Basho on How to Make a Haiku

17 statements from his letters and spoken word

Translations and Commentary by Jeff Robbins

Assisted by Sakata Shoko

　　(Words of Basho are in boldface)

From the hundreds of passages I have translated from Basho’s letters to followers and from spoken word recorded by followers, I have culled 17 statements on how to produce a haiku. I offer this advice from the greatest of all haiku poets to all you folks writing haiku today. Three statements are from a letter Basho wrote in 1681 to his follower Biji. Throughout this letter, Basho repeatedly condemns “oldness” in poetry; he later said to his follower Doho: Oldness is the worst disease a poet can have. By “oldness” I believe he means what is “conventional, conforming to standards.”

1    Settling for standards and searching for reason places one in the middle grade of poets;  one who defies standards and forgets reason is the wizard on this path.

In the letter to Biji is is this point of advice:

2 　 Without a sense for how to use ordinary words, you will get mixed up in oldness.

Years later, Basho put this idea in positive terms:

3 　 Poetry benefits from the realization of ordinary words

                      (Haikai wa eki no zokugo o tadasu nar)  

This Basho haiku illustrates his mastery of the use of ordinary words

Sama zama no               Many, many

koto omoi-idasu           things come to mind,

sakura kana                   cherry blossoms

Basho’s words are completely, utterly simple. No complications: seven ordinary words with the most basic grammar possible in Japanese and likewise in English. He says absolutely nothing new about cherry blossoms or memories – instead he ‘sums up and conceals’ a thousand years of poetic expression on these flowers and the memories that pass from one cherry blossom season to the next. The plain and ordinary words are “realized” through the thousand years of associations of Japanese life with cherry blossoms. Ordinary words take on extraordinary meanings and feelings.

4 Know that a poem combines things . . .

   Poetry is the experience of the heart which goes and returns.

Ami no ko ga                    Fisherman’s child

kujira o shirasu                to announce a whale

Kai fuite                             blows on a shell

This single renku stanza combines the intriguing trio of child, whale, and shell; we start with medium-size child, then move out to enormous whale, return to small shell in boy’s hand, then spread out to fill the area with sound, the whale swimming away, the adults running to their boats, the boy watching excitedly from his post. So much life and aliveness.

5     “The skillful have a disease; Let a three-foot child get the poem

That disease is “oldness,” conventionality, heaviness in writing. A three-foot child would be five or six, so have little higher cortical function to circumvent the native spontaneity of the lower brain.

6   Only this, apply your heart to what children do.

Children’s actions are whole, not divided by the endless conflict of adult concerns. Strive to write poetry with that wholeness.

Ko no moto ni                      Under the trees

shiru mo namasu mo       soup, vinegar salad, and

sakura kana                         blossoms hurray!

The scene is the same in Basho’s time as in ours. The cold of early spring has passed, but there is still a chill in the air. Under a canopy of pinkish white blossoms, on ground scattered with petals, we lay out our favorite foods. The soup is brought to the picnic in an iron pot and heated over a fire. Namasu is commonly translated “fish salad” but cookbooks and experience at celebrations says different: it is raw vegetables (or sometimes fish) sliced thin, and marinated in vinegar, popular at celebrations. Amidst the excited chatter of girls and women in their blossom kimono, laughter of relatives and friends, some more petals have fallen on the food.

At the time of this verse, Basho said,

7       “As I gained some feeling for the rhythm in this verse on blossom-viewing,  I made Lightness.”

Haruo Shirane defines Lightness as: “a stress on everyday common subject matter, on the use of vernacular language, and on a relaxed rhythmical seemingly artless expression” — each of these are conspicuous in UNDER THE TREES.

Basho says that Lightness comes from the kakari, or rhythm of the words. Shirane, from his native Japanese ear, describes the rhythm in UNDER THE TREES in Japanese: the verse “starts slowly with four successive ‘o’ sounds (ko, no, mo, to) and then plunges into a strong consonant beat: (ni shi-ru mo na-ma-su mo sa-ku-ra ka-na) with each new syllable seeming to pick up speed, and then ends on the emotive, exclamatory kana, thus suggesting the inebriated mood of a cherry blossom party.” The final kana is “emotive, exclamatory,” so HURRAY! We are celebrating the season of warmth and new Life. Lightness is Us, real people having fun, sharing food.

To those who love Western poetry, Basho’s verses of Lightness will seem so simple and Light they feel like nothing – but they leave the reader feeling good — as opposed to Heaviness which relies on heavy word associations and allegory to make the reader feel sad. Even without tragedy, sensationalism, or negativity, Basho reaches into the human heart:- in this verse, through taste sensations – soup which could be so many possibilities and raw vegetables imbued with the sour of vinegar. Taste images bring us back to the times when we ate those foods, times we celebrated together.

Four years after the birth of Lightness in the haiku UNDER THE TREES, Basho said at a gathering of his Edo followers before he left on his final journey west to Kansai,

8 　   Now in my heart the form of poetry is as looking into a shallow stream over sand with Lightness both in the body of the verse as well as in the Heart’s connection

9 – Do not allow your verse to be artificial.

Basho compares an artificial verse by Kikaku with his own naturally occurring verse:

Koe karete                     Hoarse shriek

saru no ha shiroshi         monkey’s white fangs

mine no tsuki                  moon over the peak

Shio-dai no                     Salted bream

haguki mo samushi      their gums so cold

uo no tana                       a fish store  

Kon says “Along a street in the desolation of winter, a few salted bream are lined up on a tray in a fish store. The lips drawn back in death reveal gums frightful in their coldness.”

Basho said, Kikaku surpasses all in exaggeration, so let us forgive him.　　　　　　　　

10   　 The verse HOARSE SHRIEK is Kikaku.

             ‘Gums of salted bream’ is the poetry of my old age.

              The lower segment, “A fish store,”saying only that, is my style.

Basho in his old age has discovered something else: Lightness. Poetry can be excellent without heavy and exaggerated imagery; instead of monkeys shrieking and jagged mountain peaks like monkey fangs, poetry can reveal ordinary scenes in daily life. Kikaku wrote his verse from imagination, not from any actual experience of monkeys or mountains or the moon. It has nothing to give us; once the shock is over, there is nothing in the verse can we learn.

“A fish store” is Basho’s genius. Another poet would have ended the poem with something bold, striking, philosophical, or religious. Basho however just says “A fish store”, with all its daily life associations in smell and sound and sight. Any woman in the temperate zone near the sea can see Basho’s haiku right before her eyes when she goes shopping in winter. Kikaku’s verse is suitable only for people off in some fantasy world where monkeys shriek. It is literary and “old.” Basho’s verse is REAL and Light.

11 In the verses of other poets is too much making and the heart’s immediacy is lost.

What is made from the heart is good; the product of words shall not be preferred.

Words from the heart are good. Words from other words are not.

12 — A stanza may have extra sounds, 3, 4, even 5 or 7; if the phrase has good resonance, it is okay – however if even one sound stagnates in your mouth, scrutinize the expression.

Basho advises that we speak the verse out loud to insure that the phrases have “resonance” (hibiki) and do not “stagnate” in the mouth — like water in a stream stuck behind a wad of fallen leaves, old, foul, and heavy — but rather flow with natural rhythm that resonates in the listener’s ear. For many years I have enjoyed the natural resonance I hear when I speak:

“Many, many,

things come to mind

cherry blossoms.”

Recently I considered changing the middle segment to “things brought to mind” or “thoughts come to mind” to more “accurate” to the original – but when I spoke these phrases out loud, I found that they “stagnate” in my mouth. “Things come to mind” is natural English and resonates. Basho told Kyorai:

13   This is a path of a fresh lively taste with aliveness in both heart and words

In a letter of 1690, Basho offered the following haiku as an example of the qualities which make up Lightness.

Komo o kite           There is a man

tare bito imasu      covered by a straw mat,

hana no haru         glory of spring

14   According to your various talents, make the verse from your heart, whether linked verse or haiku, neither heavy nor merely spinning about.

A beggar sleeps under a straw mat in the freezing cold New Year’s weather. He has an identity, a human dignity within the glory of spring. If not for fortune, I could be him. The verse goes straight to its sociological meaning; it does not “spin about” aimlessly, yet is not “heavy”; it does not shove that meaning at the reader’s face.

15  In poetry is a realm which cannot be taught. You must pass through it yourself.  Some poets have made no effort to pass through, merely counting things and trying to remember them.  There was no passing through the things.

To write poetry, you must “pass through things.”

Kara tsubo ni                 On the saddle

kobouzu noru ya           sits their ‘little monk’ —

daikon-hiki                      daikon-gathering

This is not an actual apprentice monk but rather an ordinary kid whose head has been shaved close. Because ‘daikon gathering’ in Japanese tradition suggests a happy family excursion, I have added in “their”: we feel not this is not just any little boy, but “their little monk”— the youngest son loved by the whole family.

Basho told Doho:

16         “To have the little boy stand out in relation to the daikon-gathering was the making of this verse”

The image of “little monk” makes the child “stand out,” the bald round head on a child‘s body sitting on the horse high above the horizontal field, watching his elders at work. (See the painting.)   This “standing out” is what “makes” the verse. The light color and roundness of the boy’s head are “cute,” while pulling gargantuan white radishes from the ground is dirty and rough. The important word here is “stand out.”   Unless something “stands out in relation” to something else, there is no poem.

Two months before his death, although it was autumn, to his long-time followers aged like himself、Basho wrote a Spring verse.

Kao ni ninu                  Unlike our faces

hokku mo ide yo       may our haiku emerge

hatsu-zakara              as first blossoms

Though our faces are wrinkled and pockmarked by the ravages of time, our poems can be as fresh and vibrant as the first cherry blossoms to emerge on their twigs. About this haiku Basho said:

17 The physical form, first of all, must be graceful, then the musical quality makes a superior verse.

For the “physical form” to be “graceful,” I believe the verse must have a consistent rhythm of beats.

Basho speaks of a “quality of turning,” as in music that quality which gives an “accent” or “resonance,” instead of being flat and boring, yet even with all that “turning,” all haiku are scored with the same steady

four beats per measure. Syllables expand or contract to fit into the four beats: thus in the chorus to We are the World, the one syllable of “world” expands to fill an entire measure, and the six syllables of “ones who make a brighter” contract to four beats. I discuss this at length in my article “Syllables, Words, and Beats”.

By translating with a consistent four-beat rhythm — 3 beats and pause / 4 beats without pause / 3 beats and pause – and using ordinary English words which (I hope) resonate, I aim for a graceful physical form with a musical quality.

*************

I request your assistance in getting out the word on the warm affectionate Basho who wrote hundreds of poems about women and children, about friendship, love, and compassion — hundreds of Basho works few people know, yet I believe the most pro-female, child-centered, and life-affirming works in world literature.

Feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Basho4now@gmail.com

The following is an excerpt from an upcoming book on the Shikoku Pilgrimage, expected to be released in 2017.  Edward J. Taylor will thus become our second WiK member to have a book published about the famed 88 temple pilgrimage, following the release of Running the Shikoku Pilgrimage (2013) by Amy Chavez.

We spent the morning walking a long straight line across Marugame. At the far end was Temple 78, Gōshō-ji, a small hilltop temple with very clean grounds. A trio of men was busy trimming the pines, one of them lying prone across branches that looked too weak to support his body weight. The man’s position reminded me of some of the aerial antics of the shugenja, who dangled themselves off precipices, climbing one-handed along chains over empty space.   In fact, this very temple had once been a center for the mountain ascetics who had fled the usual centers of a more orthodox Buddhism, seeking a life closer to the earth, closer to the truth, or at least whatever particular truth had animated them.

As we walked back down the hill, a man pulled up and handed us a tiny pair of waraji, with the Heart Sutra written inside on a small piece of paper, wishing us luck. There was an interesting, though unintended pun here, in these woven straw sandals representing the outward ritualized practice of the pilgrimage, and the attached sutra the inner. As Richard Payne wrote, “Where sutra is a thread used to string or sew things together, and also the warp on a loom (the lengthwise threads), tantra identifies the weft (also, woof, the crosswise threads) on a loom. As religious texts, sutras and tantras string together teachings.”

We spent the rest of the morning walking another long straight line across Sakaide. At the far end was Temple 79, Tennō-ji. Along the way, we watched an old man slowly bike up the road, stop suddenly, and put his hand over his mouth in reaction to something. He was watching a house being torn down, and I could almost see his mind running through memories he associated with the place, memories of people now moved on. A childhood friend, a high school crush. What was for the workmen just another job was for him the end of a history.

Tennō-ji was a small temple that had been nearly engulfed by the neighboring shrine. Now shaded by many pine trees, Emperor Sutoku had once been exiled here a millennium ago, his body kept in the pond so as to preserve it until news of his death reached the court in Kyoto.   The lotus stems in the water looked equally lifeless. This was the only temple on the pilgrimage where Miki and I were completely alone, not another henro in sight. We sat awhile, enjoying the peace. I could imagine the loneliness that the wandering poet Saigyo had found when he came here to pay homage to his lord, a loneliness broken when the dead emperor’s ghost arose to engage the poet in debate. The nōkyō-jō was in a different part of the grounds, but even here there was no one but a single monk.

As this region was once known as Sanuki, we very much looked forward to the famous, eponymous Udon. We saw on our map that there was a shop along the trail, but were disappointed by the “On holiday” sign hanging from the door. (Ironically, the three times that we tried to eat Sanuki Udon in Sanuki, we found the shop closed.) In the next town was a supermarket just off the trail. Leaving our bags hidden behind an abandoned house, we walked the short distance to the store, but found it had little in the way of ready-to-eat stuff. We had a poor lunch and stocked up for an equally poor dinner and breakfast to eat later on in the mountains. Ever since leaving Matsuyama, we had found restaurants and shops to be plentiful, food and baths easy to come by. Now we faced a sudden return to the insubstantial diet that we’d had in Kōchi, along with a tough climb ahead.

I had taken some time looking over our maps, and after judging distances both vertical and horizontal, decided to climb up to Temple 81 first, continue to the higher Temple 82 and spend the night nearby, then drop down to Temple 80 in the morning (Armin Howald jokingly compares the Shikoku Henro to the Tour de France, with its various mountain stages.) Most of the ascent up to Temple 81, Shiromine-ji, was along a winding road. A school must have been having a field trip of some sort, for a few hundred kids were now approaching from the opposite direction in small groups. Many yelled out the obligatory ‘Harro!” as they passed, to which I’d raise my hand and respond, “Henro!” Miki grew tired of this by the twentieth exchange or so, but the kids and I still laughed every time.

The final push was up an incredible flight of wide stone steps. They were a cliché out of a kung fu film, and I half expected to see Shaolin monks with buckets balanced across their shoulders, carrying water up and down, with a harsh and painful punishment awaiting any who spilled a single drop. The temple grounds themselves were equally magical, with many nods to esoteric Shugendo practices as well as references to Taoism and shamanism. A single building would be standing atop its own individual flight of steps, or at the end of a trail in the forest. A bus group from Kyushu was in front of the Hondo, singing more than chanting, resonating a beautiful energy that took both Miki and I in. It is said that the Heart Sutra’s 260 characters encapsulate the essence of Buddhist scripture, and here we felt it in the rise and fall of every syllable. We chatted with them on the way down, and found in them the only real spiritual feel out of the dozens of bus groups we’d thus met. Yet again, when Miki and I have grown most jaded, and begun to wonder if any of the purity has survived the commercialization, we meet people who set us straight.

Leaving Shiromine-ji, we climbed again, arriving at a saddle where a large statue of Kōbō Daishi sat at the confluence of trails to Temples 82 and 80. Images of the Taishi are easily recognized, and may even contain unintended Chinese elements. As Baquet has noted: “We’re told that on the pilgrimage, we should hold our beads in our left hand when we pray, without being told why.  A cursory inspection will show that statues of the Daishi always show him with a circle of beads in his left hand.  (A circle–remember that.)  In his right, he usually has his vajra if sitting, and his staff if standing. Freud calling.  The circle is feminine, the staff or vajra masculine.  The feminine symbol is in the left (yin, receptive, passive) hand, the masculine in the right (yang, creative, active) hand.”

After a short rest we climbed again. Where Shiromine-ji had exuded its power in spaciousness and light, Temple 82, Negoro-ji, was more severe. It too had all the feel of a shugendo training space, with darkened grounds and halls, and even the figure of a slain ox-demon back in the trees. Baquet again: “In the 16th-century an ox-headed demon was terrorizing the people of the Go-shiki-dai.  A samurai killed him with one arrow, cut off his Bull-headed gods–a motif from time immemorial. […]  This moon-connection runs deep.  A folklorist might look at the slaying of a cow-figure, representing the moon, as a triumph of a sun religion over a moon cult.  And in Shingon Buddhism, Dainichi–“Big Sun”–is the primary Buddha.”

To enter the Hondo, one had to walk through a series of long dark corridors, lined with barely visible Kannon. Chanting in front of the Hondo was a man dressed in black monks robes, carrying the ringed Shakujo staff of a shugenja, and chanting in a powerful voice. We’d met him and his wife a few times during the past few days, he never failing to greet me warmly in English. Here for the first time I saw his full power. We all left the Hondo at the same time, his voice strongly muttering a mantra, punctuated by the sound of his shakujo hitting the floor with a loud ‘Thwack!’

Miki and I moved back into the forest, the darkness pressing in. We had contacted a man about zenkonyado, and he’d offered us free lodging at a former Kokuminshuku. These were once quite the thing during the bubble years, a place where company workers could go to stay and play. This particular one had belonged to the Kawasaki corporation, so we were expecting a huge luxurious hotel that we’d have all to ourselves. Except that there was no one there to let us in. We rattled some doors and banged on some windows, then finally gave the man a call. It seemed like he’d forgotten about us entirely, and quickly came over in his car. There had been a sudden cancellation, so with some space available back at his lodging, he invited us to stay there. A few minutes later, we entered and saw about a dozen people sitting around a low table, waiting to eat. Oryoki style. We’d unwittingly come to a Zen Temple. I suppose the name, Kappa Zen Dojo should’ve been a clue, but as we’d found it on our list of zenkonyado, hadn’t really expected this. The temple was unique, isolated well out of sight upon the mountain, and used predominantly as a place to rehabilitee hikikomori shut-ins in order for them to return to being productive members of society. The meal was more casual than at other temples where I’d done Zen training, and it was followed by a half-hour of the residents talking about their day. Midway through, my hips were screaming as I sat cross-legged on the floor, having immediately come off a 30-plus kilometer day, over two high peaks. After dinner, the top monk explained the schedule, which we were expected to follow. Despite Zen being my primary Buddhist practice, one I’ve committed thousands of hours to, not one part of me wanted to be here. I was exhausted, my backs and legs sore, and I was being denied my own recuperative rituals of writing and reading.   For the walker, self-care and rest are crucial, and I began to worry about the following day. As my fatigue-fed frustration grew, I found myself nearly in tears.

Then I accepted defeat. This acceptance began to build, and I found the zazen that followed surprisingly relaxing. Breath following breath, step following step. Meditation wasn’t that dissimilar to walking in that you could rely on the repetitive rhythm, get lost in it. One could walk for hours in a semi-blank state of mind, and being well conditioned to weeks of that, here on the cushion it was easy to drop in.  Don Weiss wrote about emptiness in his great “Echoes of Incense.” “Hundreds of books have been written about sunyata (emptiness), but all of these books put together teach less than walking the pilgrimage day after day or sitting in meditation every morning. The intellect cannot grasp this idea. But to the heart, it is simple.”

As it was, it was a bit surreal to be sitting in the middle of this meditation hall, with black robed figures sitting completely still on one side and fidgety kids on the other, as if in detention. From somewhere within the hall a girl was crying, and the slumped, seated postures of the kids betrayed a defeat far greater than my own.

All photos courtesy Edward J. Taylor

KJ 87

Amazingly, Kyoto Journal is approaching its 30^th anniversary—not bad going for an all-volunteer non-profit publication, in any context. Back in the pre-Internet days of monochrome cut-and-paste layout (art-knife and toxic spray-nori) we had no inkling that the magazine would last more than a few issues, or that it would continue to evolve over three decades into its current Asia-spanning digital format. Deepest gratitude to each and every one of KJ’s multitude of supporters: our contributors, subscribers, and editorial/production staff!

Our soon-to-be released fall 2016 issue, KJ 87(!), features excerpts from three exceptional new books, complemented by a wide-reaching ensemble of encounters with people engaged in extending creative boundaries in Japan, India, Kazakhstan, Cambodia—and North Korea. Marc Peter Keane’s forthcoming Japanese Garden Notes: a visual guide to elements and design, is a feast for the eyes in explicating behind-the-scenes aspects of this quintessential art; the always-thoughtful Alex Kerr’s newest publication, Another Kyoto, is equally rich in insights into the essence of classic Kyoto. Artist activist Mayumi Oda’s autobiography Sarasvati’s Gifts melds her Buddhist/feminist art and social commitment, revealing an intensely-lived life.

In two separate interviews we delve into the evolution of haiku and its world-wide relevance, with Richard Gilbert, a Kumamoto-based scholar and poet, and Kala Ramesh, poet and founder of an ongoing international haiku festival in Pune, India. Toyoshima Mizuho and Hara Masaru, a Kyoto Noh actor, discuss hidden depths of this ancient performance art. Remo Notarianni profiles contemporary Kazakh artists including photographer Almagul Menlibayeva, who documents cultural transitions through a fashion-style lens; George Saitoh interviews artist Tatsuta Tatsuya, who focuses sunlight through a Fresnel lens to transform his sculptures. Elle Murrel mingles with artists from East and central Asia, and beyond, who created installations in Nara for this summer’s spectacular Culture City of East Asia program, “A Journey Beyond 1300 Years of Time and Space.” Raymond Hyma presents the inspiring story of Nika Tath, an entrepreneurial blind massage therapist in Phnom Penh with “seeing hands.” Stacy Hughes joins a pioneering surfing tour in North Korea—the DPRK—helping set up an impromptu surf school; Ilyse Kusnetz visits Tomorrowland, located in Tokyo Bay, and Robert Brady farewells an era beside the shining vastness of Lake Biwa in Shiga. Plus poetry by Ami Kaye, Sushma Joshi, Leanne Dunic—and translations of ghazals by 19^th century Indian poet Ghalib—new fiction by Sacha Idell, and a raft of topical reviews.

To be published digitally in mid-November, available by single issue or subscription. Track us on Facebook for updates as we go to press—we’re also fine-tuning plans for our anniversary party in Kyoto in January.