Triumph of the Sparrow Read online

  Throughout Takahashi's work, as in all Zen writing, such attitudes are prominent, yet they need not be seen as peculiarly Zennist or, for that matter, Oriental. In his “Worpswede” the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes what could very well serve as paraphrase of a poem like “Destruction”: “We play with obscure forces, which we cannot lay hold of, by the names we give them, as children play with fire, and it seems for a moment as if all the energy had lain unused in things until we came to apply it to our transitory life and its needs. But repeatedly . . . these forces shake off their names and rise . . . against their little lords, no, not even against—they simply rise, and civilizations fall from the shoulders of the earth.”

  III

  Shinkichi Takahashi might have written, as Chekhov did to a friend, “A conscious life without a definite philosophy is no life, rather a burden and a nightmare.” That the poet has found such a definite philosophy in Zen Buddhism has perhaps been demonstrated, and it is doubtlessly true that his work is distinguished largely because of the philosophy underlying it. He has worked hard, as all Zennists must, to discover truths which can hardly be expressed in anything less than poetry. Indeed if the Western reader interested in Zen wants some indication of what the philosophy can mean to a practitioner, he might do well to seek it in the work of Takahashi. For centuries Zennists have through poetry expressed insights afforded by their discipline. With that in mind, it might prove useful at this point to give some idea of the manner in which the art has been employed, particularly by great masters.

  Even in translation—such is the hope—Zen poetry is so suggestive in itself that, as in a piece like “Life Infinite,” explication is rarely necessary. Older Japanese Zennists did not theorize about the poems they would write from time to time, for good reason: to them poetry was not an art to be cultivated for itself. Rather it was a means by which an attempt at the nearly inexpressible might be made. Though some poems are called satori poems, others death poems, and some are little more than interpretations, meant for presentation to a master, of koans (these may equally be satori poems), all the poems deal with spiritually momentous experiences. There are no “finger exercises,” and though some Zen poems are comparatively light there are few less than fully inspired. Indeed when one considers the traditional goal, the all-or-nothing striving after illumination, this is hardly to be wondered at.

  Poets of the Chinese Ch'an sect (Zen is the Japanese transliteration of Ch'an), on whose works early Zennists modeled, in every respect:, their own, were less reluctant to theorize. They speak, for example, of the need to attain a state of calm, making it possible for the poet to get the spirit of nature into his poems. If Zen masters considered it out-of-role to write on the nature of poetry, many affected by Zen did not, and great haiku poets like Basho, an enlightened Zennist, had disciples who would transcribe their words. Here is Basho's disciple Doho: “The Master said: ‘Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant.’ He meant that the poet should detach the mind from himself, and by ‘learn’ that he should enter into the object, the whole of its delicate life, feeling as it feels. The poem follows of itself.”

  Another way of thinking about this most important principle of Zen aesthetics, and a suggestive one for Westerners, is to recall Keats's “Negative Capability,” by which the poet implies that the true artist does not assert his own personality, even if imagining himself possessed of one. Rather he identifies as far as possible with the object of his contemplation, its “personality,” without feeling that he must understand it. There are many Zen poems about this state of mind, one of the best being Bunan's:

  The moon's the same old moon,

  The flowers exactly as they were,

  Yet I've become the thingness

  Of all the things I see!

  Zen poetry has always been richly symbolic, and while hardly unique to Zen the moon is a common symbol. It should be remembered, in relation to the use of such symbols, that as religion Zen is a Mahayana Buddhist sect, and that the Zennist searches, always within, for the indivisible moon (essence) reflected not only on the sea but on each dewdrop. To discover this, the Dharmakaya, in all things, whether while in meditation or writing a poem, is to discover one's own Buddha-nature. Most Zen poems delineate graphically what the spiritual eye has been awakened to, a view of things seen as for the first time, in their eternal aspect. Here, a thirteenth-century piece by the master Daito:

  At last I've broken Unmon's barrier!

  There's exit everywhere—east, west; north, south.

  In at morning, out at evening; neither host nor guest.

  My every step stirs up a little breeze.

  One of the most important Zen principles, so appealing for obvious reasons to Westerners interested in the philosophy, is the need to “let go.” It is a principle based on the idea, demonstrably true, that one never gets what is grasped for. Seek not, in other words, and ye shall find. Here is how the nineteenth-century master Kanemitsu-Kogun expresses it:

  My hands released at last, the cliff soars

  Ten thousand meters, the plowshare sparks,

  All's consumed with my body. Born again,

  The lanes run straight, the rice well in the ear.

  Traditionally death poems are written or dictated by masters just before dying. The master looks back on his life and, in a few highly compressed lines, expresses for the benefit of disciples his state of mind at the inevitable hour. The Void, the great Penetralium of Zen, is often mentioned in the death poems. The mind, it is thought, is a void or empty space in which objects are stripped of their objectivity, reduced to their essence. The following death poem by the fourteenth-century master Fumon is typical:

  Magnificent! Magnificent!

  No one knows the final word.

  The ocean bed's aflame,

  Out of the void leap wooden lambs.

  It would be misleading to claim only Zennists exhibit such stoicism before death. In his brilliant essay “Artists and Old Age” the German poet Gottfried Benn tells of the diamond dealer Solomon Rossbach who, just before leaping from the top of the Empire State Building, scrawled what is by any standards a great death poem:

  No more above,

  No more below—

  So I leap off.

  Because of the extremely private nature of sanzen, meeting of master and disciple during which the latter is expected to offer interpretations of koans, sometimes in the form of poetry, not too much can be said about those poems based on koans. Perhaps the following anecdote will give some idea of what takes place at such an interview, particularly the manner in which the disciple's poem is handled:

  Kanzan (1277–1360), the National Teacher, gave Fujiwara-Fujifusa the koan “Original Perfection.” For many days Fujifusa sat in Zen. He finally had an intuition and composed the following:

  Once possessed of the mind that has always been,

  Forever I'll benefit men and devas both.

  The benignity of the Buddha and Patriarchs can hardly be repaid.

  Why should I be reborn as horse or donkey?

  When he called on Kanzan with the poem, this dialogue took place:

  Kanzan: Where's the mind?

  Fujifusa: It fills the great void.

  Kanzan: With what will you benefit men and devas?

  Fujifusa: I shall saunter along the stream, or sit down to watch the gathering clouds.

  Kanzan: Just how do you intend repaying the Buddha and Patriarchs?

  Fujifusa: The sky's over my head, the earth under my feet.

  Kanzan: All right, but why shouldn't you be reborn as horse or donkey?

  At this Fujifusa got to his feet and bowed. “Good!” Kanzan said with a loud laugh. “You've gained perfect: satori”

  Though satori, death, and koan interpretation figure strongly in early Zen poetry, many of the poems deal with nature and man's place in it. The Buddha-nature is by no means man's alone, being discoverable in all that exists, animate or
inanimate. As Arthur Waley puts it in Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art: “Stone, river and tree are alike parts of the great hidden Unity. Thus man, through his Buddha-nature or universalized consciousness, possesses an intimate means of contact with nature. The song of birds, the noise of waterfalls, the rolling of thunder, the whispering of wind in the pine trees—all these are utterances of the Absolute.” And as Shinkichi Takahashi expresses it in “Wind among the Pines”:

  The wind blows hard among the pines

  Toward the beginning

  Of an endless past.

  Listen: you've heard everything.

  IV

  It is clear that Shinkichi Takahashi is an important Zen poet, but what is it, apart from his philosophy, that makes him a remarkable contemporary poet, read with almost as much appreciation in the English-speaking world as in Japan? There are many reasons for the appeal of his work, but surely the chief is the breathtaking freedom of imagination, his capacity, as Robert Bly in his anthology News of the Universe claims, to handle seven or eight things at the same time and thus write “the poetry of the future.” This is best seen perhaps in those poems dealing with the life of creatures, for in order to empathize in such ways the poet must imagine fully, enter the world of his subject spontaneously, no holding back. In poem after poem Takahashi reveals how totally he is able to identify with his subject.

  In much of the poet's work, seemingly scornful of logical development, he achieves something close to pure poetry, which comes only from an unburdened imagination. Now pure poetry is as difficult to define as to write, yet an attempt must be made. If we take into account those elements of poetry which, as far back as Aristotle, have been considered preeminent, chiefly vital metaphor and verbal energy, then we are forced to conclude pure poetry is very rare indeed, and much that goes by the name of poetry is really little more than metered prose. In modern criticism a great deal of space is devoted to the praise and refined analysis of experimentation, those ingenuities which so often cloak hollowness. Yet the serious reader is not so easily fooled, poets like Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas capture him readily enough, because their work is comparatively pure, charged with potent images.

  A fine poet is something of an anomaly, and may be likened to a perfectly functioning sensorium, one sense related organically to all the others—eye to the ear, and so on. Whether he turns to poetry because it is as natural for him to do so as for the bird to sing, or because the making of poems may confer a distinction not attainable otherwise, I cannot say. Nor tell whether the themes associated with much serious poetry—social justice, for one—come naturally to a poet or are just used as suitable subjects to engage the imagination of the gifted human.

  When we hear Takahashi claim his philosophy is more important to him than anything he writes, we are perhaps entitled to a degree of scepticism, yet bear in mind that traditionally Zen is not only the philosophy of artists, it is essentially, in its highest forms, unabashedly elitist. The Sixth Patriarch of Zen, the Chinese Hui-neng (637-712), who was handed “the robe and the law” of succession mainly because of the insight expressed in a short poem written for his master, claims in his Platform Scripture: “there is no distinction between sudden enlightenment and gradual enlightenment in the Law, except that some people are intelligent and others stupid. Those who are ignorant realize the truth gradually, while the enlightened ones attain it suddenly.”

  Just as the gifted man finds it possible to attain ends more quickly in a philosophy like Zen, he can, once setting mind to it, attain in the arts what others, however sincere and assiduous, cannot hope to reach. The fad: is—were it acknowledged—that most critical writing deals with the phenomenology of failure, with why X, were he more like Z, might turn out to be slightly superior to Y. We wind up mistrusting much criticism, and aesthetic theorizing, because in spite of it, and all standards and criteria it propounds as essential to the judgment of art, a work either fully engages the imagination or doesn't, which is why Ezra Pound could claim that “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” The important artist stands alone.

  Though as Zennist Takahashi disclaims any ambition of the kind, he must—like all poets, whether working within a particular discipline or not—be judged first as artist. In order for a poet anywhere to become an artist, he must become maker of the new, and that which chiefly distinguishes the poem of an artist from that of a writer of verse is that it can live alone, palpably there, unsupported by anything outside itself, indifferent to the uses made of it. A work of art is no vehicle of preachment or propaganda, and whatever the idea in the name of which it was brought into being—Zen, Marxism, Art itself—it lives or dies to the degree it possesses qualities which, though seemingly unique to its medium, are rightly seen as held in common by all genuine works of art—appropriate form, freshness of detail, integrality of tone, and relevance to human experience.

  A Wood in Sound

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  The pine tree sways in the smoke,

  Which streams up and up.

  There's a wood in sound.

  My legs lose themselves

  Where the river mirrors daffodils

  Like faces in a dream.

  A cold wind and the white memory

  Of a sasanqua.

  Warm rain comes and goes.

  I'll wait calmly on the bank

  Till the water clears

  And willows start to bud.

  Time is singed on the debris

  Of air raids.

  Somehow, here and now, I am another.

  Aching of Life

  • • • • • • • • • •

  There must be something better,

  But I'm satisfied just as I am.

  Monkeys sport deep in the forest,

  Fish shoot up the mountain stream.

  If there's change, there's also repose—

  Which soon must suffer change.

  Along the solar orbit of the night,

  I feel life's constant aching:

  Smack in the middle of the day,

  I found moonlight between a woman's legs.

  Snow Wind

  • • • • • • • • •

  There's nothing more to see:

  Snow in the nandin's leaves

  And, under it, the red-eyed

  Rabbit lies frozen.

  I'll place everything on

  Your eyeballs, the universe.

  There's nothing more to see:

  Nandin berries are red, snow white.

  The rabbit hopped twice in the cool

  Breeze and everyone disappeared,

  Leaving the barest scent.

  The horizon curves endlessly

  And now there's no more light

  Around the rabbit's body.

  Suddenly your face

  Is large as the universe.

  Canna

  • • • • • •

  A red canna blooms,

  While between us flickers

  A death's head, dancing there

  Like a pigmy or tiny ball.

  We try to catch it—

  Now it brushes my hands,

  Now dallies with her feet.

  She often talks of suicide.

  Scared, I avoid her cold face.

  Again today she spoke

  Of certain premonitions.

  How can I possibly

  Save this woman's life?

  Living as if dead, I shall

  Give up my own. She must: live.

  Time

  • • • • • • •

  Time like a lake breeze

  Touched his face,

  All thought left his mind.

  One morning the sun, menacing,

  Rose from behind a mountain,

  Singeing—like hope—the trees.

  Fully awakened, he lit his pipe

  And assumed the sun-inhaling pose:

  Time poured d
own—like rain, like fruit.

  He glanced back and saw a ship

  Moving towards the past. In one hand

  He gripped the sail of eternity,

  And stuffed the universe into his eyes.

  The Pink Sun

  • • • • • • • • • •

  White petals on the black earth,

  Their scent filling her nostrils.

  Breathe out and all things swell—

  Breathe in, they shrink.

  Let's suppose she suddenly has four legs—

  That's far from fantastic.

  I'll weld ox hoofs onto her feet—

  Sparks of the camellia's sharp red.

  Wagging her pretty little tail,

  She's absorbed in kitchen work.

  Look, she who just last night

  Was a crone is girl again,

  An alpine rose blooming on her arm.

  High on a Himalayan ridge

  The great King of Bhutan

  Snores in the pinkest sun.

  Thistles

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Thistles bloomed in the vast moonlit

  Cup of the Mexican sands.

  Thistles bloomed on the round hillock

  Of a woman's heart.

  The stained sea was choked with thistles,

  Sky stowed away in thistle stalks.