A Brief History of Haiku (IV)

 What is a haiku?  

Two concepts that William Scott Wilson suggests underlie the nature of haiku are concepts from Zen Buddhism, which arrived in Japan in the 12th century A.D.  The first is "No depending on words or letters", the idea being "...not only the fewer words the better in true communication, but less of any physical material in any art would bring the mind into closer contact with the true spiritual or psychological intent of that art".  The second is "Directly pointing to the mind of man, which Wilson suggests "...meant getting away from wordiness and the "over-think" in general, relying more on intuition and practice than reasoning, and general emphasis on, again, simplicity and frankness."

So what is haiku?

Wilson states it well:

"Haiku is the poetry of simplicity and frankness, an almost wordless verse - the sound of an unstrung zither, in the parlance of Zen - that resolves the seeming paradox of Confucius' necessity of the knowledge of words, and Zen Buddhism's non-reliance on words and letters.  Haiku encapsulates the mundane and the ordinary, finding in them significance rather than meaning....to quote the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro "A pure experience", noting  "A truly pure experience has no meaning whatsoever.  It is simply a present consciousness of facts as they are."

This pure experience is the essence of haiku.  There is (very rarely) any judgement of the experience because if there were, it would become one of meaning rather than experience."

Or, as also quoted by Wilson and  provided by the late 19th century haiku poet Masaoka Shiki, was shasei, or "describing a living situation not unlike a photograph."

The idea of a photograph resonates with me: the concept that a photograph freezes a moment in time without necessarily any explanation of the photograph inherently existing. It just is, a visual spot in the time stream captured for us to see them as they are.

Think back to the haiku last week from Matsuo Basho:

古池や蛙飛び込む水の音

furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

Old pond,

frog leaps in,

water's sound.

If I close my eyes, I can see this scene perfectly: I have seen it 100 times walking along a creek edge or a pond. A frog leaping in is an unremarkable event, likely something we pass over looking at something else on our walk.  I can see it in my mind if I let myself drift for a minute.

A moment.  A point in time of images with sounds and smells, now frozen.  

A verbal photograph.

This is haiku.

Sources cited:

Wilson, William Scott.  A Beginner's Guide to Japanese Haiku:  Tuttle Publishing, New York:  2022.