Basho Matsuo
i m writing an Introductory Chapter: Dear Hermits with Love. i have written about Chomei Kamo, Marco Polo, Basho Matsuo, I. Newton, L. Descartes, L. Feuerbach, and Kumagusu Minamikata. i wish you to know about Japanese traditional thinking and practicing "Wabi" or "Sabi". then i will post a part of Basho Matsuo among the "Dear Hermits with Love". Intoroductory Chapter Dear Hermits with Love Basho’s thought of secluded life Basho Matsuo (1644-1694 Japanese)was a Japanese poet “HAIKU” which should have 5, 7 and 5 Japanese syllables necessarily including a word to hint a season and is a poetic mode of the shortest poem in the world. A set of 5, 7 and 5 syllables in Japanese seems to be accorded to rhyming in English. At the same time, he was an advocate of a Japanese taste of “WABI” by which might be meant “the sense of beauty (aesthetics) to be found in poverty and simplicity; subdued taste; quiet refinement; sober refinement”. He was a founder and a great master of the HAIKU who enhanced to an art from what used to have been just a play of word among the common populace. Basho was like Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591), founding master of “Tea Ceremony” which was enhanced from common way of drinking green tea to an artistic mode of drinking ground Green Tea which was called WABI and SABI. There is nobody of Japanese who does not know about his name “Basho”. Taking for example, I will illustrate a Bsho’s HAIKU which is one of most famous ones: “An old pond A frog jumps in A splash of water” (translated by Inazo Nitobe (1866-1933) an author of “BUSHIDO―The Soul of Japan 1898) Herein, his thinking mode of WABI is condensed. He did not only refine the thinking mode of WABI but also practiced it. It was like that Kamo no Chomei was not only an advocate of the traditional thinking mode of SHOGYO-MUJO (all worldly things will be transitory by themselves) but a practitioner of it. He travelled fundamentally walking sometimes hiring a horse, with Kikaku only together as a follower, one of his pupils around TOHOKU districts and the mid portion of Honshu Island of Japan which coincidently covered the areas where the 11/iii/11 great earthquakes and tsunami took place, when he was 46 years old. It was 5 years before he died. It amounted to 2400 kilometers and 5 months travelling. This travel also was so humble that it symbolizes and presents his WABI opinion. He wrote a travel diary “Oku no Hosomichi” (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), beginning with a famous phrase “The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them” (translated by Donald Keene: “Bash?, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches”. Intro. and trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa. London: Penguin Books (Penguin Classics), 1966). Basho used to live with Nun Jutei who presumably had been his common-law wife. The descriptions around Nun Jutei are so few that the relation between Basho and Nun Jutei has been controversial and totally unclear. Nun Jutei who had been separated from Basho for unknown reason now suffered from serious disease of lung tuberculosis which was thought to be incurable and then moved back to Basho’s house. Basho was said to carefully nurse her. However she died in1694. Basho heard from her death when he visited Kyoto. He closed the entrance gate of his hut against anybody soon after Nun Jutei’s death supposedly to keep a memory of Nun Jutei and at the same time majorly in order to write “Oku no Hosomichi”. Basho himself died only 4 months after Nun Jutei’s death, when he was 51 years old. It was on the way of Basho’s travel around Osaka that he died. In 1693, after he put out on the door “Statement of Closure of Basho’s Thatched Hut”, he wrote “Oku no Hosomichi” there. This was the last and third secluded life of his, since he had lived two precedent secluded lives. The statement is like following (translated by me): HEIKAN-NO-SETSU (Statement of Closure of BASHO’S Thatched Hut 1693) The amorous desires are hated by the true gentleman and so Buddha put it on the beginning of the five commandments (against murder, lust, theft, lying and intemperance). However, many people fail to get rid of those desires so that I hear many people are involved in love and lust. At the rendezvous, laying under an unknown palm tree in the Mt.Kurama (sleeping with harlots), some people may unexpectedly be captives of blind love. If there is no public watchman, nobody might know how serious the offence they commit is and how many people ruin themselves for love affairs. Though many people fall in love with particular harlots to sell their houses and lose themselves, some senile people wish to live as long as possible and become much greedier, and let their own souls suffer from the matter of money and rice just for a moment and as the result, come not to recognize the human sentiments. Those disgraceful people should not be forgiven. Suppose our longevity rarely is 70 years old, to me, there could remain only 20 years more or less which will be a prime of life. To my retrospect, my age till 40 years old is as really ephemeral as a night dream. By my age of 50 and 60 years, I may have looked like ruins of former self and so I am wondering whenever I am awake or asleep, what is worth devouring? Idiot thinks too much. He who becomes a master of an art is just the piles of exacerbation of the worldly desires as Kenko Yoshida put it in his work “TSUREZURE GUSA” around 1330 (English translation Essays in idleness, Columbia University Press, New York), and they are also those who are likely to debate rights and wrongs. Zhuang-zi (guessed BC369 -286 Chinese philosopher) put that he who is a master of an art like me makes a living with the art and is excited with greed of the demon’s world, and is unable to be saved out of drowning even in a narrow ditch beside paddy fields. Therefore I can also say as well as Zhuang-zi said that it is in the mind of an aged man that the one plays in the quiet and clean field for a young or for an old, transcending over the worldly interests. When someone visits me, we must begin to talk to him about idle topics and I am afraid whether or not I might bother the other, in turn when I visit him as well. It is best to close all the doors like Sonkei who is said to be absorbed in reading a lot of books with keeping the doors locked, and to close all the gates like Togoro who is said not to go out closing all the gates for many years. Let the vacancy that there is no friend be a kind of friend of mine and let me regard that poverty is a kind of wealth, and thus a stubborn guy who is 50 years old is writing this statement and lets himself in commandment. Morning glories are coming out On the hedge in a line to a gate Locked with a bar daytime. BASHO With youth in its 40s, be damned, even though the expectancy then was like that, I sometimes think. However, he died at his age of 51 in fact. Looking at some portraits or drawings of Basho, he looks very old. People’s view of life and death then seems established much earlier than ours now. However, he proved how much he loved his used-be wife by the fact that he survived only 4 months longer than Nun Jutei’s death. Thus under the purely WABI which was a circumstance which he intentionally made, he wrote up OKU no HOSOMICHI, an ever monumental work during the 4 months. His hearing Nun Jutei’s death from his pupil was on the way of his travelling too, his death itself took place on the way of his travelling and his major work “OKU no HOSOMICHI” was poetically depicted of his travelling. Herein, he established the Japanese traditional view that still up to the present day, Japanese are fond of comparing their own lives with humble travels (TABI in Japanese) like pilgrimages without a religion or a holy land. Even if he resided at a certain point, he necessarily needed the secluded life as if he might like to feel his own time like just a traveling. Basho was not only a master of HAIKU as an artistic literature and a refiner of the thinking way of WABI but also a traveler of life time. His life as a whole seems synthesized with these three aspects not only in principle but in practice. That’s why without hesitation, he could write at the beginning of OKU no HOSOMICHI, “The months and days are the travelers of eternity.” He personified life and time. I would like you to remind of Kamo no Chomei’s thinking way of SHOGYOMUJO, that is, “Of the flowing river the flood ever changeth, on the still pool the foam gathering, vanishing, stayeth not. Such too is the lot of men and of the dwellings of men in this world of ours.”