The only substantial
collection in English
of Basho's renku, tanka,
letters and spoken word
along with his haiku, travel
journals, and essays.
The only poet in old-time
literature who paid attention with praise
to ordinary women, children, and teenagers
in hundreds of poems
Hundreds upon hundreds of Basho works
(mostly renku)about women, children,
teenagers, friendship, compassion, love.
These are resources we can use to better
understand ourselves and humanity.
Interesting and heartfelt
(not scholarly and boring)
for anyone concerned with
humanity.
“An astonishing range of
social subject matter and
compassionate intuition”
"The primordial power
of the feminine emanating
from Basho's poetry"
Hopeful, life-affirming
messages from one of
the greatest minds ever.
Through his letters,
we travel through his mind
and discover Basho's
gentleness and humanity.
I plead for your help in
finding a person or group
to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material,
to edit and improve the material, to receive 100%
of royalties, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide
and preserve for future generations.
Quotations from Basho Prose
The days and months are
guests passing through eternity.
The years that go by
also are travelers.
The mountains in silence
nurture the spirit;
the water with movement
calms the emotions.
All the more joyful,
all the more caring
Seek not the traces
of the ancients;
seek rather the
places they sought.
If we think Basho is serious in the following, we would get a heavy feeling from this tirade – however realize that he is having fun with your mind, and wants you to be amused.
Ode to a Crow
In the villages you ravage the persimmon and chestnut treetops. In the fields you lay waste to the crops; don’t you know the harshness of the farmer's labor?
Autumn is lovely, with sweet orange persimmons on the trees, tasty chestnuts escaping from their burrs, golden fields of rice stalks heavy with grain -- until the crows come by. Miserable crows!
Moreover you grab the sparrow’s eggs and eat the frogs in ponds. You search about for a corpse and devour the intestines of a cow or horse. Finally it is said that for a squid a crow will throw away life,
or imitate the cormorant and lose there too.
Of course Basho feels sympathy for frogs in ponds. Crows do not follow the dying as vultures do, but they do stalk about looking for something dead. A crow sees a squid lying inert on the sea and thinks it ready meat, but then finds those ten arms stronger than its beak. Basho read somewhere (maybe in National Geographic) that a crow can be so consumed by greed that he dives into the water, trying to catch fish the way cormorants do, but since crows cannot swim at all, he drowns. (Sounds more like a turkey than a crow).
Crow, you make no attempt to gain wisdom. With a heart like yours, for all the greedy things you do, you have been died black as ink. If you were human, would be a monk who profits. When even Buddha’s family hates crows, the ordinary person wants no part of you.
Basho insults the crow with comparison to a monk who sells Buddhism for personal profit. “Buddha’s family” are those devote ones who really and truly feel compassion for all creatures – even mosquitoes and cockroaches – but they too succumb to the lower emotions when it comes to crows.
So now, be more discreet, lest you end up on the arrow tip of Master Houyi or be punished by the Three-Legged Golden Crow.
Houyi, in ancient China, was the God of Archery. The Chinese say the Sun is a Three-Legged Golden Crow. Actually, there were ten such suns living in a mulberry tree in the Eastern Sea. Each day one of the sun-crows would be driven through the sky. But one day in 2170 BCE, they grew tired of this routine and decided to all rise at once. Global warming was intense and everything started to die. Yao, the Emperor of China, asked the God of the Eastern Heaven for help. This God sent for Houyi who proceeded to shoot one sun-crow after another. Yao pleaded for him to let one sun live, and that is one we have today. And if that divine crow up there hears what you crows are doing on Earth, he (or she?) may blast you away.
I plead for your help in finding a person or group to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material, to edit and improve the presentation, to receive all royalties from sales, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide and preserve for future generations.
The only substantial
collection in English
of Basho's renku, tanka,
letters and spoken word
along with his haiku, travel
journals, and essays.
The only poet in old-time
literature who paid attention with praise
to ordinary women, children, and teenagers
in hundreds of poems
Hundreds upon hundreds of Basho works
(mostly renku)about women, children,
teenagers, friendship, compassion, love.
These are resources we can use to better
understand ourselves and humanity.
Interesting and heartfelt
(not scholarly and boring)
for anyone concerned with
humanity.
“An astonishing range of
social subject matter and
compassionate intuition”
"The primordial power
of the feminine emanating
from Basho's poetry"
Hopeful, life-affirming
messages from one of
the greatest minds ever.
Through his letters,
we travel through his mind
and discover Basho's
gentleness and humanity.
I plead for your help in
finding a person or group
to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material,
to edit and improve the material, to receive 100%
of royalties, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide
and preserve for future generations.
Quotations from Basho Prose
The days and months are
guests passing through eternity.
The years that go by
also are travelers.
The mountains in silence
nurture the spirit;
the water with movement
calms the emotions.
All the more joyful,
all the more caring
Seek not the traces
of the ancients;
seek rather the
places they sought.
