I would like to talk about Kobayashi Issa and Haiku, well technically senryu as practice.  Haiku’s focus us usually nature and senryu is like haiku but the focus is primarily on human nature and emotion. For today, when I say haiku I mean both haiku and senryu.  So who is this Issa fellow.  He by far one of my favorite poets of all times.  He was a Pure Land priest and poet and is considered one of the four masters of haiku in all of japan. In his lifetime it is said that he wrote over 20,000 haiku!  Issa lived a difficult life and knew loss and impermanence intimately,  outliving three children and his wife.  He is most known for this haiku written shortly after the death of his young daughter,

 

This dewdrop world —

Is a dewdrop world,

And yet, and yet .

 

And a less well known one.

 

Outliving them,

Outliving them all,

Ah, the cold!

 

His poems strike at the heart of being human and the challenges of being “foolish and passionate beings.” who live in the midst of samsara. And yet even in the midst of his suffering, Issa finds the promise of the Buddha way and Amida’s grace and faces his life directly, not with just sadness but with the wide range of human emotion. In the midst of  Issa’s difficult life he was able to cultivate great compassion that he expressed toward the lowliest of creatures.  His haiku exemplifies a respect for all life and that all life is moving toward awakening, he is a master of the mundane and the mythic.  Here are a few examples.

 

Don’t worry, spiders,

I keep house

casually.

 

On the flower pot

Does the butterfly also hear

The Buddha’s Promise

 

They praise the Buddha too

Frogs on the rocks

In a row.

 

Swatting at a fly

And praising Amida

Buddha

Climb Mount Fuji,

O snail,

but slowly, slowly.

 

I love Issa’s frogs chanting the nembutsu! And the last haiku is one of my favorites.  Here, even Issa realizes the irony of …  “praising the Buddha at the same time condemning, one by one, the insects that rove over my table.”

The reason I bring up Issa,  is some years ago, I was inspired by him and Basho to take up writing haiku.  Initially I was fascinated  by the powerful imagery and emotional impact of such a short poem, with three lines and a certain number of sound units. I wrote a few hundred, I posted them up on walls around salt lake city anonymously, some very large others small transparencies glued to random bricks on sides of buildings. It was fascinating to see people stop and read them and watch their reactions.  As a form, my haiku were sometimes  more fragments than really haiku. My mother-in-law calls them “littlies”.   Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg called them American sentences since they broke a lot of the rules of traditional haiku but the “practice” was still there.  At first I didn’t realize the practical cultivation of awareness that writing these poems offered. In time, I began to notice the practice of writing and thinking “in haiku” was  shifting my attention, I began to see the profound in the simplest things.   My mind slowed down, became more focused, more open.  I began to see timelessness and meaning in everyday events, in a tiny green insect walking across the pages of the book I was reading, of a mother and child interacting, the intimacy of being in the present moment with my breath or quietly drinking a cup of tea.  Here are a few examples of my practice.  ( Warning for you syllable counters, these do not follow the traditional sound unit form.)

 

A kite leans
against a window
falling snow

 

dark winter sea
a lone boat
bobbing

 

a mother sings
her child’s eyes
heavy – heavier

 

thrown into the air
young child laughing
– now a mother

 

the old man flying

a kite his mother

calling him home

 

sleeves rolled up
he gives his son a bath-
new widower

 

a small child cries
called home by his mother-
litter of puppies

 

Reading and writing haiku can become a form of practice.   The haiku becomes a manifestation of simple  awareness,  of the profound present, it helps us to recognize the flow of energy and the interdependence of all things, of being present with someone or something, that the world is created over and over again in every moment.  This can happen because ideally the haiku is egoless – no self, it can open a world where one forgets the separate self.  In my experience because of the practice of haiku, I could more easily let go of the “storied self” with all its subplots and dead ends and become aware of the openness that is found in simple awareness.   I like how Elizabeth Searle Lamb has explained haiku,

 

“haiku epitomizes a moment that occurs naturally in our lives, but that we often hurry or gloss over. Haiku awareness is a simple way to slow down and tune in to this fleeting moment, to appreciate what is right in front of us.  For a fleeting moment we pause and note the sunlight on the sheets as we make the bed, note the warm sun on our cup as we sip tea, or note the fading light on the curtain as we enter the room. And we let out a breath or sigh. Pausing.”

 

Thank you and

Namu Amida Butsu