Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa

Pure Land Haiku: The Art of Priest Issa

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I leave it all to Buddha, as in the ancient story. The way ahead may be dangerous, steep as snowy trails winding through high mountains. Nevertheless I welcome the New Year just as I am. David Lanoue, whose Haiku Guy website on Issa is perhaps the best internet resource, puts it this way:. His vision is unpretentious, blunt, non-censoring and, often, tongue-in-cheek, as any random sampling of his many thousands of verses attests.

Issa, I think, would approve of this perception, since he forged it with the aggressive persistence of a Hollywood publicist. This is not to say that his poetic persona is false or not representative of the real man. I am only suggesting that we should keep in mind that our image of Issa is a consciously designed literary construct. I enjoyed his openness in sharing thoughts and feelings.

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I add to the quasi-fictional information with research excursions into biographies and history. So by no means is this essay to be viewed a scholarly treatment. I gratefully leave that to scholars and translators. A spiritual quest forms the basis for the journal. Initially, he states his feelings about the falseness and materialism of Japanese holidays:. The answer is, of course, no. Like all texts, hokku survive the demise of the events that produced them, taking on a different life. The internet can be a rich source of contextual information. The gods are said to descend from the heavens and dwell in the earthly realm for three days, after which time the decorations are burnt, releasing the spirits back to their realm.

A second prose theme in Oraga Haru alludes to the difficulties of the path Issa has chosen:. I live in a tiny cottage that might be swept away at any moment by a blast from the wild north wind. I will leave all to Buddha, and though the path ahead be difficult and steep, like a snow-covered road winding through the mountains, I welcome the New Year — even as I am. Again, context is important, but not essential. This passage serves as a preface to the start of his travel as a spiritual journey and, as we learn as we read further in his journal, to the difficulties that he is likely to encounter.

Indeed, the journey was so trying, he considered turning back many times. A haiku that indicates his feelings about the suffering he witnessed and about the indifference of those better off is:. The haiku is perhaps an apt depiction of first-world readers who are likely to understand such wholesale suffering only from a distance. Yes, some of us contribute funds, encourage foreign aid, adopt children, sponsor various development missions, help build schools, fund medical teams and contribute to food banks.

In the next passage, Issa shifts from his negative attitudes about the rituals to the family gatherings surrounding those rituals. Here he expresses his joy of seeing his young daughter explore the world. And again, context lends further understanding: For us, the rice cake offered to his daughter would be viewed as a sparse and inexpensive celebration treat.

After all, our typical holiday banquets consist of abundant spreads of sumptuous foods and our problem is obesity, not near starvation. As for the seeming incongruence about his daughter having been born only the previous May and yet being two years old, traditionally in many Asian cultures, babies are considered one year old when they are born.

Inclusive Jodo Shinshu and the skillful use of expedient means

About this, Lanoue writes: This year, Issa vows to do otherwise. I was enchanted, for example, when my young daughters, dressed as elves, delivered the gifts handed to them by my father-in-law, dressed as Santa. It is practiced today with ritualistic splendour.

Here Issa is sharing his delight in watching a crow enjoy a bath in a rain puddle. And who among us has not enjoyed watching birds sparrows, jays, robins in my backyard enjoying puddles and even dust baths? In my culture, the crow is considered by many to be a noisy, invasive pest, and in a mythical or superstitious sense, a harbinger of bad news or even death. In China and Japan, for example, the crow has a positive mythology: If one passes through it, one is protected from infectious diseases. In this haiku, both a crow and a nightingale pass through, suggesting that the hoop welcomes both commoners crows and nobility nightingales.

He is simply looking both inward and outward, mingling memory with perception. Earlier cultural narratives infiltrate his consciousness and join with the immediate impressions of his five senses, producing haiku in which past stories and present situations seamlessly combine. Paying attention to this aspect of Issa can lead to an insight that might be helpful for haiku poets today: In a sense, such poetry exists in the interval between the past and now. As I made my way through Oraga Haru , I realised increasingly that while some contextual detail may increase appreciation, it may be that a single introductory passage from a lengthy travel journal would be better understood as part of a whole, just as with the opening pages of a novel where there is much to follow.

The entire work should be read to gain a better appreciation for the man, his times and his writing style. His story feels real. As Woodward has stated: This should come as no surprise to writers of haibun, with its emphasis on reportage and storytelling. To have our stories evoke the sentiments we wish them to convey, we select facts, pay attention to sequencing and use language with care in an attempt to make them interesting and poetic.

He knows how to turn a phrase. His passage contains bits of philosophising, his feelings about certain cultural practices and Buddhist philosophy as well as allusions to literature: As written, the mix feels like what I expect in a contemporary haibun. It might have been written today! Issa does not write like contemporary haiku poets; contemporary haiku poets, the best of them, write like Issa. I corresponded on this issue with Jeffrey Woodward and he offered the following in an email correspondence:.

These poetic places offer a chronological sequence in his visitation and allusion based on the poems previously composed about them.

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The very absence of any such convention in the UK or North America, of poetic places with conventional associations based upon the poems composed there, is one reason that travel haibun in English are so often impoverished. The repetition of major motifs, with variations, is what makes the chaotic surface phenomena cohere at the deeper level. Can a lay exploration be of use to other writers new to haibun who will also hear about the masters and wonder about their approach to haibun?

I came to realise that most haiku are not readily appreciated with a quick reading, nor even, as some have suggested, through several readings aloud. Of course, the work of scholars is critical to guiding us to a deep understanding of a work, but often their writing is lengthy, academic and jargon prone.

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As such, it fails to engage on an intuitive level. Thus, as has often been asserted, the scholars may be mostly speaking among themselves. In an editorial in Haibun Today , Jeffrey Woodward has commented on the need for a critical literature on English-language haibun:. I would agree that two levels of literary criticism are essential — that done by scholars and translators, and that done by contemporary readers and writers.

Today there is a world of resources on the internet, widespread availability of inexpensive books, and increasingly rich resources found in our own haiku-genre journals to assist us in doing so. Reading haiku and haibun is, after all, an acquired skill — one that has to be worked at.

We turn to these poems not to discover the past but to experience the present more deeply. In this way, they satisfy the test of all great literature, for it is our own lives we find illuminated in them. He speaks to me through his writing and accompanies me on my walks.

Finished for the day, I don snowshoes and come across numerous tracks: During the following years, he wandered through Japan and fought over his inheritance with his stepmother his father died in He wrote a diary, now called Last Days of Issa's Father. After years of legal wrangles, Issa managed to secure rights to half of the property his father left.

He returned to his native village at the age of 49 [7] and soon took a wife, Kiku. After a brief period of bliss, tragedy returned. The couple's first-born child died shortly after his birth.

A daughter died less than two-and-a-half years later, inspiring Issa to write this haiku translated by Lewis Mackenzie:. A third child died in Then Kiku fell ill and died in As a big fire swept the post station of Kashiwabara on July 24, , according to the Western calendar. Issa lost his house and had to live in his storehouse, which is still kept in the town.

Kobayashi Issa

Of this same fire, he wrote: He died on November 19, , in his native village. Since the Tenth Year of Bunsei roughly corresponds with , many sources list this as his year of death. Issa wrote over 20, haiku, which have won him readers up to the present day. Though his works were popular, he suffered great monetary instability. Despite a multitude of personal trials, his poetry reflects a childlike simplicity, making liberal use of local dialects and conversational phrases, and 'including many verses on plants and the lower creatures.

Issa wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly on frogs, about on the firefly, more than on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures'. Issa, 'with his intense personality and vital language [and] shockingly impassioned verse Issa was also known for his drawings, generally accompanying haiku: Issa's sketches are valued for the extremity of their abbreviation, in keeping with the idea of haiku as a simplification of certain types of experience.

One of Issa's haiku, as translated by R.

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