Zen Culture Part 15

The potter wants the Zen connoisseur to understand what he has done: to see the clay, to feel and admire its texture, to appreciate the reasons for the type and color of the glaze. 'The pieces are carefully contrived to draw attention to both their original elements and the process by which these elements were blended. For example, a bowl whose glaze only partially covers its clay provides a link with the natural world from which it came. Its texture springs out, like that of a piece of natural driftwood. At the same time, the bald clay, the streaks of glaze, the hand-formed sculpture, allow one to recognize the materials and the process of formation. When the potter keeps no secrets, one enters into the exhilaration of his moment of creation. Once again, this is a deliberate aesthetic device, reminding one that the potter is an individual artist, not a faceless craftsman. The look and feel of Zen ceramics make them seem forerunners of the modern craft-pottery movement, but few modern potters are blessed with the rich legacy of Zen aesthetic ideals that made these ceramics possible. The secret lies deep in ancient Zen culture, which taught the Momoyama masters how the difficult could be made to seem effortless.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zen and Haiku

_Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory--

_Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley

HAIKU IS REGARDED by many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes of _koan _riddles, _sutras_, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional j.a.panese poetry--an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the j.a.panese of the early Zen masters.

On first acquaintance j.a.panese seems an unlikely language for poetry.

It is a syllabic tongue with each syllable ending in a vowel or the nasal n; consequently there are only five true rhymes in the entire language. Italian poets overcame a somewhat similar handicap, but their language is stressed, which j.a.panese is not. With no usable rhymes and no stress, how can the music of poetry be created? Over the centuries, the j.a.panese solved this problem by replacing meter with a system of fixed syllables--either five or seven--for each line. (This means that some lines of j.a.panese poetry may have only one word, but the system seems to work.) In place of rhyme, j.a.panese poets learned to orchestrate the pitch of individual vowels within a single line to give a sense of music. This device was ill.u.s.trated by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth using a poem from the cla.s.sical era. (The vowels are p.r.o.nounced as in Italian.)

_Fu-ta-ri yu-ke-do

Yu-ki su-gi ga-ta-ki

A-ki ya-ma wo

I-ka-de ka ki-mi ga

Hi-to-ri ko-ge na-mu

_

In his a.n.a.lysis of this particular poem, Rexroth has pointed out that the first and last lines contain all five vowels in the language, whereas the middle lines contain various combinations and repet.i.tions, which produce a p.r.o.nounced musical effect.1 The ability to create such music without rhyme, one of the finer achievements of j.a.panese poetry, is far more difficult than might at first be imagined and leads naturally to a.s.sonance, or the close repet.i.tion of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repet.i.tion of similar consonant sounds. Some of the vowels have psychological overtones, at least to the sensitive j.a.panese ear: u is soft, a is sharp and resonant, o connotes vagueness tinged with profundity.2 Various consonants also convey an emotional sense in a similar manner.

Another clever device of the early j.a.panese versifiers was the use of words with double meanings. One example of this is the so-called pivot word, which occurs approximately halfway through a poem such as the above and serves both to complete the sense of the first part of the poem with one meaning and to begin a new sense and direction with its second meaning. This can at times produce a childish effect, and it does not always elevate the overall dignity of the verse. Another use of double meaning is far more demanding. Since the j.a.panese kana script is entirely phonetic and allows for no distinction in spelling between h.o.m.onyms, words which sound alike but have different meanings, it is possible to carry two or more ideas through a poem. (A somewhat labored example in English might be, "My tonights hold thee more," "My two knights hold the moor." If these were written alike and p.r.o.nounced alike, then the poem could mean either or both.) The first meaning may be a concrete example of a lover pining for his love, and the second a metaphor. Ideally, the two meanings support each other, producing a resonance said to be truly remarkable.

The early j.a.panese poets overcame the limitations of the j.a.panese language both by attuning their ears to the music of the words and by capitalizing on the large incidence of h.o.m.onyms. They settled the matter of meter, as noted, by prescribing the number of syllables per line, with the princ.i.p.al form being five lines with syllable counts of 5,7,5,7, and 7. This thirty-one-syllable poem, known as the _waka_, became the j.a.panese "sonnet" and by far the most popular poetic form during the Heian era. Almost all a poet can do in five lines, however, is to record a single emotion or observation. The medium governed the message, causing j.a.panese poets early on to explore their hearts more than their minds. The _waka_ became a cry of pa.s.sion; a gentle confirmation of love; a lament for the brevity of blossoms, colored leaves, the seasons, life itself. A sampling of _waka _from the early cla.s.sical era shows the aesthetic sense of the seasons and lyric charm of these verses.

_Tsuki ya aranu

_ Can it be that the moon has changed?

_Haru ya mukas.h.i.+ no

_ Can it be that the spring

_Haru naranu

_ Is not the spring of old times?

_Waga mi hitotsu wa

_ Is it my body alone

_Moto no mi nis.h.i.+te

_ That is just the same?3

Judged on its concentrated power alone, for this is virtually all an English reader can evaluate, this poem is a masterpiece. Its content can be condensed into five lines because much of its impact lies in its suggestiveness. It is, however, closed-ended, with no philosophical implications other than a wry look at human perceptions. Haiku added new dimensions to j.a.panese poetry.

The early aristocratic era gave j.a.panese poetry its form, the five-line _waka_, and its subject matter, nature and the emotions. Later the familiar j.a.panese idea that life is but a fleeting moment and all things must blossom and fade was added. One critic has noted that as this idea took hold, poems gradually changed from praise of the plum blossom, which lasts for weeks, to praise of the cherry blossom, which fades in a matter of days.

_Hisakata no

_On a day in spring

_Hikari nodokeki

_When the light throughout the sky

_Haru no hi ni

_Warms with tranquility.

_s.h.i.+zugokoro naku

_Why is it with unsettled heart

_Hana no chiru ran

_That the cherry flowers fall?4

j.a.panese poetry of the pre-Zen period has been handed to us primarily in a few famous collections. The first great anthology of j.a.panese poetry is the Manyoshu, a volume of verses from the middle of the eighth century. A glance through the Manyoshu shows that the earliest poets did not confine themselves to five-line verses, but indulged in longer verses on heroic subjects, known as _choka_. The tone, as Donald Keene has observed, is often more masculine than feminine, that is, more vigorous than refined. As sensibilities softened in the early part of the Heian era and native verse became the prerogative of women, while men struggled with the more "important" language of China, the feminine tone prevailed to such an extent that male writers posed as women when using the native script. The next great collection of verse, the Kokinshu, published in the tenth century, was virtually all five- line _waka _concerned with seasons, birds, flowers, and fading love, and embracing the aesthetic ideals of _aware_, _miyabi_, and _yugen_.

As the aristocratic culture gradually lost control in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new verse form, derived from the _waka_, came into being: _renga_. This form consisted of a string of verses in the repeated sequence of 5,7,5 and 7,7 syllables per line--in reality a related series of _waka _but with the difference that no two consecutive two-or three-line verse sequences could be composed by the same individual. At first this new form seemed to offer hope of freeing poets from the increasingly confining range of subject matter prescribed for the _waka_. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Before long the _renga_ was saddled with a set of rules covering which verse should mention what season; at what point the moon, cherry blossoms, and the like should be noted; and so forth. Little creativity was possible under such restrictions. Versifying became, in fact, a party game much in favor with provincial _samurai_ and peasants alike in times. While the remaining Kyoto aristocrats tried to keep their _renga _in the spirit of the cla.s.sical _waka_, with allusions to Chinese poems and delicate melancholy, the provincials threw _renga _parties whose only aesthetic concern was adherence to the rules of the game. During the As.h.i.+kaga age, _renga_ and sake parties were the most popular forms of entertainment, but _renga's _only genuine contribution to j.a.panese poetry was the use of the vernacular by provincial poets, which finally broke the stranglehold of Heian feminine aesthetics.

By the beginning of the Momoyama era, linked verse had