HAIKU
ENLIGHTENMENT
Part 1
The dynamic pause. In haiku, we pause for a
few concentrated seconds. Not to escape from the helter-skelter -- or tedium --
of existence but to enter into the life of things in a dynamic way.
The haiku moment refreshes us, focuses, strengthens and encourages us to
continue on a pathless path which reveals itself uniquely to us all:
midstream halt -
the horseman looks up
at the falling stars
H F Noyes
These pauses ground us in the mystery of being as we open ourselves to new
vistas. They allow us to be attuned to the rhythm, colour, sound and dynamic of
life, from season to season, whoever, whatever or wherever we are.
Touch and savour. The haiku bids us to savour phenomena:
autumn -
now the slow bee allows
stroking of fur
George Marsh
Momentous events often appear small, insignificant happenings take on a new and
delicate meaning for the reader and writer of haiku. The jaded palate finds that
what it longs for is not the sweet, the sour, the piquant or the robust but the
possibility of all of these and more, the coolness of water, the headiness of
wine, the comfort of old port. Many unexpected pleasures await those who stroll
on the haiku path. Many contradictions, many odd juxtapositions await. And haiku
will resolve them, make everything whole again.
Haiku is the great reviver of the senses, senses governed by enlightened
insight. In the above haiku, the shift of attention is to the bee. It is as if
the bee slows down, for our sake, to appreciate it -- to see it -- in a new
mood, a new light. Its summer of antics is all over. We are invited to savour
another dynamic, one as real as that which went before and that which is yet to
come. All of nature, and our own, comes alive. The microscopic focus of the
haiku reveals the inner order and beauty of existence, over and over again. We
cannot tire of good haiku. It is a distillation of all that is real in life. It
is, as you will see, an elixir of enlightenment, always available.
The naturalness of it all. Our last pause will be death. For the haikuist, death
is another perfectly natural phenomenon, not something divorced from life or
signifying its end:
necklace of bone.
ants have finished
with the snake
Margaret Manson
Many haikuists have written until their very last breath. Death-bed haiku of
haijin (masters) -- such as Shiki -- are justly famous. We can be in awe of
anything, even our own demise. Everything is of cosmic magnitude, here and now.
F Scott Fitzgerald says in The Great Gatsby:
Life is much more successfully
looked at from a single window.
The haikuist would not argue with
that.
Effortless
attunement. By working at haiku and by living haiku -- through
reading and composition and through acquiring the haiku instinct, or knack -
effortless attunement is the natural and inevitable result. This ability becomes
the unfailing groundwork for sudden enlightenment. It can repeat itself --
over days, over centuries. David Burleigh published this haiku in 1998:
trapped inside a pot
at the bottom of the sea
the octopus dreams
Basho wrote the following in May, 1688:
octopus traps -
fleeting dreams beneath
a summer moon
This may be mere coincidence, or it may be evidence of the cosmic mind at work,
or it could be an example of honkadori, allusive variation. If so, hunkey
dorey!
Mr. Burleigh kindly responded to an enquiry by stating that it did, in fact,
allude to Basho's verse in the Travel-Worn Satchel but that his own haiku
was inspired by the confined space of urban living.
Confined no longer! Each successful haiku is
a breath of freedom. The seventeen syllable, traditional form was adjudged to be
a breath span. And, just as Keats said that poetry should come as naturally as
foliage to a tree, or not at all, so we say that haiku is an exhalation, a
breath of freedom, a sigh.
It is a plunge. In the way of haiku, we cannot know what is next to be revealed.
We are not soothsayers. Nor do we dabble in magic. What will be the next haiku
moment? Anticipation is foolish. Each moment is as unique as your fingerprints,
your iris, and as fleeting as your breath. The haiku moment will not happen
without you. You must be there for it to happen. And it occurs in such an
intense, pure form that it appears to have happened without you. That brief,
piercing insight, that moment of haiku enlightenment, has stripped you of the
thousand items that are the jig-saw of your ego. Then we're back again in the
duality of the world and its routines. But we know that another surprise awaits
around the corner, whatever it may be.
The surprise of unity. Everything about our
existence seems fractured from the time our umbilical cord is cut. But haiku
offers us a direct route towards unity. It is put well by Jonathan Clemens, in The
Moon in the Pines (Frances Lincoln Limited,2000):
Haiku seeks, in a handful of
words, to crystallize an instant in all its fullness, encouraging through the
experience of the moment the union of the reader with all existence. The reader
side-steps conventional perception, startled into a momentary but full
understanding of the poet's experience. By locking reader and poet into the same
reality, haiku helps us perceive the ultimate unity of all realities.
The aliveness of haiku is one of
its most remarkable gifts:
everything I pick up
is alive -
ebb tide
(Chiyo-ni: Woman Haiku Master, Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi,
Tuttle 1998)
Newness and aliveness. Haiku practise leads
to a feeling of newness and aliveness. Can one feel enlightenment? Let us be a
little inscrutable about this and say that feelings may or may not be part of
the experience. Sudden enlightenment is a liberation - from feelings, from
cognition. Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists
enlightenment as 'the state of being in harmony with the laws of the universe'
(Taoism) and also 'the realization of ultimate universal truth' (Buddhism).
Haiku practise is not at variance with these goals. And here is a lovely
Christian manifestation of haiku truth:
April snow-
the lightness of the Host
in my hand
Adele Kenny
(Frogpond, No. 3, 1998)
This particular haikuist is a member of the Secular Franciscan order and
believes that writing haiku means
. . . using words reverently to
express the sacredness of God's universe - in moments of isolation, in moments
of communion - alone and yet united with the Creator and with all creation.
(ibid.)
And this creation that we speak of
is everything, not just mountains, rivers and deserts:
I sleep. I wake.
how wide
the bed with none beside
Chiyo, 1703-1775*
Creation is presence - and absence too:
Autumn - I look at the moon
without a child
on my knee
Onitsura
It is meeting, and parting:
I have got to know
the scarecrow
but now we must part
Izen
It is not one thing, but many things together, in a strange harmony which the
haikuist intuits:
night disappears
behind the mountain -
deer's bellowing
Kyokusi
It is fierce:
the autumn squall
blows the eagle
over the edge of the crag
Ryota
It is gentle:
mist about the grass,
rain silent,
evening calm
Buson
It is holy:
putting his hands together -
frog
reciting a poem
Sokan
*(The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, ed. Faubion Bowers, Dover
1996)
The haiku highwayman: He will stop us again
on the road, take our clothes, our money, our watch, our identity papers,
leaving us dumbfounded, looking around like a newly born. He gives us time to
wonder at our nakedness, at the universe, to look at the sky, at the moon, for
the first time. Then he throws everything back at us again, laughingly. And as
we pick ourselves together, we know the world has changed. We have changed.
End Part 1. The next 5
installations of Haiku Enlightenment
will in subsequent issues of World Haiku Review.
Next:
Tasting Vintage Haiku of Gabriel Rosenstock
