Haiku:An Anthology Of Japanese Poems Read online

  YACHŌ. See OKADA YACHŌ.

  YAMAGUCHI SEISHI (1901–94). Born in Kyoto, he was a member of the haiku journal Hototogisu. He introduced new ideas to haiku through his poems.

  YASUI (1658–1743). A merchant from Nagoya, Yasui wrote many haiku following the Bashō tradition. Later in his life, Yasui shifted his interest to waka and the tea ceremony.

  YAYŪ (1702–83). Yayū was a retainer of the Owari family, one of the three branch families of the Tokugawa clan. After he retired, Yayū spent his life creating haiku and paintings. He was also known for his haibun (poetic writing).

  YORIE. See KUBO YORIE.

  YŪJI. See KINOSHITA YŪJI.

  THE ARTISTS

  HAKUIN EKAKU (1685–1768). Considered the most important Zen master of the past five hundred years, Hakuin was also the leading Zen painter, creating a large number of works with power, humor, and Zen intensity.

  IKE TAIGA (1723–76). One of the great literati painters of Japan, Taiga was unusual in that he displayed his art fully at a youthful age, creating delightful transformations of the scholar-artist landscape painting tradition.

  KI BAITEI (1734–1810). One of the major pupils of poet-painter Buson, Baitei (also known as Kyūrō) lived in Shiga Prefecture and created both landscapes and humorous figure studies.

  MARUYAMA ŌKYO (1733–95). By creating a style that combined naturalism with influences from China and the West, Ōkyo became founder of the popular Maruyama school of painting.

  MATSUYA JICHŌSAI (active 1781–88, died 1803?). Also known as Nichōsai, he was a sake brewer and antique dealer in Osaka who dabbled in poetry, painting, and singing. His humorous paintings have a caricature style all their own.

  SESSON SHŪKEI (1504?–1589?). One of the major ink-painters of the late medieval period in Japan, Sesson was known for his strong compositions and bold brushwork.

  TACHIBANA MORIKUNI (1679–1748). Born in Osaka, Morikuni studied the official style of the Kanō school, but was expelled because in one of his books he published designs that were considered secrets in the Kanō tradition.

  YAMAGUCHI SOKEN (1759–1818). A pupil of the naturalistic master Ōkyo, Soken was especially gifted in his depictions of figure subjects.

  THE ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. TACHIBANA MORIKUNI (1679–1748), Stream from Ehon Shakantei (1720)

  2. KI BAITEI (1734–1810), Crow from Kyūrō Gafu (1795)

  3. KI BAITEI (1734–1810), Deer from Kyūrō Gafu (1795)

  4. KI BAITEI (1734–1810), Leaf from Kyūrō Gafu (1795)

  5. KI BAITEI (1734–1810), Iris from Kyūrō Gafu (1795)

  6. KI BAITEI (1734–1810), Pine from Kyūrō Gafu (1795)

  7. HAKUIN EKAKU (1685–1768), Gourd from Hakuin Oshō Shigasanshū (1759)

  8. HAKUIN EKAKU (1685–1768), Shrimp from Hakuin Oshō Shigasanshū (1759)

  9. MARUYAMA ŌKYO (1733–95), Plum Branch from Ōkyo Gafu (1850)

  10. YMAGUCHI SOKEN (1759–1818), Buds from Soken Gafu Sōka no Bu (1806)

  11. YAMAGUCHI SOKEN (1759–1818), Cranes from Soken Gafu Sōka no Bu (1806)

  12. YAMAGUCHI SOKEN (1759–1818), Rice Fields from Soken Gafu Sōka no Bu (1806)

  13. ANONYMOUS, Drunkard from Toba-e Ōgi no Mato (1720)

  14. MATSUYA JICHŌSAI (? –1803?; active 1781–88), Music from Gahon Kochōzu Gahi (1805)

  15. YAMAGUCHI SOKEN (1759–1818), Planting from Yamato Jinbutsu Gafu Kōhen (1804)

  16. YAMAGUCHI SOKEN (1759–1818), Woodcutter from Yamato Jinbutsu Gafu Kōhen (1804)

  17. ANONYMOUS, Fox-Monk from Toba-e Ōgi no Mato (1720)

  18. SESSON SHŪKEI (1504?–1589?), Crow from Kingyoku Gafu (1771)

  19. IKE TAIGA (1723–76), Boating from Taiga/I Fukyō Gafu (1803)

  20. IKE TAIGA (1723–76), Willows from Meika Gafu (1814)

  Excerpt from Cold Mountain Poems by Han Shan, edited and translated by J. P. Seaton

  eISBN 978-0-8348-2187-3

  Introduction

  HAN SHAN AND SHIH TE have been the most popular icons of Mahayana Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism in particular, for more than a thousand years. Their poetry traveled to Japan nearly as quickly as Zen itself, and there, as in China, it inspired a popular and long-lasting tradition of paintings, and of rubbings from stone-carved images of their figures. Like those images, the poetry of Han Shan and Shih Te has survived everywhere into the present century. They are poets to laugh with, to make friends with, and to recognize, easily, as bodhisattvas, Buddhist saints whose purpose in life, and in life after life, is to help each of us to reach nirvana, the release from the suffering of eternal reincarnation. Quite a load for two laughing madmen dressed in rags to carry? But it is one they bear lightly and more than willingly.

  In 1958, only a decade after D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen to enthusiastic crowds of American artists and intellectuals in a series of lectures at Columbia University, Gary Snyder, one of the most influential poets of the Beat Generation, published the first translations of Han Shan’s poems into American English. The Beat’s great novelist Jack Kerouac embodied Han Shan in a character based on Snyder himself and further embedded the image of Han Shan in young Americans’ hearts and souls, quoting Snyder’s translation of Han Shan in his hugely successful novel The Dharma Bums. Shih Te, always a sidekick, has tagged along through the centuries.

  Wang Fan-chih, the third Zen poet in this selection, created his mordant and sometimes truly funny poetry a couple of centuries after Han Shan, in the outsider tradition founded in China by the mountain sage. Then, as the T’ang dynasty collapsed around them, Wang Fan-chih’s complete works, along with a batch of unrelated work labeled with his name, were hidden carefully in a monastic library around the year 1000. They rested there until the beginning of the twentieth century, almost as if they were waiting for another age of urban ghettos and seemingly hopeless poverty, of collapsing empires and visions of apocalyptic change. As these approach, Wang Fan-chih is ready to join his fellow Zen masters in the titanic struggle to save us all from suffering.

  In their poems and in the pictures that are so much a part of their tradition, we see Han Shan and Shih Te: always the pair, ragged, yes, but always laughing too—sometimes with pure joy—maybe because they know something wonderful? Sometimes pointedly laughing at themselves, and, more daringly, sometimes pointedly laughing at the readers’ follies, that’s mine, and yours too. They wrote their poems on trees, on rocks, on the walls of farmers’ homes, and on the walls of the monasteries they sometimes visited, taking menial work, as they did in the kitchen at Kuo-ch’ing Temple, a famous pilgrimage site in the T’ien-t’ai mountains in southeast China. But they didn’t observe the monastic discipline, and they were never dependable servants, being drawn to hike off toward a cave on Cold Mountain’s side, their true home. There, according to the traditional story, finally cornered by temple officials, Han Shan went into the cave at Cold Cliff and pulled it shut behind him, leaving his admirers to collect and hand down more than 350 poems by the two poets.

  In fact, though I’ll follow the convention of treating them as two individuals, Han Shan and Shih Te are pseudonyms given to several poets who wrote poetry and lived the lives of mountain mystics during the two or three centuries (sixth through eigth) when Zen itself was breaking free of the institutionalized Buddhist churches of T’ang dynasty China and establishing itself as the most Chinese of Buddhisms. Zen did this by emphasizing meditation over scriptural study (“Zen” literally means “meditation”) and, maybe even more importantly, by incorporating the wisdom and the humor of the great Taoist sages Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Han Shan became one of Zen’s foremost popular representatives, its central, independent, layman saint. Though he used the simplest time-honored verse forms, he spoke in a voice with an almost completely new tone. His poetry became the voice of ordinary people, liberating the common sense of the people, and though it was largely ignored by critics and bibliographers, it remains popular among poets and poetry lovers.

  The branch of B
uddhism that came to China from India was Mahayana, and all Mahayana Buddhist institutions are missionary institutions, in accordance with the vision of the historical Buddha, Gautama Shakyamuni. I believe that the high monks and abbots of Ch’an, as Zen was called in China, saw the poetry of Han Shan and Shih Te for one of the things it certainly was, an outstanding tool for teaching the basic principles of Buddhism. I suspect they intentionally brought the institutional power of their church to the cause of creating a book, a collection of the poems of the two poets, adding to it a few poems of generic Buddhist doctrine and dogma. This collection, with the force of Ch’an and of its ally Pure Land Buddhism behind it in every succeeding dynasty, survived the vicissitudes of time to provide a continuing source of solace and inspiration into the present era.

  The tall tale of Han Shan and Shih Te disappearing into the cave is certainly a beguiling one. We are told that several hundred years after Han Shan first started writing his poems on trees and rocks, an imperial Confucian official named Lu-ch’iu Yin (whom history has provided with two lifetimes, or sets of dates anyway, and maybe even one real official office, though not anywhere near the T’ien-t’ai Range) came along and wrote an account of his own short encounter with the two, by then transmogrified into the bodhisattvas Manjusri (known as Wen-shu in Chinese) and Samantabhadra (known as P’u-hsien). This is the story which has come down to us, in a couple of very similar versions, for more than a thousand years.

  Lu-ch’iu Yin’s memoir is a neat little essay that appears to tell us just about everything we need to know about both Han Shan and Shih Te. There are two very similar, popular versions. The shorter version comes from the introduction to Han Shan’s poems in the Ch’üan T’ang Shih, the great collection of T’ang dynasty poems. There are several available in English, including Gary Snyder’s from 1958. The following is mine:

  Nobody knows where Master Han Shan came from. He lived at Cold Cliff, in the T’ien-t’ai mountains in T’ang-hsing County, sometimes coming in to visit Kuo-ch’ing Temple. He wore a fancy birch-bark hat, a ragged cotton coat, and worn-out sandals. Sometimes he’d sing, or chant verses in the temple porches. Other times he’d sit out at farmers’ houses, singing and whistling. No one ever really got to know him.

  Lu-ch’iu Yin had received a government appointment in Tan-ch’iu, and when he was just about to debark to take up his post, he happened to run into Feng Kan, who told him he’d just come from the T’ien-t’ai area. Lu-ch’iu Yin asked him if there were any sages there with whom he might study. “There’s Han Shan, who is an incarnation of Wen-shu, and Shih Te, who is an incarnation of P’u-hsien. They tend the fires of the kitchens in the granary at Kuo-ch’ing Temple.”

  The third day after he’d taken up his position, Lu-ch’iu Yin went in person to the temple and, seeing the two men, bowed in appropriate fashion. The two burst out laughing and said, “Oh that Feng Kan, what a tongue-flapping blabbermouth! Amitabha! [Note the Buddha’s name taken in vain as a light oath.] We can’t imagine what you’d be bowing to us for!” And with that they went straight out of the temple, back to Cold Cliff. Master Han Shan disappeared into a cave, and then the cave closed up behind him. It had been his habit to inscribe his poems on bamboo and trees and rocks and cliff faces. Those, along with the ones he wrote on the walls of farmers’ homes, inside and out, came to 307. They are collected here in one volume.

  There are more than just several problems with this tale, historically speaking. To begin with, the quasi-narrator, the official Lu-ch’iu Yin, is a person who doesn’t exist in any of the dynastic histories. Feng Kan, the Zen master and authority for the authenticity of Han Shan and Shih Te, has existence issues too. The only evidence he ever was is this story, and a couple like it in which he’s a character. He is known to history solely as the man who told Lu-ch’iu Yin that two Buddhist holy men lived near the county office where he was about to take up his post. Feng Kan is enshrined in the modern biographical dictionary of Buddhist monks as a “tongue wagger” in language that was clearly taken from this story. To put it mildly, Feng Kan is the nearly perfect example of an almost living, breathing fictional character.

  If we accept that both Lu-ch’iu Yin and Feng Kan are bogus—though excellent scholars who are brilliant men of goodwill have pursued their shadows in many interesting directions—we can surmise that they are certainly in the introduction for a reason. In history, historical characters sort of have to be included, but in fiction, the characters are created as tools of the narrative. The traditional introduction to the poetry of Han Shan and Shih Te is propaganda. There is enough real poetry attributed to the name Han Shan to substantiate the existence of a historical person (or more likely, persons) we can call Han Shan. The introduction, with its fictional account of Han Shan, tells the readers that Han Shan was a religious seeker, a man called to the life of the religious hermit, and, finally, a boddhisattva, a person who has achieved supernatural powers rather like a saint in Roman Catholicism, capable of interceding on behalf of suffering humanity.

  What can we surmise about the real poet, or poets? We are told that “he lived at Cold Cliff.” The search for an idea of what the real Han Shan was like can begin there. Cold Cliff, or Han Yen, is a real place, a cliff in the T’ien-t’ai mountains in southeast China where hermit seekers had lived for millennia. The earliest of these were Taoists. Then, as Buddhism arrived from the west after the year 100 or so, both Taoists and Buddhists sat there. They found and occupied places where they could weather the winter cold, maybe foraging a little firewood against the worst of it. They dug roots and dried herbs for medicine and for food. Maybe they even planted a few soybeans, though the Taoists generally excluded grains from their diets. And finally, and that was the purpose of it all, they sat in meditation. Every time the word “sit” appears in a poem by Han Shan or Shih Te, it means to sit, cross-legged on the ground or on a simple straw mat, in meditation. For the Taoist, it is the “sitting forgetting” that is intended to free him of the memory of words, the memory which separates him from the Tao, which, according to Lao Tzu, cannot be described in words. For the Buddhist, “sitting” refers to the deep mind meditation that is the eighth and final step in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, the prescription for getting free of samsara, free of illusion, free of suffering. In Sanskrit, the Indian literary language that is the basis of Mahayana Buddhism, this sort of meditation is called dhyana, pronounced ch’an in Chinese and zen in Japanese. Emphasis on sitting meditation as the source of ultimate enlightenment is one feature of both Taoism and Buddhism that the poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih all share.

  The Lu-ch’iu Yin introduction also tells us that Han Shan lived intentionally on the edges of society and that, like a lot of people who live on its edges (religious seekers, artists of all kinds, even literary translators), Han Shan had what amounts to a day job. The poems show us a man who’d rather be sitting or re-creating his insights and inspirations in poetry to share with friends, or, like a bodhisattva, with all sentient beings. But, being a human in a body, Han Shan came from time to time to Kuo-ch’ing Temple to pick up a little work. If you’re going to spend time in the hills prospecting for something worth more than gold, you need a grubstake. You need to buy a few supplies, salt and oil, onions, a few pounds of rice. Though stories tell of hermits living on dew and sunlight, they also tell of hermits who pull their caves shut behind them. Those who tried the dew and sunlight diet most likely didn’t thrive. So our outsider Han Shan came, when he ran out of grub, to a monastery. On the way in and the way out, except when being pursued by gawking monks and pilgrims and meddling authorities, he visited with the local farmers. We’ll see in the poems that he had a familiar and sympathetic relationship with farmers and farming. He left poems in repayment for their shelter and gifts.

  So, despite the exaggerations, the tall tale gives us a pretty realistic picture of a hermit-poet. My personal guess about the real origin of the Han Shan poetry is this: The poetry of the many hermits who lived o
n Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and Han Yen (Cold Cliff), two real locations in the T’ien-t’ai Range, was becoming famous well before anyone thought to pull all the poems together. The T’ien-t’ai Range was home to many temples and places of pilgrimage, and even today, or again today, cliffs in the area are adorned with poems both brush written and stone incised. Some of the best of the latter are the sources of the rubbings mentioned above. It’s quite possible that Shan Han Shih (Han Shan’s Poems) originally meant the poems written or displayed at Han Shan, rather than poems by a poet named Han Shan. I doubt anyone will pin Han Shan down any further than he has been at this point, either through good scholarship (the scholars agree that there are at least two Han Shans) or through educated guessing like mine. But there is a little more to be said about the poetry of Han Shan as it has come down to us.

  Among these poems are many that appear to come from the best poetry of mountain hermits of Taoist, Buddhist, and maybe even free-agent mystics, with a sprinkling of more orthodox Buddhist work and some poems on themes appropriate to all three Chinese religions. For, as the Chinese have liked to say for millennia, “The three Ways are one.” Among the works of Han Shan, along with the mountain poems, are a few very fine poems of traditional Confucian rural retirement and a few that are modeled on the best of the Taoist epicurean poems. There are also a few poems that fairly unconvincingly claim familiarity with or achievement in the cultural accomplishments of the Confucian, even of military men. Add a few bits of moral exhortation, some of which are very funny and clearly intended to be so, and some of which are not, and you have the Han Shan collection, 307 poems in the Chinese collection and 311 in the Japanese.

  If there was something like a conspiracy to package these poems and present them as the work of a bodhisattva, I gratefully accept the gift. If the fractal and chaotic workings of human history (or pure accident, if you prefer) have been the only source of this great collection of poetry, I gratefully accept that miracle as well. My own selection was guided, frankly, almost entirely by my own taste. That is, I translated the poems I like the best, of Han Shan as well as of Shih Te and Wang Fan-chih. I did try to show examples of every type of poem that didn’t bore me or go beyond my personal knowledge of Buddhist philosophy. There aren’t many of the last category, not because I’m an expert, but because, essentially, “deep” philosophy, of which there is much in other schools of Buddhism, just isn’t a Zen thing, and it certainly is not Han Shan’s thing.