ECCENTRIC ZEN-HAIKU MASTER, PART TWO.

 

ECCENTRIC ZEN-HAIKU MASTER, PART TWO:

Gabriel Rosenstock’s new versions in English and Irish of Zen-Haiku master Taneda Santōka, with occasional commentary; also, new versions in Dutch by Geert Verbeke.

there’s the culprit . . .

that dark cloud

drenched me!

 

féach air . . .

an scamall mallaithe úd

a bháigh mé!

 

daar is de boosdoener . . .

deze donkere wolk

doorweekte mij!

 

thick foliage –

a narrow green path

leads to a grave

 

duilliúr dlúth –

cosán caol glas

chuig uaigh

 

dik gebladerte –

een small groen pad

leidt naar een graf

 

entering a green forest . . .

I cannot but think of Ryōkan

on this path

 

foraois ghlas . . .

smaoiním ar Ryōkan

ar an gcosán seo dom

 

een groen bos betreden…

ik kan slechts denken aan Ryōkan

op dit pad

[Ryōkan Taigu (1758–1831) noteworthy poet, monk, eccentric, was Santōka’s spiritual mentor.]

even whiter

when washed well –

radishes

 

is báine fós

nuair a nitear go maith iad –

raidisí

 

zelfs nog witter

indien goed gewassen –

radijzen

 

calm

after the storm –

look, here come the flies

 

calm

i ndiaidh stoirme –

seo chugainn anois na cuileoga

 

kalm

na de storm –

kijk, hier komen de vliegen

 

gone! the last drop of sakè –

nothing to do but listen

to the wind

 

an saicí go léir ólta –

faic le déanamh

ach éisteacht leis an ngaoth

 

weg! de laatste druppel sake

niets te doen dan luisteren

naar de wind

One of his father’s enterprises was to open a sakè  distillery in 1906. Ten years later it closed. There’s a short animated film worth looking at in which we see Santōka draining his flask, or gourd, of rice wine:

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkeFgBkcuZ4&t=8s

Though forbidden by Buddhism, alcohol was used by Santōka to help distil experiences to their innermost  purity! There were many notorious drinkers before and   after him. (See The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan,  W.  Puck Brecher, University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).  Here’s a haiku by Issa, a Buddhist of the Pure Land tradition, from the year 1793, his last drop gone:

.酒呑まぬ吾身一ッの夜寒哉
sake nomanu waga mi hitotsu no yozamu kana

out of sakè
such is my life . . .
a cold night          (Translation: David G. Lanoue)

Issa’s contemporary, the previously alluded to Ryokan, has a short poem (tanka):

Holding a bottle of sweet sake

You urge me to drink;

And how I went on drinking,

Fascinated by the sweet wine!

from The Zen Fool Ryōkan, Misao Kodama & Hikosaku Yanagishima (Charles Tuttle)

The journal Simply Haiku carried a wonderful talk on Santōka in the Autumn of 2005 but is marred, somewhat, by the negative WASP attitude to alcohol and bacchanalia in general: http://simplyhaiku.com/SHv3n3/features/stanford_forrester-santoka.html

Sure, alcohol has its risks – as does the gun, the car, the hamburger and a million other things – but would you deprive Issa, Ryōkan, Santōka or anybody else of their measly comforts?

If WASPs ruled the world (and they rule a large part of it, alas), they’d confiscate the ‘drop of the craythur’ and have the three boys above – Santōka, Ryōkan and Issa – working out in the gym. Not sure what haiku harvest such a grim plan might yield!

The WASP culture has been described by John Bassett McCleary as “the most aggressive, powerful, and arrogant society in the world for the last thousand years.” In the matter of Santōka’s weakness, the WASP (and all his cousins and imitators) would recommend rehab.

Fine. Rehab might have added a couple of years to his life. But at what cost? The cost of losing his koan? Sakè was his koan, the great conundrum, and shortly before his death, on August 28, 1940, he writes:

Sakè is my koan. If I could understand sakè –if I could learn the true way to enjoy sakè, it would be  my awakening, my breakthrough!

Thanks to Garry Bannister, Irish speakers can now find out more about the crazy wisdom of  koans in his new book:

http://newisland.ie/product/path-home-conair-siar/

There’s a loneliness in drinking sakè, whether alone or in company, and Santōka’s loneliness was such as to enable him to perceive the loneliness of the universe and of all the creatures in it:

staying with a cat –

how it longs to hear words

from us humans

Of course, we too are of the animal world, meaning having anima (breath/soul) – lest we ever forget it.

Was ourZen-haiku master one of the greatest haijin or haiku masters of all time? Not everyone has a high opinion of him. Writing in Modern Haiku (Summer 2007), Charles Trumbull who was editor of that journal between 2006 and 2013, describes him as ‘a chronic drunk never far from a state of depression, a shiftless wanderer, and apparently a bit of a con man to boot.’ Nevertheless, he goes on to say that he is a Santōka fan!

Drink, for Santōka, was often used as a mystical vehicle with which to escape the tyranny of the mind. Anything can act as a vehicle:

not a drop of sakè left in the gourd

staring fixedly at the moon

I wrote a hundred haiku after looking at a photograph of the Very Venerable Chögyam Trungpa in Highland Regalia:

http://onslaughtpress.com/product/antlered-stag-of-dawn/

Moon-gazing, an age-old form of meditation, is called trataka in the yoga tradition. The haiku above sounds very much as though Santōka engaged in some form of trataka along with other techniques such as chanting namu Kanzeon, the name of the Compassionate One, a most wonderful vehicle, integral to Santōka’s spirituality, as he tells us beautifully:

heavy with chant

pine branches hanging low

namu Kanzeon!

Shiftless wanderer indeed! The dreaded WASP tends to glorify logic and deify the mind, becoming over-reliant on mind; the mystic drops it. (I am paraphrasing the Anglo-Irish Taoist philosopher and lover of fine wines Wei Wu Wei: ‘the saint is one who disciplines the ego; the sage is One who drops it’). If further confirmation is needed, Chapter 73 of the timeless classic I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is called Death of the Mind is Birth of Wisdom.

 

               sakè for body, haiku for heart;
sakè is the haiku of  body,
haiku the sakè of  heart.

saicí don cholainn, haiku don chroí;

haiku na colainne é saicí,

saicí an chroí é haiku

 

sake voor het lichaam, haiku voor het hart;

sake is de haiku van het lichaam

haiku de sake van het hart

Was he an alcoholic? A haikuholic! (The word, I think, is Geert Verbeke’s, our Dutch translator, a significant figure in the haiku world who works as a senso painter these days).       Santōka was as absorbed in haiku as were Sufi poets such as Rumi inflamed by the ‘wine’ of truth, as medieval bhakti poets of India were utterly absorbed in the divine – God-intoxicated. God intoxication is very rare among the sober ranks of WASPdom. God-intoxication distorts the meaning of life as outlined in the handbooks of WASPdom.

The above-mentioned Charles Trumbull states in Haiku Reality, ‘Often when I receive haiku submissions for the journal I edit I reject them because I feel that they lack meaning. They don’t speak to me.’  And in the same journal we have this telling confession:

Now, I’m a great devotee of definitions. This quirk dates back decades, when my fellow graduate  students and I so earnestly sought relief for the world’s woes in all-night bull sessions. These rough-and-tumble matches always seemed to devolve, sooner or later, into definitions: “Yeah,  but how do you define ‘justice’?” “So what exactly do you mean by ‘nature’? Does that include ‘human nature’?” I drag these mental shackles to my work in haiku.

To Charles and his disciples we say: Throw away thy mental shackles! We must be prepared to drop the mind, to loosen its control over us, to reject its incessant demands, its constructions and constrictions, and to be prepared to witness what happens in the emptiness that is created when the mind temporarily vacates its throne:

can’t give up the booze;
budding trees,
budding grasses

 

nílim in ann éirí as an ól;

péacann crainn,

péacann féara

 

kan de drank niet opgeven;

ontluikende bomen,

ontluikende grassen

 

That’s it! There you have it – a great blossoming of the imploded mind.

they’ve no need

for any attention –

weeds sprouting

 

ní gá

aon aire a thabhairt dóibh –

péacann fiaile

 

ze hebben geen nood

aan enige aandacht –

kruiden ontkiemen

 

days

when I no longer beg –

simply stare at mountains

 

bíonn laethanta gan déirc agam –

is mé ag stánadh

ar na sléibhte

 

dagen

dat ik niet langer bedel –

slechts staren naar bergen

Simply stare at the mountains. This, too, is a form of trataka, mountain gazing. His birth name was Taneda Shōichi. His haigo or pen-name, Santōka, means ‘fiery mountain peak’.

Photographs of saints and sages may used in the trataka tradition or something as simple as a candle flame or a dot. In the following sublimely beautiful and utterly simple haiku, Santōka uses a persimmon:

resting on my palm

a persimmon –  fascinatingly red.

 

He uses a persimmon, the persimmon uses him; whichever way you like to express it, one thing is certain – trataka of some form or another has occurred. Trataka techniques may be employed when looking at the sky or even when looking at darkness. My mind! Be as is sky! he writes in his diary. This is trataka.

       Trataka is not some form of self-hypnosis. It belongs to the sacred tradition. We may call it ‘haiku gazing’ in the context of this book. What is looked at through our prosaic eyes is normally neither sacred nor profane. What is revealed through pure haiku gazing, or trataka, assumes the inherent aura of the sacred:

now I am here at the ocean’s edge

the blueness infinite

 

anseo ar imeall an aigéin dom

goirme shíoraí

 

nu ben ik hier aan de rand van de ocean

de oneindige blauwheid

 

holiness –

a chicken

in all its whiteness

 

beannaitheacht –

sicín is a bháine

uile

 

heiligheid –

een kip

in al haar witheid

 

This moment, when the scales fall from the eyes, is sometimes referred to as an epiphany, rare enough in the lives of most people but part and parcel of the life of a haijin. One could say that such trataka-like epiphanies are what distinguish a haiku master from a mere Sunday versifier. Such haiku epiphanies can last a few seconds or a few minutes and equipped with this vision one can penetrate the vastness of an ocean, a sky, or as we see here on his arrival back at his hut:

deep stillness

dust on the desk

 

ciúnas ar fad

deannach ar an deasc

 

diepe stilte

stof op de werktafel

 

as I stroll along – cuckoos

picking up speed –

cuckoos!

 

mé ag máinneáil liom – cuacha

mé ag bogshodar–

cuacha!

 

zoals ik langs wandel – koekoeken

pikken snelheid op –

koekoeken!

 

on and on i walk

nothing but wild lilies

in bloom

 

ag siúl liom i gcónaí

romham is im’ dhiaidh

lilí fiáine faoi bhláth

 

 

ik blijf wandelen

niets dan witte lelies

in bloei

 

morning mist –

the sudden appearance

of a red letter box

 

ceobhrán maidine –

nochtann bosca litreacha dearg

gan choinne

 

 

ochtenmist

het plots opdoemen

van een rode brievenbus

 

When Ireland finally separated from Britain, rather than replacing English letter boxes, we simply painted their red ones green! In many respects, the whole emancipation was nothing more than a paint job!

 

a fine mist since dawn

how beautiful they are:

persimmon leaves

 

báisteach éadrom

ó mhaidin –

áilleacht na nduilleog dátphlumaí

 

fijne mist sinds dageraad

hoe mooi zijn ze:

kakibladeren

 

END OF PART TWO. MORE TOMORROW!

Gabriel Rosenstock’s latest haiku volume is Stillness of Crows. His philosophy of haiku can be found on this YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmj54hpqMyo&t=100s

 

 

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