Triumph of the Sparrow Read online

  Copyright © 1986 by Lucien Stryk

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  The first ninety-one poems, from “A Wood in Sound” to “Afterimages,” are from Afterimages: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi, copyright © 1970 by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, published by Swallow Press. They are reprinted by permission of Ohio University Press. The remaining poems, from “Shell” to “Absence,” are from The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry, copyright © 1977 by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto. They are reprinted by permission of Penguin Books. The interview with Shinkichi Takahashi first appeared in the Ohio Review (Spring/Summer 1978).

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Takahashi, Shinkichi, 1901-

  Triumph of the sparrow : Zen poems ofShinkichi Takahashi / translated by Lucien Stryk with the assistance of Takashi Ikemoto.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 9780802198273

  1. Takahashi, Shinkichi, 1901 Translations into English. 2. Zen poetry. Japanese—Translations into English. I. Stryk, Lucien. II. Ikemoto, Takashi, 1906- III. Title.

  PL839.A5155 A28 2000

  895.6′15—dc21

  00-034143

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  00 01 02 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Don't tell me how difficult the Way.

  The bird's path, winding far, is right

  Before you. Water of the Dokei Gorge,

  You return to the ocean, I to the mountain.

  —Hofuku Seikatsu

  Contents

  • • • • • • •

  Introduction

  A Wood in Sound

  Aching of Life

  Snow Wind

  Canna

  Time

  The Pink Sun

  Thistles

  Rat on Mount Ishizuchi

  Burning Oneself to Death

  Nehru

  Strawberry

  Ox and Sleet

  Cock

  Back Yard

  The Pipe

  Crow

  White Flower

  A Spray of Hot Air

  City

  Murmuring of the Water

  Pigeon

  Mummy

  Red Waves

  Sparrow in Winter

  The Martian Rock

  Destruction

  Disclosure

  The Hare

  Duck

  What Is Moving

  Autumn Flowers

  The Peach

  One Hundred Billionth of a Second

  Quails

  Flower

  Stillness

  Horse

  Misty Rain

  Collapse

  Sun

  Words

  Rain

  Chidori Pool

  Bream

  Time

  Cat

  The Position of the Sparrow

  Life Infinite

  Paper Door

  Deck

  Spring Snow

  The Cloud and the Butterfly

  On a Day of Continuous Rain

  Black Smoke

  Evening Clouds

  Mascot

  Wind

  Wind among the Pines

  Stitches

  Sun and Flowers

  Comet

  Immutability

  Snail

  Here

  If I Am Flowers

  Man

  Statue of Kudara-Avalokitesvara

  Fish

  Cock

  Crab

  Ants

  Sun

  Sun through the Leaves

  Magpie

  A Richer Ground

  Penguins

  Ivies

  Sparrow

  Apricot

  White Paper

  On the Wind

  Like Dewdrops

  Apex of the Universe

  Ice

  What Dashes?

  Wild Camomiles

  The Solid Season

  Lovebird

  Rat and Woman

  Body

  Afterimages

  Shell

  Mushroom

  Flight of the Sparrow

  Sky

  Sparrow in Withered Field

  Afternoon

  Hand

  Sweet Potato

  Camel

  Raw Fish and Vegetables

  Downy Hair

  Toad

  Drizzle

  Sea of Oblivion

  Cloud

  Mother and I

  Sheep

  Eternity

  Sparrow and Bird-Net Building

  Clay Image

  Gods

  Braggart Duck

  Stone Wall

  Beach

  Moon and Hare

  Lap Dog

  Moon

  Vimalakirti

  Snowy Sky

  Near Shinobazu Pond

  Let's Live Cheerfully

  Rocks

  Urn

  Spring

  Peach Blossom and Pigeon

  Spinning Dharma Wheel

  Four Divine Animals

  A Little Sunlight

  Explosion

  Railroad Station

  Absence

  Interview with Shinkichi Takahashi

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  I

  Like that of most important poets, East or West, Shinkichi Takahashi's work can be read on a number of levels, each rewarding, yet one must bear in mind, moving through Triumph of the Sparrow, that his poems are those of a Zen Buddhist. The poet began as a dadaist at a time in Japan when experimentation based on Western examples flourished. The ‘20s and ‘30s were decades as restless in Japan as elsewhere; the best work of the leading modernists expressed that unrest. Dadaism and surrealism especially, while foundering most, inspired some interesting work and made a few reputations. Often translations, for the most part little more than passable, were made of such poetry. There was inevitably more outright borrowing than serious emulation, and the ambitious modernist was more likely to resemble Tristan Tzara, say, than Basho, Buson, and other great masters of Japan's past.

  Takahashi was born in 1901 in a fishing village on Shikoku, smallest of Japan's four main islands. Largely self-educated, having left a commercial high school just before graduation to go to Tokyo, he hoped for a career in literature. He had no money and very little luck, contracting typhus, winding up in a charity hospital, eventually being forced to return home. He did not give up. One day, reading a newspaper article on dadaism, he was galvanized. It was as if the movement had been created those thousands of miles away with him in mind. He returned to Tokyo, worked awhile as a waiter, then as an errand boy in a newspaper office. In 1921 he produced a mimeographed collection of dadaist poems, the following year a dada manifesto and more such poems. In 1923 he published Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi, in 1926 Gion Festival, and in 1928 Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi. The books shocked and puzzled, but were warmly received by
a few. A critic called him the Japanese Rimbaud.

  Still far from satisfied with life and work, given to impulsive actions and often getting into trouble with the police, he sought advice of the famed Rinzai Zen master Shizan Ashikaga, and was invited to come to his temple, the Shogenji. Takahashi participated in a special one-week retreat at the temple, applying himself strenuously to the very tough training. One day, walking in the corridor, he fell down unconscious. When he came to, his mind was shattered. At twenty-seven years old, it seemed his creative life was finished. Sent home, he was locked up in a tiny room for three years, during which time, however, he continued to write poems.

  He slowly made a thorough recovery, and in 1939 visited Korea and China. He managed during the war to support himself as a writer, and in 1944 began work for a Tokyo newspaper. The following year, the newspaper office bombed out, he turned to freelance writing. He married in 1951, and lived with his wife and a daughter in the Nakano Ward of Tokyo a serene yet active Zennist writer's life.

  Not long after his return to Tokyo in 1932 the poet heard Shizan Ashikaga's lectures on Zen, and in 1935 became the master's disciple at Shogenji. Through almost seventeen years of rigorous training he, like all those working under a disciplinarian, experienced many hardships, but unlike most he gained genuine satori a number of times. He describes in an essay two such experiences. The first came when he was forty, during a retreat at a mountain temple. It came his turn to enter the master's room to present his view of a koan (problem for meditation, usually highly paradoxical). As is the practice, he struck the small hanging bell announcing his intention to enter. At the sound, he awakened to the keenest insight he had ever had. The sound, he describes, was completely different from what he had so often heard. His other experience came some years later while in a public bath: stepping out, he stooped to grasp a wash-pail. In a flash he discovered that he had no shadow. He strained to see, but there were no other bathers, and wash-pails, voices, steam itself had all disappeared. He had entered the Void. He lay back again in the bath, at ease, limbs stretched out.

  By 1952 Takahashi had learned all he could from the master, and the next year received in the master's calligraphy a traditional “Moon-and-the-Water” testimonial of his completion of the full course of discipline. He was now recognized by the master as an enlightened Zennist, one of the handful of disciples so honored by Shizan. Now he was qualified to guide others, something Takahashi has done through his writings ever since. In addition to numerous books of verse, the poet has published books on Zen, among them Essays on Zen Study (1958), Commentaries on Mumonkan (1958), Rinzairoku (1959), The Life of Master Dogen (1963), Poetry and Zen (1969), and Zen and Literature (1970). Typically, in Essays on Zen Study he writes: “Since, to my way of thinking, God transcends existence, to conclude there is no God is most relevant to him. As it is best not to think of such a God, praying to him is futile. Not only futile, but also immeasurably harmful; because man will make blunders, if, presupposing good and bad with his shallow wisdom, he clings to his hope of God's support.”

  II

  Since the Kamakura period (thirteenth century), many of Japan's finest writers have been, if not directly involved in its study and practice, strongly drawn to Zen Buddhism, which some would claim has been among the most seminal philosophies, in its effect on the arts, the world has known. A modern example, the late Yasunari Kawabata, Nobel Laureate and author of among other important works the novel Yukiguni (Snow Country), was as a writer of fiction greatly indebted to the haiku aesthetic, in which Zen principles dominate. His Nobel Prize acceptance address was virtually a tribute to Zen. Another world famous author, Yukio Mishima, wrote plays, a few of which have reached an international audience, based on the Noh drama, which like the art of the haiku is intimately associated with Zen. Many other writers have been affected by Zen, which, Arthur Waley has pointed out, has always been the philosophy of artists, its language that in which poetry and painting especially have always been discussed. Unlike Takahashi, however, few contemporary Japanese writers have trained under a Zen master. He is widely recognized as the foremost living Zen poet.

  The poet's work is best read, then, in rather special context, its chief, perhaps most obvious, quality being what in Zen is called zenki, spontaneous activity free of forms, flowing from the formless self This is best seen in the bold thrust of his images. No less important, and clearly Buddhist, is his awareness of pain, human and animal, though it should be evident that his frequent references to things “atomic” need not be seen as exclusively Buddhist or Japanese. That many of his poems are “irrational” cannot be denied, but if once irrationality was a suspect element in Western poetry (it has never been in Oriental), it is less so today—witness the acceptance of artists who, like Takahashi, employ the surrealistic method, if only in modified form. Zen and Taoist poets have always been unconventional in their methods and attitudes, and Takahashi's poems sin no more against the rational than Hakuin's, the greatest figure in Japanese Rinzai Zen. Here is a typical poem by the eighteenth-century master:

  You no sooner attain the great void

  Than body and mind are lost together.

  Heaven and Hell—a straw.

  The Buddha-realm, Pandemonium—shambles. Listen: a nightingale strains her voice, serenading the snow.

  Look: a tortoise wearing a sword climbs the lampstand.

  Should you desire the great tranquility,

  Prepare to sweat white beads.

  In his preface to our Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews, Takashi Ikemoto wrote, “To a Zen poet, a thing of beauty or anything in nature is the Absolute. Hence his freedom from rationality and his recourse to uncommon symbols. Yet ultimately what he portrays is concrete, not a dreamy fancy or vision.” Surely one of the strengths of Takahashi's poetry is its concreteness—a particular bird, beast, or flower, a precisely rendered, however unusual, state of mind. And yet much of the poetry is admittedly very difficult, one reason being that, as in the case of all Zen poets, many of Takahashi's poems read like koans, the purpose of which is to make clear to the seeker of answers that there is no distinction between subject and object, that the search and the thing sought are one and the same. (One of the best known koans is Hakuin's “What is the sound of one hand clapping?") One awakening to such identification attains the state of muga, an important step toward the goal of training, safari.

  If read with some appreciation of the philosophy, Zen poetry need not be obscure. To give an idea of how a trained Zennist might read it, here is an analysis of Takahashi's “The Peach” by Taigan Takayama, Rinzai Zen master of Yamaguchi (the quotation is from an interview in Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews):

  Most interesting, from both the Zen and literary points of view. Let's begin with the former: an Avatamsaka doctrine holds that the universe can be observed from the four angles of (1) phenomena, (2) noumenon, (3) the identity of noumenon and phenomena, and (4) the mutual identity of phenomena. Now, whether he was aware of it or not, the poet depicted a world in which noumenon and phenomena are identical. Considering the poem with Zen in mind, the lesson to be drawn, I suppose, is that one should not loiter on the way but proceed straight to one's destination—the viewpoint of the mutual identity of phenomena. But from a literary point of view, the significance and the charm of the poem lies in its metaphorical presentation of a world in which noumenon and phenomena are identified with each other.

  More generally, and to return to Takashi Ikemoto's description of Zen verse, a few more features of the poetry may be cited. There are “conciseness, rigor, volitionality, virility, and serenity.” Yet, in spite of the importance, considering the poet's intention, of analyzing the Zen elements in Takahashi's poems, they should be fairly intelligible to those familiar with much modern poetry, even in English translation (if not, the poet is less to blame than his translators), for as has often been said that which is most translatable in poetry is the image, and it is in his use of imag
ery especially that Takahashi is perhaps most unique:

  My legs lose themselves

  Where the river mirrors daffodils

  Like faces in a dream.

  —“A Wood in Sound”

  The peak of Mount Ishizuchi

  Has straightened the spine

  Of the Island of Futana.

  —“Rat on Mount Ishizuchi”

  Sunbeams, spokes of a stopped wheel,

  Blaze through the leaves of a branch.

  —“Sun through the Leaves”

  Yet Takahashi wishes to be judged—if as poet at all—as one whose work expresses more than anything else the Zen spirit. A poem like “Canna,” which in addition to being effective poetry communicates powerfully one of the bodhisattva ideals of Mahayana Buddhism, sacrifice for others, is therefore of particular importance. In Takahashi such ideals are everywhere given expression. Some of his pieces concern Zen discipline, “Life Infinite” being typical. In spite of its apparent simplicity, such a work is very difficult to understand outside a Zen context—and extremely hard to render properly in another tongue. Take the last line: if it had been given somewhat less paradoxically, as, say, “I need nothing, fearing not even death,” the poet would have been misrepresented and the reader misled, for there is no fear of death in Zen. While poems like “Life Infinite” may not to some be quite as rewarding artistically as others of Takahashi's pieces, they are understandably of great importance to him and thus must not be passed over.

  While an alert reader may find it possible to read a poem like “Life Infinite” without too much difficulty, there is another kind of poem which, though dealing as directly with the Zen experience, works somewhat more subtly and can prove most puzzling. “Destruction,” which exhibits as well as any the quality of zenki, is such a poem, for here there is not only “spontaneous activity free of forms, flowing from the formless self,” but the destruction of the most rigid of all forms, a conceptual universe. What the poet says to us is that man, unlike the sparrow, has created forms which confine and frustrate, and until he sees that they have no reality, are paltry, “so much eye secretion,” he will continue to tremble before them, their prisoner. He must live freely as the sparrow who can, should he wish, crush the universe and its creator. Indeed all forms, not the universe alone, “tremble before him.”