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.
7 Basho haiku, 4 renku, one prose passage on green, the color of renewal
Legend:
Words of Basho in bold
Words of other poets not bold
The words for “green,” aoi or midori, appear so frequently in Basho poetry (with white also frequent). The green of plants, more than just a color to Basho, is a force of nature which invigorates the viewer, for example in this very early renku stanza written when he 32.
From green face of laughing mountain Spring is seen
To say Basho is “anthropomorphizing” the mountain misses the point; instead he sees the mountain and himself as connected: since laughter comes to his face as an expression of winter ending and spring beginning, the green color spreading over the mountain has the same essential nature as laughter. Note that this interpretation does not come entirely from this stanza-pair; rather it comes from all the green-oriented verses in this article, and it comes from knowledge of his thirty years of exploring the connections between nature and the humanity of himself and other people.
Basho drew his philosophy from the ancient Chinese sage Chuang Tzu who offered this amazing vision of cosmology.
At first there was no Life, not only no Life, but also no Form; not only no Form, but no Energy to produce Form, the element for 10,000 things, the energy of the Sun. Within chaos: a featureless, indistinguishable state, from the mixture of disorder came Energy. Energy changed into Form, and Form changed into Life, and finally Life returns to Death. The changes from Chaos to Energy to Form to Life to Death
resemble the orderly cycle of spring, summer, autumn, winter.
Chuang Tzu says nothing about Green, however 20 centuries later, his follower Basho added Green to Chuang Tzu’s cosmology in this renku stanza:
Chaos rides on Green, at play with The Energy
Basho plays with the first two steps in Chuang- Tzu’s vision of creation -- Chaos and Energy– and adds a new element, “Green,” the primal invigorating force of plant life which “Chaos” rides on while playing with “Energy.” Since all Energy comes from the Sun, if “Green” is the vehicle for playing with Energy, we have good reason to see “Green” as chlorophyll, and then we have a spectacular metaphor for the glory of photosynthesis all over Earth.
The first photosynthesis occured more than 3 billion years ago in microscopic cyano-bacteria (often called blue-green algae, although not algae at all) which lived in a world without oxygen, getting their energy from sunlight. Too tiny to be seen, and able to reproduce forever without dying. we might say they had no Form and no Life. Millions upon millions of years of photosynthesis by the green substance in these bacteria produced oxygen which accumulated to enable larger, multi-cellular oxygen-breathing forms of life to evolve. Life dependant on oxygen must eventually burn out, so we come to the final stage in Chuang Tzu’s cosmology.
The most famous example of Basho’s love for green is this haiku he wrote at the shrine in Nikko, dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu who brought peace and prosperity to Japan after centuries of war and chaos; the haiku glorifies these positive social conditions along with the sunlight and green leaves.
How glorious young leaves, green leaves light of the sun
The combination of green and sunlight again deepens our understanding of the glory of photosynthesis.
Makoto Ueda translates seven 20th century scholars on this verse:
one says “the reference to the sunlight is too obvious; this is not a good poem”
and another that “The poet’s virtuosity here is almost intimidating.”
I would like to know what the biologists think.
Both of the poetry names Basho chose for himself and commonly used – Tosei and Basho – contain green. He signed his first few renku stanzas with an alternate pronunciation of his actual name Munafusa, but soon began using ”Tosei,” written with two kanji 桃 tou, the Chinese pronunciation for “peach,” and sei for “green” meaning not-full-grown, immature. The peach is the sacred tree of Taoism, and suggests Basho’s favorite philosopher Chuang Tzu, and Chuang Tzu’s favorite goddess, the Queen Mother of the West, who had Peaches of Immortality which she gave to her guests. The name also seems to be associated with his family, for there is evidence that his mother came from a family whose name contained the peach kanji 桃、pronounced momo. Even after he used the name Basho with most people, even in his final letters to his brother, he signed as Tosei, possibly as a rememberance of their mother. This use of “peach green” in association with his hometown and family suggests his immaturity and possibilities for the future.
”Basho” means the banana plant, which in Japan grows enormous brightgreen leaves but no bananas. Likewise, the man Basho produced an enormous quantity of poems (leaves) but no children (fruit). When he moved into his first hut in Fukagawa just across the Sumida River from downtown Edo in 1680, one follower planted a basho in the yard,and he poet soon took the name for himself. In the next 12 years, Basho left that hut and went on long journeys. In 1692 his followers built a new hut for him, and planted five banana plants in the garden. He described:
Their leaves over seven feet tall large enough to cover a harp or be sewn into a lute case. The wind flutters the tail feathers of a phoenix the rain pierces the ears of a green dragon.
.
If you look around in Japanese gardens, including gardens of abandoned houses, here and there you will see a basho plant, and you may find the image of “ears of a green dragon” comes to mind.
Here is another very early renku stanza-pair in which Basho wrote the second stanza, and this one goes out to the social scientists and especially the economists:
In this world where there are daimyo are merchants too
willow becomes green: credit pulls people in
Where there are provincial lords living life expensively, there must also be merchants. Basho notes that merchants have this trick they play on us to get rich: they offer credit, and credit pulls people in, so they buy and borrow beyond their earning power, thinking that somehow they will have the money to pay back. And “credit pulls people in” is just as inevitable as “willow becomes green.”
Fresh and green The tranquility of a rock That never moves
Drinking then sleeping here on this bridge
The first word in the Japanese is 青々、aoao, the kanji for “green” with a repeat mark. The chilly weather of early spring has passed, the day is warm and comfortable, the plant world green and alive. Basho recognizes that the “tranquility of a rock that never moves” is a drunken perception, so he gives that perception a location: on a bridge looking down at the stream, focusing on one particular rock that stays still while all that water goes rushing by; he watches the lovely green world for a while, drinks and falls asleep, wakes up to drink and watch some more.
Rain in June the green of spike moss how long to last
Iwahiba are a species of spike moss (genus Selaginella) growing in Japan. They are evergreen perennials and bear scale-like, spore-bearing leaves clustered in spikes. In prolonged dry conditions, the leaves curl up into brown balls, but when wet, they open up and return to green, thus in English may be called “resurrection plants.”
Basho’s haiku focuses on a contradiction: the long summer rains which begin in June are depressing, while the bright green of wet spike moss is refreshing. Basho wonders how long will this miserable rain will last, and also how long will the spike moss remain green.
Being green is alright, yet peppers become red
Green peppers are only green because they were picked before they turned red. They are altogether fine to eat, yet are immature fruits, full of chlorophyll for growing. As they turn red they become healthier: vitamin C content doubles, vitamin A content is eight times higher,and beta carotene nearly triples. The immature state is “alright” but nature (i.e. DNA) has more in store for this pepper.
Basho opened a renku sequence with this hokku which contains a personal message to his current house guest Shado:“You write good verses, but still you are a ‘green horn.’ Naturally, as time goes by, you will mature.”
A bamboo forest is unlike any other forest; instead of blending green leaves with brown trunks and branches, the entire bamboo is green. The bamboos are actually a grass, and the “trunks” are blades as tall as trees. Basho loved to visit Saga, in the west of Kyoto, famous for vast and extensive bamboo groves:
Ho-toto-GI-su through great bamboo grove moonlight trickles
Towering bamboos form a cathedral of green with moonlight trickling through. Basho scholar Kon Eizo says “through the gaps and crevices in the dense luxuriant bamboo grove, greenish-whitemoonlight passes in countless slender rays.” The clear bright five-note call of the little cuckoo punctuates the feeling of divine presence.
Basho also wrote this haiku in Saga about Mount Arashi just across the river.
Mount Arashi covered with thick green fibers of wind
The wind becomes visible as it blows through the green covering the vast mountain. One of the more remarkable features of Japanese is the double sound words such as saya saya, said to be the sound of touching thin fabric" in Kon Eizo’s description of the feeling of this haiku:
The refreshing and fragrant breeze blows over the great bamboo grove,
and the leaves flutter saya saya, giving us a refreshing feeling
of being able to see the transparent fibers of the wind.
Into the flowing pattern of ripples green willow reflections as threads seem to be woven
Ki no Tsurayuki in the 10th century wrote this tanka combining green and water. There is no abstraction or philosophy here; he simply sees the green reflections mingling with the pattern of ripples, and notes the physical similarity to threads woven into fabric
In 1688, Basho wrote a renku stanza praising the woman Sonome, comparing her to a plum blossoms, the most elegant of images to the Japanese mind. Sonome responded with this stanza:
Pine needles are falling in the month of March
The "month of March" is when plum trees are in full bloom, but pine needles have absolutely no elegance. Sonome’s verse is not interesting or evocative, and this is intentional. Basho has praised her, so she, a refined Japanese woman, must deny his praise with an expression of humility – and this humility makes her verse somewhat heavy.
Six years later, in a letter to his follower Sampu Basho advised:
Concentrate on Lightness and Interest
A few months later, in his final haiku three days before his death, Basho takes the image Sonome provided, and enhances it with the elements of Tsurayuki’s ancient tanka: green and flowing water, thereby giving
lightness and interest to Sonome’s humble image:
Clear cascade into the ripples fall green pine needles
This, his final verse of greenness, is truly his death haiku.
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.
