Walking Zen
(This story first appeared in The Common Review, Spring 2005, under the title "Vagrant Haiku.")
"Talentless and incompetent as I am," wrote the vagrant poet Taneda Santoka two months before his death in 1940, "there are two things I can do, and two things only: walk with my own two feet; compose, compose my poems."
In most significant lives there is a turning point, a decisive break with the ordinary. In Santoka's life there were two. The first was his mother's suicide when he was nine. The second was his own apparent suicide attempt at age 42. Instead of death it brought him to a Zen temple. Here his life proper may be said to begin.
"soppy with morning dew/ I go off/ in any direction I please"
If his poems seem simple at times almost to simplemindedness, we must bear in mind the bitter life whose fruits they are. Few privations were spared him. His unstable character afforded him no place in settled society. Homeless, jobless, often friendless, he took to the road, tramping, it has been calculated, some 28,000 miles over 14 years through the Japanese backwoods, begging for his sustenance, sleeping in flophouses, drinking to excess - and writing his snippets of poetry, word-shards of ecstasy and despondency and, fitfully, what Buddhists regard as the most precious of life's gifts, serene acceptance.
"drizzly rain/ only one road/ to go by"
He was born Taneda Shoichi (Santoka, meaning "mountaintop fire," was a literary name adopted when he began writing haiku in university) in the village of Sabaryo in southwestern Honshu in 1882. His father was a wealthy landowner and prominent local politician whose compulsive womanizing depleted the inherited family fortune and drove his wife to despair. One day in 1892 the nine-year-old Shoichi was playing with friends when a sudden commotion drew him to a well on the family property. He arrived to find his mother's lifeless body being lifted out of it.
From then on he seems at home nowhere and fit for nothing - except poetry, for which he showed an early aptitude. He entered the literature faculty of Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University in 1902, only to suffer a nervous breakdown and leave without completing his first year. A sake-brewing business he and his father set up in Sabaryo failed. An arranged marriage in 1909 produced a son the following year, but broke down at last in 1920, his unfitness for married life so plain in his own eyes that he acceded to his wife's family's plea for a divorce.
"husband and wife quarreling/ night/ spiders dangle down"
It is an early poem (1917), restless but homey, the open road that dominates his mature work nowhere in evidence. His first poems had begun appearing in 1913 in Soun, Layered Cloud, a new magazine dedicated to a new poetic form: free-verse haiku. He was, for a time, a member of its editorial board.
Then as now, poetry operated largely outside the economic sphere. In 1919, the year before his divorce, he went to Tokyo to look for paying work. A part-time position with a cement company was followed by a full-time job at a library. A second nervous breakdown put an end to it. In 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, levelling his boarding-house along with much of the rest of Tokyo. Penniless, he headed south to Kumamoto on the island of Kyushu, to work in the picture-frame store his ex-wife had opened there.
And now we come to the second great turning point in Santoka's life, the near-death experience that snapped his precarious attachment to the conventional world and showed him a new path: the liberating potential of misery.
Was he bent on suicide, or was he too drunk to know what he was doing? One night in December 1924 he planted himself on a Kumamoto railroad track and, arms raised, stared down an oncoming trolley. The trolley screeched to a halt, at which - according to one version of the story - an exasperated passenger leapt off, collared the wretch, and dragged him to a Zen temple for discipline.
What would his fate have been had he been handed over to the police instead? The head priest of the Ho'on-ji Temple was one Mochizuki Gian. Asking no questions, issuing no reproaches, he fed the overgrown waif and told him he could stay as long as he liked. Under Gian's guidance Santoka meditated, studied the Buddhist sutras and did odd jobs around the temple. In 1925, aged 42, he was ordained a Zen priest. Now he embarked upon vagrancy in earnest.
"What I forever aspire to," he wrote in his diary seven years later, "is a mind calm and free from pressure, a realm of roundness, wholeness... I have to walk, walk, walk until I get there."
In other words:
"as muddy water flows/ it becomes clear"
The rest of his life, at least its externals, is easily summarized: he walked, begged, drank and wrote. Many of the poems are about walking, begging, drinking and writing:
"hurry down the road/ never look back"
"no help/ for the likes of me/ I go on walking"
"get drunk/ you hear all sorts of voices/ winter rain"
"Heaven/ doesn't kill me/ it makes me write poems"
"even in/ my iron begging bowl/ hailstones"
"autumn wind/ for all my walking/ for all my walking"
That last was written in 1939, the year before his death. With a few sedentary interludes, he had been on the road 13 years. The poet seems to feel he had little to show for all his walking, certainly not that "realm of wholeness" he had been seeking. On the other hand (there is always an "other hand" in the cryptic, ambiguous world of haiku), the poem may admit of a brighter interpretation. In a diary notation of 1930 Santoka had quoted the 10th-century Chinese monk Fayan Wenyi's dictum: "Each step is an arrival," adding on his own account, "Forget about past walking, don't think about future walking; one step, another step, no long ago, no now, no east or west, one step equals totality. Get this far and you understand the meaning of walking Zen."
His first walking trip began in 1926; it lasted three years. He wore the black robes of a mendicant monk. On his shaven head perched a wide-brimmed conical straw hat, his only protection against the rain. He carried a wooden staff and an iron begging bowl. Begging is a traditional religious discipline undertaken by Buddhist monks on behalf of their temples, but Santoka belonged to no temple and thus forfeited all claims to popular respect. He was a beggar, pure and simple. His practice was to stand in front of a house or shop and chant a sutra until he was either given something or chased away. As the Depression of the 1930s deepened, patience with "the likes of him" wore increasingly thin.
"Living," he noted in his diary in 1932, "is tasting. People are happiest when they can really learn to be who they are. A beggar has to learn to be an all-out beggar. Unless he can be that, he will never taste the happiness of being a beggar."
Did he taste it? If so, the savor quickly faded. "I hate begging," he wrote in 1930. "I hate wandering. Most of all, I hate having to do things I hate!" Such black moods were transitory but recurring. "Even if it means nothing to eat," he wrote in 1933, "I don't want to do any more of that hateful begging! People who have never done any begging seem to have difficulty understanding how I feel about this."
And yet he persisted. Even after he managed to procure a retreat for himself, an abandoned cottage he moved into in 1932, he continued to walk, continued to beg. At home in his hermitage, he found he spent more time cultivating his garden than writing his poems. Only on the road could he write. And so, even when relatively settled, he set out frequently, walking nowhere that a non-poet would recognize as a destination. His begging generally began at dawn and ended as soon as he had enough to satisfy his immediate wants: a simple meal, enough sake to induce a measure of self-forgetfulness, a bath, and a night's lodging at the cheapest of inns. Of one particularly crowded hostelry he wrote:
"stretching out my feet/ they touch the man from Shikoku"
Haiku is the world's shortest verse form. Rooted in the light verse that absorbed so much of the leisure of ancient Japan's dilettante-aristocracy, it was elevated to a serious art form in the 17th century by the most famous of Japan's many wandering poets, Matsuo Basho. He set the standards for imbuing haiku's 17 syllables with transcendantal implications as vast, he claimed, as the universe itself. As the modern Zen master Daisetsu Suzuki explains, "At the supreme moment of life and death we just utter a cry or take to action, we never argue, we never give ourselves up to lengthy talk." Haiku aspires to be that cry uttered at "the supreme moment," which is every moment lived to the full.
A modern haiku revival that began in the late 19th-century included among its innovations "free-verse haiku." This dispensed with the 17-syllable format and the traditional obligation to include a "seasonal" word. Soun was at the forefront of this novelty. Santoka embraced it with particular enthusiasm. His verses, indeed, are so free as to blur at times the distinction between a poem and a random jotting:
"tree fallen over/ sitting on it"
"on the road/ a tooth/ about to come loose"
"cold clouds/ hurrying"
"Haiku-like haiku aren't particularly bad," he wrote. "But haiku that don't seem haiku-like at all - nowadays that's the kind I'm after."
Simplicity is not easy. "Today I managed to write ten haiku. To be sure, they're about as much good as bits of broken tile. Still, if I polish them up, they'll probably shine insofar as bits of tile can. So it's polish, polish! Polish until they shine!"
"Santoka," he admonished himself, "you are a man who lives only for haiku. Without haiku, you don't even exist!"
True enough, his haiku and his existence are inseparable. He crafted, endured, at times even relished, the sort of life whose every passing moment is a poem - at least a poem in embryo.
"not a cloud in sight/ off comes my hat"
"If," he wrote, "there is anything good in my life - or I should say, anything good in my poems - it comes from the fact that they are not imitative, they are not contrived, they tell few lies, they're never forced.”
"camellia/ I turned to look back at/ red”
He gave up everything - home, family, dignity, all the comforts and joys of a normal, settled, prosaic life - for what? To discover what? The redness of a camellia?
Doesn’t everyone know that camellias are red? Of course, but it is the haiku poet's peculiar gift to be startled by the familiar - to be jolted by it into a state of poetry. The distinction is not between knowing and not knowing, but between knowing and experiencing. If a poem can impart the experience, as opposed to mere information, it is a success, and its brevity and simplicity do it no discredit.
Here Japanese has a distinct advantage over English. English is hard pressed to convey the poetic ambiguity, so natural in Japanese, as to, for example, what the subject of a sentence might be. The camellia poem, eight words long in English, has four words in Japanese, and "I" is not one of them. That could be you looking back at the camellia, or it could be some third party; it could be all of us together. For that matter, there is no certainty it is the camellia that is being looked back at. Grammatically speaking, it could be the red camellia looking back - at you, perhaps. All this bears on the distinction beteween knowing, which is precise and logical but abstract, and experiencing, which is concrete but inconclusive.
"Let neither of us think too much," Santoka once wrote to a friend. "Let's become more foolish. Better: let's revert to our original foolishness." Why? To experience life rather than know it, to see the world and everything in it, every "supreme moment," as though for the first time - "like a baby who is yet unable to smile," as the Chinese sage Lao Tzu put it 2500 years ago. Was Santoka that ancient baby, blundering, through a freak accident of reincarnation, into the 20th-century?
“nearly run over/ by a car/ cold cold road”
Assuredly, he was no better suited than an infant for the complexities and noisy distractions of 20th-century life. Not that he disdained modernity. On the contrary, he admired it, and we catch him in October 1930 confiding to his diary: "Today as I was walking along, I kept thinking to myself: when there are trains, when there are automobiles, to walk, and moreover to walk in straw sandals - what an outmoded, what an inefficient and burdensome way to travel!"
Yes, but: "Nevertheless, by venturing to do something so ludicrous, I, who am not very clever, justify my existence."
Santoka published several haiku collections in his lifetime; on his journeys he corresponded with other poets by mail, and was a welcome guest at poetry meetings - one was in fact to have taken place at his cottage the night he died. Still, his admirers were few, and after his death in 1940 he was soon forgotten. A Santoka revival a generation later would have seemed highly improbable, and yet, against all odds, that is what occurred. It began in the 1970s, and swelled to such proportions that "at present," noted one commentator in 1980, "more books on Santoka are available than perhaps on any other Japanese poet, ancient or modern."
What do Japanese today, busy to the point of workaholism, prosperous to the point of stupefaction, webbed and wired via electronic gadgetry to a world of unending affairs and non-stop chatter, see in this solitary, rootless, silent, poverty-stricken poet who situated himself in the universe as a beggar and sought the wisdom of foolishness?
What they see is, of course, what they sense is missing from their own lives. They - we - could pursue it easily enough. All that's necessary is to cast off everything, but who has the courage, or the madness, to do it? Vagrant poets have it. It is their curse and their gift. They follow where it leads, shouldering its burdens and reaping its rewards:
"the deeper I go/ the deeper I go/ green mountains"