A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings (Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka)

by Soiku Shigematsu (Translator), Soiku Shigematsu (Compiler), Robert Aitken (Foreword by)

Overview

One of the vital aspects of traditional Rinzai Zen koan study in Japan is jakugo, or capping-phrase exercises. When Zen students have attained sufficient mastery of meditation or concentration, they are given a koan (such as the familiar “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) to study. When the student provides a satisfactory response to the koan, he advances to the jakugo exercise–he must select a “capping phrase,” usually a passage from a poem among the thousands in a special anthology, the only book allowed in the monastery.

One such anthology, written entirely in Chinese, was translated by noted Zen priest and scholar Soiku Shigematsu as A Zen Forest: Sayings of the Masters. Equally important is a Japanese collection, the Zenrin Segoshu, which Mr. Shigematsu now translates from the Japanese, including nearly eight hundred poems in sparkling English versions that retain the Zen implications of the verse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865473287
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/01/1988
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	968,837
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Robert Aitken (1917-2010) was Roshi of the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu and the author of Taking the Path of Zen and The Mind of Clover. His introduction to Zen came in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, after he was captured as a civilian in Guam. R. H. Blyth, author of Zen in English Literature, was imprisoned in the same camp, and in this unlikely setting Aitken began the first of several important apprenticeships. After the war Aitken returned often to Japan to study. He became friends with D. T. Suzuki, and studied with Nagakawa Soen Roshi and Yasutani Hakuun Roshi. In 1959 Robert Aitken and his wife, Anne, established a Zen organization, the Diamond Sangha. Aitken was given the title "Roshi" and authorized to teach by Yamada Koun Roshi in 1974.

Read an Excerpt

A Zen Harvest

Japanese Folk Zen sayings Haiku, Dodoitsu, and Waka

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By Soiku Shigematsu

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 1988 Soiku Shigematsu
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86547-328-7

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INTRODUCTION

To me Zen is a bit like the mikan trees that grow in our temple orchard. The mikan is a kind of mandarin orange that we harvest in late autumn. Every year, I make it a rule to take my son, Sojun, into the orchard to let him learn something of Zen from mikan-picking. At this time of the year, all the mikan branches are heavy with ripe fruit. Just looking at them makes me restless. I feel as though it were my urgent business to release each tree from its heavy burden. The drooping branch is my drooping heart. It's not good for a burdened heart to bear any more than it has to. And like the bending mikan trees, the burden should not be carried indefinitely. Unload and just enjoy the freedom of it.

      How refreshing
    The whinny of a packhorse
      Unloaded of everything! (327)

As we set to work, each of us hangs from his shoulder a bamboo basket, into which we place the picked fruit. I say to Sojun, "Don't toss the fruit in so roughly. Be careful with it or you'll bruise it. It's as alive as we are, so treat it as carefully as you would your own eyeball, as Dogen Zenji says. Treat it roughly and watch its sweetness go. It'll lose its freshness and rot to spite you.

"And don't seal up that vinyl bag we put fruit in. See how damp the inside of the bag has become. That shows the fruit is breathing even after it's picked from the twig. Leave it open a little so the fruit can breathe. It's really like us that way.

"Do you know why this fruit is so green? It's because it didn't get enough sunshine. And why these pieces are so small? Because this tree's roots couldn't grow deep enough or spread wide enough through the soil. It needs more nourishment. Its puniness is its way of asking for help. Let's listen to its voiceless words. We've got to cultivate the earth more deeply around these trees."

Sometimes when Sojun thinks he's finished a tree, I say, "You think you're done, but I can see some pieces still left hanging. There! Over there! Yes, that one near the top hidden behind the leaves. It's not easy to see. Another's down there below that branch. You can see it better from this angle. Come over here, you can see it clearly." My talk goes on like this in the mikan orchard.

This is the Zen priest in me speaking, suggesting that with a slight shift in the angle of vision, some bit of truth shows itself of its own accord. Sticking to one angle is the worst thing: flexibility is all. Zen, like the mikan tree, should be approached from various viewpoints.

In the following, I shall introduce Japanese folk Zen sayings, according to three fundamental angles of vision:

(1) Zen Universalism

(2) Zen Individualism

(3) Zen Vitalism.

To these, I wish to add another important aspect of Zen, which present-day people might call:

(4) Zen Ecology.

But, before we start, let's take a quick look at the historical aspect of the Zen sayings that comprise this anthology.

* * *

One of the most vital parts of traditional koan study as practiced in the Rinzai Zen monasteries of Japan has been jakugo or capping-phrase exercises.

The first thing every newcomer to the zendo (meditation hall) has to do is become used to sitting in concentration without any physical or mental disturbance. Once this is accomplished, the student is given a koan such as the well-known "What is the sound of one hand (clapping)?" by the roshi (Zen master). After this the student devotes all his or her energy to this koan, a question that cannot be dealt with by intellectual analysis. This study often takes a long time, but when at last an appropriate response has been successfully offered and confirmed, the student can move on to the next step in the process — the jakugo exercise. That is, the student is required to pick out the most appropriate capping phrase, usually a passage in a poem from among thousands in a special anthology, that best explains the physical-and-mental state the student has reached.

In the zendo, no books are allowed except this anthology, a capping-phrase book. Every student is expected to keep at least one copy of such an anthology, usually inside a sleeve of his or her monk's robe to be read through again and again. Zen students find this exercise really useful, even inevitable, because of the help it provides them in clarifying their views of each koan. By practicing this exercise, students naturally learn the handbook sayings by heart, and this constitutes the basic culture of Zen people while it also fosters a penetrating eye for classic Zen texts.

But more important, this exercise is a paradoxical attempt, within a spiritual discipline that normally eschews dependence on language, to express the unexplainable Zen experience poetically. Thus it serves as an invaluable bridge connecting two seemingly incompatible worlds: the world of literature and the unexplainable world of Zen experience.

Compiled in the late fifteenth century by the Japanese Zen master, Toyo Eicho (1428–1504), the Zenrin Kushu (Zen Forest Saying Anthology) is the time-honored capping-phrase book. This collection of Zen phrases and sayings was plucked from a variety of Chinese sources, not all of which are specifically Buddhist. Besides such Zen classics as The Blue Cliff Records and The Gateless Gate, Toyo drew from the Confucian Analects, T'ang and Sung poetry, and many other Chinese sources. So far as traditional koan study is concerned, the Zenrin Kushu, the essence of Zen literature, serves the student as an authentic map of the main road to Zen.

Another handbook, the Zenrin Segoshu (Folk Zen Saying Anthology) was compiled to meet the demands of those who find the Zenrin Kushu difficult to read because its entries are written entirely in Chinese.

Since Chinese characters were introduced to Japan as early as the fourth century, the Japanese share a vast written vocabulary with the Chinese people. For the Japanese to absorb these Chinese ideographs it was, of course, necessary to fit them into the context of their own language. The principal adjustment was one of word order. Thus, despite the similar appearance of the two written languages, they are fundamentally different.

Quite naturally, as Zen became popular among laymen who knew only Japanese, the Japanese Zen masters and priests had to create a new literary tradition. Although they continued to write poems and sermons in classical Chinese, the traditional written language of Japanese Zen Buddhism, the practice of writing the words of the Dharma in their native language gradually became increasingly common among Zen teachers in Japan. Those who were good poets have not only extended the Buddhist world but have simultaneously enriched the body of Japanese literature.

The Zenrin Segoshu is thus a collection of Japanese tanka (waka), haiku (hokku), and other short traditional Japanese literary forms suitable for practicing the capping-phrase exercise. Some entries are the waka of famous Japanese Zen masters such as Dogen (1200–53), Ikkyu (1394–1481), Bunan (1603–76), Hakuin (1685–1768), and Ryokan (1757–1831). Others are by lay students such as Miyamoto Musashi (?–1645), the famous swordsman and author of The Book of Five Rings, or Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), a well-known intellectual and leader of an agricultural movement. And a number of the haiku are by Japan's greatest poets: Basho (1644–94), Buson (1718–83), Issa (1763–1827), as well as lesser known authors.

The dodoitsu, another major Japanese poetic form (though little known abroad), is also represented in this anthology. It is a sort of popular song that originated in the entertainment quarters of nineteenth-century Japan. The themes of these songs are generally amorous and the composers wrote them with no Zen intention at all. But, quite curiously, many of them suggest a good deal about Zen, and that is why so many dodoitsu were selected to illustrate Zen points of view.

While it is true that the didactic poems by Zen masters are impressive and have contributed to the illumination of many Zen students, some readers may find the real gems of the collection to be the secular sayings by ordinary people, who devoted their brief lives to the transient whims of this ephemeral world. Behind their laughter and complaints, we can hear their authentic human voices. The Zenrin Segoshu is, so to speak, a storehouse of poems of enlightenment through unenlightenment.

1. ZEN UNIVERSALISM

Shakyamuni abandoned his wife, son, and the Capila Castle at the age of twenty-nine. He could have enjoyed his happy, secular life as a prince of the Shakya clan, were it not for the doubts that grew gradually and secretly in the depth of his heart. One day, the story goes, he was out in his chariot when he happened to meet successively an old man, a sick man, and a corpse. Seeing in them the human sufferings of old age, sickness, and death, Shakyamuni came to realize fully the inevitable facts and uncertainties of life. Every existence, once it comes into being, changes and dies. Nothing in the world remains constant. What Shakyamuni sought was the unchangeable truth behind these ephemeral phenomena. So, cutting all secular bonds, he left home. This is the story of his "great renunciation."

To recognize the impermanence of existence is the beginning of self-realization.

      Young and old —
    Whoever they are —
      Their bodies are
    More fragile than the dew
    On the morning glory. (105)

      Now, now,
    This now is
      A time for good-bye;
    Disappearing like the dew
    My life, your life. (67)

Human life, as the Japanese commonplace expresses it, is as fleeting as dew. It disappears in the twinkling of an eye. This bitterest of truths to which we must resign ourselves is the major theme of the Zenrin Segoshu.

Life is transient. It has no entity. Every existence is merely a temporary compound of elements.

      Where and what is
    "I"?
      It's only
    A temporary ball of
    Earth-water-fire-wind. (50)

These four elements just happened to gather themselves into that karmic "ball," which constitutes our "self." When they come apart, we must depart — into the original Void.

      Pull and bind the sheaves
    Of grass together:
      There's a grass hut.
    Untie them and, there,
    The original field. (535)

Behind all illusory phenomena, the original Nothing prevails.

      When the lantern goes out,
    Where, I wonder, does
      Its light go?
    Darkness is my own
    Original house. (408)

"Hello, darkness my old friend/I've come to talk with you again," goes Paul Simon's song, "The Sound of Silence." "Country roads, take me home to the place I belong," sings John Denver. These two American popular singers recall, in their own kind of "waka," the place where we finally return. All individual lives — grass, fish, dog, mankind — dissolve and vanish soon enough into the Darkness. Yes, we return home to the void, the universe, the whole. It is Nothing, our original home, from which we have come.

To reach it is the way to Nirvana. By denying our "self" we become Nothing, and cosmic consciousness arises.

      What is
    Mind like,
      I wonder.
    Its invisible, and
    As large as the universe. (262)

Now, we are the universe itself.

      A hand-rolled
    Dumpling of
      Heaven-and-earth:
    I've gulped it down
    And easily it went. (397)

      I've thrust away
    The man who gulped the dumpling
      Of heaven-and-earth
    With the
    Tip of my eyelash. (398)

This cosmic consciousness provokes a kind of optimism, in which every distinction is blotted out. Individuality is meaningless. Seeing all in oneness is our goal here.

      Life and death in
    This passing world —
      See through them
    And they're like
    Ice and water. (39)

It makes no more sense grieving over death than it does birth because they are one thing from the viewpoint of this Universalism. Fortune and misfortune are one and the same. Gain and loss, good and bad, love and hatred, young and old, rich and poor — all are one. Absolute Oneness dominates this world.

      Rain, hail,
    Snow, ice:
      All different, but
    They finally meld into
    One valley stream. (19)

Viewed from this universal perspective, man is a mere "temporary ball," a speck of dust in this boundless cosmos. Life disappears so quickly that any sense of "self" is mere deception.

    Loved wife, hated husband
    In the end,
    Under a mossy tomb,
      Both skulls. (324)

How odd T. S. Eliot's Prufrock is! "Do I dare?" "Do I dare?" Why hesitate? What is the self you cling to so anxiously, Prufrock?

      Just put off
    Attachment
      From your mind:
    This world is
    Paradise. (117)

Zen reveals itself in subtle ways when our nihilism reaches its darkest depths.

2. ZEN INDIVIDUALISM

Returning from the Original Nothing — the world of no entity, no individuality — here we must meet a second aspect of Zen.

      The One Mind
    Of heaven and earth
      Is dyed into
    A thousand different
    Grass colors. (23)

This is it. The "One Mind" reveals itself in "a thousand different grass colors." Out of it come respectively animals, fish, worms, trees, rocks — and human beings, too. Here, individuality counts for something and difference is admired.

Of course, some are wise and some are otherwise. Everything enjoys its own originality. In this way each phenomenon becomes a koan.

      In spring, flowers;
    Summer, cuckoos;
      Autumn, moon.
    In winter, snow is
    Chilling and cool. (528)

With such diversity, everything becomes our teacher. So long as we are selfless, each being reveals its own secret to us. In this sense Zen students are like ecologists whose understanding of organisms is through their interrelationships with others.

Each existence in this world is the one-and-only piece of work by the "One Mind," that is, the whole universe.

      All heaven and earth
    Have worked out
      This single buttercup:
    Surely it will go on
    Age after age. (24)

One buttercup opens as a result of an infinite accumulation of causes and effects from time immemorial.

That the whole universe is a void is not to deny it is also an apparatus of the highest intricacy and sophistication. Everything is most elaborately created through incredibly complex networks of interdependence such as the food chains.

      Horse dung originates in
    The pampas grass — on
      The hills and fields — which
    Once gave shelter to
    Chirping grasshoppers. (90)

In perfect ecological harmony, each being shining bright because everything is unique.

    Winds play the shamisen,
    Leaves flutter and dance,
    Dawn crows
      Start singing. (165)

Winds, leaves, crows — each one is doing its own original job, and all are in perfect harmony at the same time.

This is the view of Zen Individualism. It is individualism supported by Zen Universalism. Needless to say, it is quite different from egotism or isolationism.

      My body is given up,
    Cast away,
      Zero.
    But on snowy nights
    I feel chilly. (86)

Having abandoned myself, I am Nothing and have no senses. Nevertheless, I'm cold on snowy nights. Why?

      I know well enough these
    Cherry blossoms will
      Return to dust, but I
    Find it hard to leave
    The trees in full bloom. (482)

Though I understand that every existence is without entity, from the bottom of my heart, I love and cling to these cherry flowers in full bloom. Why?

We go on denying our "self" — making ourselves into Nothing: this is Zen Universalism. From there we have returned with a particular kind of self-affirmation that sees everything with innocent eyes again. John Steinbeck, no more consciously a Buddhist than the anonymous composers of dodoitsu, put it this way:

    It is advisable to look
    From the tide pool
    To the stars and then
      Back to the tide pool again.

"Back to the tide pool again." Yes! This tide pool, here and now, is where Zen people live, treasuring each and every moment as a priceless jewel.

      Never, never
    Neglect your life though it's
      Temporary:
    Your present life, fleeting,
    Is the only one that's yours. (184)

This is Zen Individualism.

3. ZEN VITALISM

In Zen, vitality is highly admired.

    Walking is Zen:
      sitting, too.

Zazen is not everything. Releasing the inner vitality each being possesses originally is the vitalism of Zen.

      Be thoroughly,
    Dead
      While alive!
    Do just as you wish:
    All you do is best. (40)

This saying does not recommend suicide. Every Zen student must free himself from his superficial self. We must extinguish it completely if we are to follow our original Self and so live consentaneously with truth.

Universalism is expressed in the first and second lines, and Individualism in the third and fourth: both are animated into Vitalism in the fourth and fifth. These three aspects, seen from three different angles of vision, eventually resolve into a single, original truth: Zen Universal-Individual-Vitalism.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Zen Harvest by Soiku Shigematsu. Copyright © 1988 Soiku Shigematsu. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Foreword by Robert Aitken,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction by Soiku Shigematsu,
Japanese Folk Zen Sayings,
Notes,
Index of First Lines,
About the Authors,
Copyright,