July Haiku

even one-penny
fireworks...
ooo! ahh!

Issa


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Inevitable Spring

The warbler
wipes its muddy feet
on plum blossoms

–Issa


(Plum Garden, Kamata, by Utagawa Hiroshige, courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

Autumn Valediction

to passing autumn
the pampas grass waves
goodbye, goodbye

Shirao

Curriculum Vitae

No board, no checkers
Calligraphy worth nothing
Round-eyed hermit monk

Poem: The Frog Sutra

Could they be sutras?
In the temple well
frogs chant

Kansetsu


(POV photo of well courtesy of Gary Meulemans and Unsplash.com.)

Poem: The Sound Of Colour

Winter solitude—
In a world of one colour
The sound of wind.

Bashō

Trash Talk

In killing my Self
The monster is defeated
Eat my Zen, dickweed


("Enrag'd Monster" courtesy of John Hamilton Mortimer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Grass Haiku

Sitting quietly.
Not giving a single fuck.
Grass grows by itself.

– Posted online by a fellow Zen hermit; identity unknown.


(Photo courtesy of Anis Ur Rahman and Wikimedia Commons.)

North Coast Christmas Meditation

the mountain hermit's
fire is rising
winter rain

Issa

(Photo courtesy of Edal Anton Lefterov and Wikimedia Commons.)

Remembering Ango

Today's top headline:
"Free-range Buddhist Eaten By
Health-Conscious Cougar."

– Haiku written eleven years ago, in anticipation of my 100 Days on the Mountain.

(Photo of Katsushika Hokusai painting courtesy of the British Museum and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Long Game

The final line first
Flow most gracefully when you write
As in life, haikus


(Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, courtesy of Rawpixel.com.)

WW: New Year's Day

a good world
even from the quince thicket:
"Happy New Year!"

Issa

Autumn Anatta

Leaves fall gently down
Like rain into autumn pools
Who writes this bullshit?



(Photo courtesy of Robert Wnuk and Unsplash.com.)

The Easter Effect

spring breeze...
packed with people
the mountain temple

Issa

(Photo courtesy of Maria Yamaguchi and Wikimedia Commons.)

Seedling Year

just a foot long, but it'll do
New Year's pine

Issa















(Pine Tree by Pan Dawei courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

The Ride

Down the banister
The wild schoolboy I was slides
To enlightenment


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Issa Nails The Thing

Kobayashi Issa is my all-time favourite poet. Regular readers will find this tediously typical, for though he's one of Japan's Four Great Haiku Masters, Issa is not "the Zen one". (That would be Bashō. I like Bashō too, but he doesn't "hit" nearly as often as Issa.)

Issa annoys modern Zen on many levels. He was ordained in the Jōdo-shū sect, a Pure Land Buddhist denomination that Zenners (including myself) find a bit futile. Worse yet, he was a hermit, and on the contemporary model: he had a family, and socketed his stick dead-centre of the Red Dust World.

Yet his descriptions of hermit practice, and his distillations of eremitical insight, are the most concise, most incisive, and most accurate I've found.

Witness his most famous lines, written hours after his baby daughter died:

This world of dew
Is a world of dew
And yet.
And yet.

That simply can't be improved. If you take anything out, it falls short. If you put anything in, it collapses.

Non-Buddhists may miss the sad satire here. Our teachers often compare human existence (mistakenly but universally called "the world") to dew: it comes from nowhere, sparkles for minutes, and goes back to nowhere. Attachment to same – craving permanence in the eternally temporary – is the origin of suffering.

Accepting this sets us up for cushion error: proudly declaring that we're liberated, because we know the truth.

And yet.
And yet.

Starting to get why this middle-aged suburban church-boy so troubles Zenners?

He's also easy-going, an affront to Zen's samurai puritanism, and accepting of his own nature. His perspective is, in short, eremitical.

Exhibit B:

Napped half the day
no one
punished me.

On the eremitical path, you do what practice suggests. This is different from monastery life, where you do what order demands, what tradition demands, sometimes what the current master demands, whether it makes sense or not.

Life inside requires that kind of discipline; life outside, another kind. Issa's poem suggests that on this day, this was the right call.

And as always, his trademark self-mockery. "If only I were half the monk I claim to be."

Word.

Note the same theme, with a different conclusion, here:

Napping at midday
I hear the song of rice planters
and feel ashamed of myself.

And then there's me on ango:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

And what of those elegant Zen dilettantes, as hip in the West today as they were in 18th century Japan?

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

I gotta stop there or I'll copy and paste every poem my brother ever wrote. (I've literally never found one – not one – that isn't my favourite.) If these crumbs have whetted your appetite, you may binge at will here.

OK, one more. Until next week, here's Issa's take on being a haikunist. (Essentially, the blogger of his time and place.)

Pissing in the snow
outside my door
it makes a very straight hole.

(Photo of Kobayashi Issa's monument courtesy of 震天動地 and Wikimedia Commons.)

Seasonal Practice

Raked with great effort
I lost my piles. I found them
Beneath fallen leaves


(Feuilles d'automne [1909], by Jean Philippe Edouard Robert, courtesy of Herr Auktionen and Wikimedia Commons.)

Past Life Haiku

Before this life, what?
Sitting, I see my last face:
Cartoon character

(Impression of "un loco a secas" courtesy of El Filoloco and Wikimedia Commons.)

Sound of the Season

Twelfth Month singers
seven feet away
a little one sings

Issa


(1880 American Christmas card courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)