I am not asking you to not define it but it should be done in a non-dogmatic (okay that is a strong word) way which takes a lot of skill just as it takes a skillful zen teacher to point out what should be obvious. Where does one draw the line? A bell is also a man-made object and so is an ICBM. Somehow one jars and the other one does not. And if someone cannot tell the difference intuitively, explaining to him is not going to. It is an entirely different thing to point out, repeatedly like you have, that modern haiku has divorced itself from its original roots in hokku. That is what most of your readers would have found puzzling or even shocking.

This analogy may not apply but is close- one can easily get into the mindset that to meditate, one has to go the mountains or some remote place free of distractions or man-made constructs. Not doing that does not imply meditating in front of the Jerry Springer show either. There is a clear balance. And I am sure we both know that sometimes, our mind is much calmer at home in the midst of sounds than in the mountains.

I think you misunderstood my point about form and emptiness. We are talking about attachment to form not form per se . Insisting that one uses capital letters to start is as much attachment to form as doing whatever comes to mind (or detesting capitals like i was) is attachment to emptiness. I can see bickering about punctuation, syllable counts, content but i do not see how using small letters or capital letters affects anything. I will let go of that as i have in this mail.

Point taken about the need to point out errors. But i am sure i am not the only reader fed up with the nonstop Shiki and Higginson bashing, rightfully or otherwise. You can say “get lost and do not read it then” which is also fine but missing the point.

Zen clearly teaches that doing whatever one wants is still attachment to freedom. I find American culture, in general, obsessed with individualism (just as Asian culture is with conformity and tradition) and both are extremes. This might be a simple outcome of that given that most of the establishment haiku writers in English are American. I see that in meditation a lot. People whine about any basic instructions on form even though the link between posture and the state of the mind becomes obvious rapidly.

While it is not good to dwell on Zen, some form of contemplative practice to quieten the mind is essential to ground oneself in the here and now. Sure, one can write hokku without having heard of Zen but the basic attitude is the same whether it is Basho or Kabir or Rumi. To some gifted people such a state comes on their own (Jiddu Krishnamurti is one such person) and others have to cultivate it.

manoj

————————
David responds:

I don’t think you have added anything here that was not already answered in my previous response. You say that uniform capitalization is an attachment, I say it serves a purpose, including the giving up of attachment. Most of the characteristics of modern hokku, from form to content, are best appreciated and understood by actual use over time.

David

By: anagrammarian on April 20, 2008
at 11:10 pm

so by your logic, you should give up your attachment to capitals and make it uniform.
——————–
David responds:

It is already uniform; every line begins with a capital letter, and thereby hokku avoids all confusion and the pointless bickering over such things so common in the modern haiku community. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

David

By: anagrammarian on April 21, 2008
at 1:23 pm

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