Basho’s Pilgrimage

Many would regard Basho (1644-1694) as the foremost Japanese poet. His poems and written works—chiefly short travel diaries—are regarded as classics. Basho is of interest to students of the non-dual teachings because his life was a quest for ultimate fulfilment, and his writings, with their freshness and beauty, often contain deep insights.

By birth and background, Basho was a Buddhist, but he identified himself with no special sect or creed. He once went to the great temple of Zenkoji, which, at that time, provided living quarters for four different Buddhist sects. There he wrote:

Four gates
And four different sects
Sleep as one
Under the bright moon.

The outer aspects of religion, for Basho, were less important than the need to become ‘religiously enlightened’. He never regarded himself as a master of inner peace, but rather as a seeker, and one who was often dissatisfied with his inner state. He wrote with characteristic modesty:

I was clad in a black robe, but neither a priest nor an ordinary man of this world was I, for I wavered ceaselessly like a bat, which passes for a bird at one time and for a mouse at another.

Yet Basho undoubtedly knew more than he cared to express in the written word. For he had fathomed many secrets which are only available to a quiet mind. He knew the value of such a mind, both for creativity and for inner peace. This is also a key element of the non-dual practices, where it is held that an excited or over-active mind is of far less value than one that is tranquil.

Basho lived in Japan in the second half of the 17th century. There are two important facts to bear in mind. First, Japan was then a land at peace. Secondly, it was a country comprising a group of islands that was isolated from the outer world. Europeans had come in the previous century introducing Christianity, but now there was a reaction, and Japan had closed its gates on the outer, non-Japanese, world.

The Japanese style of poetry which Basho developed consisted of just three lines, called haiku. This brevity of expression was familiar in the East, where deep thoughts and sentiments could be expressed simply and tersely. Chinese artists often added a short poem to their pictures, and Zen monks, when they had a sudden illuminating insight, would likewise hint at their experience in a short poem.

In Japan this tradition was taken up with enthusiasm. It was considered an essential skill for courtiers and aristocrats to be able to produce short polished verses. Later the warriors began to write poetry and, lastly, the art was taken up by the people. In remote regions hundreds of miles from the centres of civilisation, Basho found villages with poetry societies.

Basho particularly admired the twelfth-century monk, Saigyo, who forsook the court in order to spend his long life wandering and communing with nature. One of Saigyo’s verses runs:

People pass away
And the truth of the passing world
Impresses me now and then.
But alas! my dull mind
Lets this truth too pass away.

Basho was born in Ueno, near Kyoto. He was a member of the privileged class, the Samurai, but his family had fallen on hard times. He was put into service as a page boy and companion to the son of the Lord of his province. It was a deep friendship, and the two young men loved poetry and culture. Then, in his early 20s, the young man sickened and died. Basho, defying feudal custom, ran away to Kyoto, and there remained for five years. For part of the time he stayed in a temple, applied himself to the study of Chinese and Japanese classical texts, and soaked his mind in the poems of the past masters. Later he wrote: ‘No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.’ During this time, he probably had the companionship of a woman named Jutei, who re-enters his story towards the end of his life.

Basho recognized the importance of tradition, which, for him meant absorbing the best and drawing strength and inspiration from those who went before you. Always on his travels, he has comments such as: ‘Saigyo was in this place.’ Indeed, he would be moved to his roots when present in a place associated with one of the masters. For instance, at a temple founded by Kobo Daishi, he wrote: ‘To say more about this shrine would be to violate its holiness.’ While there, he wrote a poem:

It was with awe that I beheld
Fresh leaves, green leaves
Bright in the sun.

In 1672, at the age of 28, he went to live in Edo, now called Tokyo, then a relatively young city. In time we find him well- established there, in fact famous as a poet and teacher of poetry.

There is a story about a disciple learning to write haiku which may date from this time. They were sitting by a stream, when the disciple noticed some red dragonflies gracefully hovering over the waters. He said: ‘Master, here is a haiku.’

Dragonflies
Tear off their wings
And you have red pepper pods!

Basho felt unable to approve this offering, and suggested:

Red pepper pods
Add wings to them
Bright dragonflies!

All this was artful and elegant, but still somewhat superficial. Basho wanted to be famous, and this had been accomplished. There was even an anthology of poems called ‘The Best Poems of Tosei’s Twenty Disciples’. (At this time, Basho was known as Tosei.) Yet, though famous, Basho was unhappy. During these years of increasing renown, an inner conflict was going on. There is a saying of the wise: ‘Worldly success and happiness are two different things.’ Something within Basho was whispering: ‘This is not what you wanted.’ He felt he was living on the surface, and that he was still ruled by the fickle life style of what was called in Japan yukiyo, meaning ‘the floating world’. If he was to be a real poet, he had to dig deeper.

Basho turned to meditation. He practised under a Zen priest, Buccho. He wanted to follow the spiritual path wholeheartedly. But he could not renounce poetry. To attain stillness of mind, was it really necessary to give up the poetical imaginings which he felt rising up within him with such irresistible force? This was a real problem. Perhaps there was a way of life which could be profoundly meditative and also poetically creative?

During these years, Basho also endured some personal mis-fortunes. The little hut built for him by his disciples was burnt down in one of those terrible fires which used to devastate old Tokyo. The following year, 1683, his mother died. He expressed his feeling in the following haiku:

On a bare branch
A crow is perched
Autumn evening.

He began to feel that life was so uncertain that it was a matter of some doubt whether any of us could lay claim to something called a home. Then, when he was 40, an answer came. He would get away from Edo. He would take to the road. He would throw off the superficial layers of his personality, and try to transcend his egoism in communion with nature. He would be like Saigyo. And, if necessary, he would die on the road.

It is noteworthy that Basho started the first of his three major journeys, not in the spring with warm days to look forward to, but in the autumn. He wrote:

Following the example of the ancient priest, who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house… amid the wails of the autumn wind.

Determined to fall
A weather-exposed skeleton I cannot help
The sore wind blowing through my heart.

He was usually accompanied by a disciple, journeying mostly on foot, though occasionally mounting a horse. He carried very little in the way of possessions and hence had no fear of thieves. He would try to put up at a farmhouse, but often slept out, for pleasure or necessity. But when he found friends or patrons in distant parts, he would be well looked after.

One great lesson Basho wanted to teach himself was to make his mind one with nature in all seasons. He wrote that the great masters ‘had a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the year’. This is followed by a statement about the way a true artist looks on the world:

Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist, therefore, is to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.

These words are without sentimentality, and show that Basho had his full measure of both sensitivity and toughness. Implicit here is the attitude of not minding when things go wrong, or when a certain view or outing is spoiled. Once Basho had set out to view Mount Fuji from a particular spot. His poem runs:

In a way, it was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.

Basho recorded his impressions in travel diaries—prose mixed with haiku poems. After travelling for about nine months, he returned, a changed man and a much more profound and meaningful poet. He writes: ‘I reached home at long last towards the end of April. After several days of rest, I wrote:

Shed of everything else
I still have some lice picked up on the road
Crawling on my summer robes.

Basho learnt by observing nature with a tranquil heart. Many of the poems he wrote at this time indicate that his mind was in a state of perfect tranquillity. It was during this period that he wrote his famous haiku about a frog. Translated by Ueda it goes:

The old pond
A frog leaps in
And a splash.

At a first hearing the poem does not sound impressive or even poetic. But an eye-witness account indicates the atmosphere of peace that led to its composition:

This poem was written by our master on a spring day. He was sitting in his riverside house in Edo, bending his ears to the soft cooing of a pigeon in the quiet rain. There was a mild wind in the air, and one or two blossoms of cherry blossom were falling gently to the ground… Now and then in the garden was heard the sound of frogs jumping into the water. Our master was deeply immersed in meditation, but finally he came out with the second half of the poem: [here, a different translation into English is used, indicating some of the depth and range of meaning carried by the original]

A frog jumped into water
A deep resonance

One of the disciples sitting with him immediately suggested for the first half of the poem:

Amidst the flowers
Of the yellow rose.

Our master thought for a while, but finally he decided on:

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond.

The disciple’s suggestion is admittedly picturesque and beautiful but our master’s choice, being simple, contains more truth in it. It is only he who has dug deep into the mystery of the universe that can choose a phrase like this.

Basho formulated a precept which embraces an important phase of the non-dual teachings. He writes:

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine. Go to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in so doing, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn…

Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one, when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there.

It is a precept that applies to all art, and life itself becomes an art when we learn to meet experience in this spirit of unity.

About this time Basho conceived the longing to go on another journey. This time he wished to go the deep north of Japan. The journey was about 1500 miles, again travelling on foot. He had never been to that region and had few acquaintances he could visit on the way. He was 45 and not in good health, but he felt he had to go. ‘The gods seemed to have possessed my soul and turned it inside out, and roadside images seemed to invite me from every corner.’ He sold his little hut before setting out. This suggests he never expected to return. Now he really was homeless.

He visited many holy places, prompting deep reflection on life’s transiency. In a certain shrine, he saw the helmet of the brave old warrior, Sanemori, who, in old age, had dyed his hair black so that he could go into battle against an army of young soldiers. Basho wrote:

How pitiful!
Under the helmet
A cricket chirping.

But on this journey, Basho also gives illustration of that thorough merging of the individual ego in the infinite life of the universe. These are poems where the poet himself is negated. While journeying alongside the swollen Mogami river, he wrote:

Gathering the rains of summer
How swiftly flows
The Mogami river!

Similarly, while walking at night along the coastal road, he could make out, far in the distance, the island of Sado.

Rough sea
Extending toward Sado Isle
The Milky Way.

When Basho eventually returned to Edo in 1691, he encountered difficulties and tensions. Everyone wanted to see him. There were no free days. A sick nephew came to live with him, whom he looked after. Jutei re-appeared, needing support. For a time it became more than he could deal with. The nephew died, and then Basho decided to lock his door to all callers. He would welcome only the morning glories—the lovely flowers growing alongside his threshold, but no more dealings with people. At this time Basho wrote:

I am one
Who eats his porridge
Gazing at the morning glories

But after deep meditation, this phase passed. After all, he had earlier formulated another principle for dealing with life:

What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of daily experience, to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing on our everlasting self, which is poetry.

Predictably, Basho set off on another journey. This time he would go westwards, visiting friends and relatives on his way to explore the south. While lingering near Osaka, he fell ill, and was forced to take to his bed. With his mind still pervaded by images of the open moorlands, and his heart pregnant with pure and poetic sentiments, this great master left his physical body on October 12th 1694. Two weeks before his passing, he had written the following haiku at the house of a friend:

A white chrysanthemum
However intently I look
Not a speck of dust!

A.H.C.