If we look at the spiritual roots of hokku, we find they extend through Zen and Mahayana Buddhism and Daoism, reaching all the way back to the Upanishads of India.  Pervading all of these is the view that, though all in the universe appears multiple and different and separate, this is but a limited view of reality, and ultimately all things are the manifestation of an underlying reality that cannot be known intellectually but can only be directly intuited.

That ultimate reality may be called variously Brahman, the Dao, or the Buddha Nature, or even as the American Transcendentalists put it, the “Oversoul.”  But as it applies to hokku, it is the ultimate democratic view –realizing that the crochety old lady across the street and the cat on her lap and the dog that chases the cat and the fellow watching it all are all ultimately manifestations of the same underlying Reality.  They appear different and separate, but ultimately they are not.

Buson wrote

Birds few,
Waters far off;
A cicada cries.

Reading that, where is the reader?  The reader becomes the scarcity of birds, the waters too distant to be audible, and the dry, rasping sound of the nearby cicada.  It is a kind of little enlightenment, in which the distinction between subject (the writer) and object (the birds, the water, the cicada’s cry) disappears. 

That is not to say that those who write hokku have seen through the world of phenomena into the underlying reality through actual intuitive experience; but such verses do take us away momentarily from our conventional view of things being separate and distinct. 

Shôhaku wrote

Silence;
A chestnut leaf sinks
Through the clear water.

Reading that, we become the silence, the leaf, the cool and clear water.  What a relief, if only for a moment, to get out of the cycle of thinking and wishing, wanting and doing — out of the notion of separateness and into the peace of just experiencing and being.

As Thoreau once wrote,

Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live and begin to be. A boatman stretched on the deck of his craft and dallying with the noon would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never as prone to lose my identity. I am lost in the haze.

It is this temporary forgetting of the phenomenal ”self,” this temporary losing of individual identity for a deeper existence, this “little enlightenment,” that comes out of and is the result of the spiritual roots of hokku. 

 

David