When all the guests have arrived, they sound a wooden gong, and the host silently appears to beckon them to the tea room. Each guest in turn stops at the water basin for a sip. At closer range, the teahouse turns out to be a rustic thatch-roofed hut with gray plaster walls and an asymmetrical supporting framework of hand-hewn woods. The floor is pitched above the ground as in the traditional house, but instead of a doorway there is a small square hole through which one must climb on his knees—a psychological design feature intended to ensure that all worldly dignity is left outside. Only the humble can enter here, for each must kneel in the sight of the others present.The interior of the tea room may feel cramped at first. Although the room is virtually bare, there seems little space left after the other guests have knelt about the central hearth. The room is in thesukiyastyle favored by Rikyu, with the walls a patchwork of dull plaster, raw wood, a fewshojirice-paper windows, and a smalltokonomaart alcove. The only decoration is a single object on thetokonomadais and the hanging scroll against the back wall. This impression of simple rusticity is deliberately deceptive, however, for the tea room is actually fashioned from the finest available woods and costs considerably more per unit area than the host's home. It is ironic that the sense of poverty and anti-materialism pervading the tea room can be achieved only at enormous expense, yet this deceit is one of the outstanding creations of Zen culture. The room and its psychological impact have been eloquently analyzed by the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki.As I look around, in spite of its obvious simplicity the room betrays every mark of thoughtful designing: the windows are irregularly inserted; the ceiling is not of one pattern; the materials used, simple and un-ornamental . . . the floor has a small square opening where hot water is boiling in an artistically-shaped iron kettle.The paperedshojicovering the windows admit only soft light, shutting out direct sunshine. . . . As I sit here quietly before the fireplace, I become conscious of the burning of incense. The odor is singularly nerve soothing. . . . Thus composed in mind, I hear a soft breeze passing through the needle leaves of the pine tree; the sound mingles with the trickling of water from a bamboo pipe into the stone basin.1The tea ceremony is intended to engage all the senses, soothing each in turn. As described by Suzuki, the organs of sight, hearing, and smell are all embraced even before the ceremony begins. The purpose, of course, is to create a feeling of harmony and tranquility conducive to the reverential spirit of the Zen sacrament. The surroundings massage your mind and adjust your attitude. This point is particularly stressed by Suzuki.Where [tranquility] is lacking, the art will lose its significance altogether. . . . The massing of rocks, the trickling of water, the thatched hut, the old pine trees sheltering it, the moss-covered stone lantern, the sizzling of the kettle water, and the light softly filtering through the paper screens—all these are meant uniformly to create a meditative frame of mind.2If a multicourse ceremony is in store, a light meal ofhors d'oeuvresand sake is served first. If the dinner hour is near, it may in fact be a substantial repast, all of which is eaten from lacquer or porcelain bowls set on a tray on the floor. After the food is consumed, the guests file out of the teahouse and wait for the host to announce the beginning of the actual tea ceremony. When they return, the ambience of the tea room has been subtly changed: the hanging scroll has vanished from thetokonomato be replaced by a simple vase containing one or two partially opened buds; and a cheerful charcoal fire, seasoned with pine needles and a touch of incense, glows from the sunken hearth in the center of the room there. Water is boiling in a kettle, emitting a sound that suggests wind in a pine forest, a subtle aural effect caused by small bits of iron attached to the bottom of the vessel.Beside the seated host are the implements of the ceremony: a lacquer or ceramic tea caddy with the powdered green tea(koicha), a jar of cold water for replenishing the kettle, a bamboo dipper, a new bamboo whisk, a receptacle for waste water, a linen napkin for the bowl, and, finally, the tea bowl itself, best described as a Zen loving cup or chalice. All the utensils have been selected for their special aesthetic qualities, but the bowl is always the unchallengedpiece de resistanceand may well be an heirloom from the hand of a seventeenth-century potter. Each guest is also provided with tiny sweet cakes, to salve his mouth against the bitter tea.With everything at hand, the host begins to prepare the whipped green tea. It is a seated dance, an orchestrated ritual, as deliberate, paced, and formal as the elevation of the host in a Catholic Mass. All the gestures have been practiced for years, until they fit together in a fluid motion. First the bowl is rinsed with hot water from the kettle and wiped with a napkin. Next the bamboo scoop is used to transport the powderedkoichafrom the caddy into the bowl, after which boiling water is added from the bamboo dipper. The host then proceeds, with measured motions, to blend the tea with the bamboo whisk, gradually transforming the dry powder and boiling water into a jade blend as exquisitely beautiful as it is harshly bitter.The guest of honor has the first taste. Taking the bowl, he salutes the host and then samples the preparation, complimenting the host on its quality. After two more precise sips, he wipes the lip with a napkin he has brought for that purpose, rotates the bowl, and passes it to the next guest, who repeats the ritual. The last to drink must empty the bowl. Curiously enough, only the host is denied a taste of his handiwork. After the formal drinking ofkoicha, the bowl is rinsed and a second batch of tea is made—this time a thinner variety known asusucha. Although it is also whipped Sung-style, it is considerably lighter in consistency and taste.After the second cup of tea, the formal part of the ceremony is completed, and the guests are at liberty to relax, enjoy sweets, and discuss Zen aesthetics. The focus of conversation is usually the tea bowl, which is passed around for all to admire in detail. Comments on the flower arrangement are also in order, as is a bit of poetry appropriate to the season. What is not discussed—indeed, what no one wants to discuss—is the world outside the garden gate. Each guest is at one with himself, his place, and the natural setting. Values have been subtly guided into perspective, spirits purified, appreciation of beauty rewarded; for a fleeting moment the material world of dualities has become as insubstantial as a dream.The tea ceremony is the great parable of Zen culture, which teaches by example that the material world is a tThef depriving us of our most valuable possessions—naturalness, simplicity, self-knowledge. But it is also much more; its underlying aesthetic principles are the foundation of latter-day Zen culture. It is a perfect blending of the three faces of Zen. First there are the physical art forms themselves: the tea ceremony deeply influenced architectural tastes, bringing into being the informalsukiyastyle to replace the rigidshoinformulas of thesamuraihouse; the art of flower arrangement, or Ikebana, owes much to the floral arrangements required for the ceremony; painting and calligraphy were influenced by the understated decorative requirements of thetokonomahanging scroll; lacquer ware developed in directions designed to complement the artistic principles of the ceremony utensils; and, finally, the growth of Japanese ceramic art from the fifteenth century onward was largely due to the particular aesthetic and practical needs of the tea ceremony.The second face of Zen, tranquility in a troubled world, found its finest expression incha-no-yu, which demonstrates as no sermon ever could the Zen approach to life.The third face of Zen is that of aesthetics. By becoming a vehicle for the transmission of Zen aesthetic principles,cha-no-yuhas preserved Zen culture for all times. It has given the people at large a standard of taste, guaranteeing that certain basic ideals of beauty will always be preserved against the ravages of mechanical civilization. And it is in this connection that we must examine the special features of the tea ceremony introduced by Hideyoshi's tea master, Sen no Rikyu. To the ancient Zen ideas ofyugenandsabihe brought the new concept ofwabi.Yugen, the realization of profundity through open-ended suggestion, found its finest expression in No poetry.Sabigrew out of the Heian admiration for lovely things on the verge of extinction. By the period this curious attitude was extended to things already old, and so entered the idea ofsabi, a term denoting objects agreeably mellowed with age.Sabialso brought melancholy overtones of loneliness, of age left behind by time. New objects are assertive and striving for attention; old, worn objects have the quiet, peaceful air that exudes tranquility, dignity, and character. Although there is no word in a Western language precisely equivalent tosabi, the ideal is well understood. For example, we say that the sunburned face of a fisherman has more character than that of a beardless youth. But to the Japanesesabiis first and foremost the essence of beauty, whether in a weathered house or temple, the frayed golden threads of fabric binding a Zen scroll, a withered bough placed in thetokonomaalcove, or an ancient kettle rusty with time. The ideal ofsabi, which became part of the Zen aesthetic canon of beauty, was perfectly at home in the tea ceremony, where even the utensils were deliberately chosen for their weathered look.Sabi, however, seemed an incomplete ideal to Sen no Rikyu. The fact that rich objects are old does not make them less rich.Sabican still encompass snobbery. As tea master for both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, Rikyu was so pained by their ostentation that he eventually revolutionized the tea ceremony and created a new aesthetic standard:wabi, a deliberate restraint, which is exemplified in his tea party of the single morning glory.Wabi, now a cornerstone of Zen aesthetic theory, is well described in a poem by Rikyu, which includes the lines:How much does a person lack himself,Who feels the need to have so many things.In a sense,wabiis the glorification of artificial poverty, artificial because there must be the element of forced restraint and in genuine poverty there is nothing to restrain. Thewabitea ceremony permits no hint of wealth to be in evidence; those who enter the tea garden must leave their worldly status at the gate. Similarly, thesukiya-style teahouse must look like a rustic hut—not made out of something new, for that would destroysabi, but not out of expensive antique woods, either. This ideal extends even to the floral arrangement, one or at most two buds; the clothes one wears, simple not dressy; the pots and cups, plain and undecorated.Wabipurged the tea ceremony of all its lingering aristocratic qualities, bringing into beingcha-no-yuas it is practiced today. Today many Japanese, even those who practice neither tea drinking nor Zen, know and appreciate the ideals preserved in the ceremony. In recent years the concept ofwabihas become the rallying point for those who regret the intrusions of the modern West into traditional Japanese culture, andcha-no-yuis valued as never before as a lesson in life's true values.CHAPTER FOURTEENZen Ceramic ArtThou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity.John Keats,Ode on a Grecian UrnShino tea bowlRaku tea bowlAlthough Japanhad been a nation of potters almost from prehistoric times, it was only after the rise of Zen influence and a popular interest in the tea ceremony that ceramics was raised from craft to high art. The great age of Japanese ceramics occurred several hundred years after the heroic periods of Chinese ceramic art in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, but, as in other cases, the Japanese eventually equaled and in some ways surpassed their mainland teachers.The Stone Age Jomon tribes in Japan created some of the richest figurine art of any of the world's prehistoric peoples. These Jomon figurines, fired at low temperatures and rarely over six or eight inches in height, are a classic puzzle to anthropologists and art historians, for they sometimes seem Polynesian, sometimes pre-Columbian, and sometimes pure abstraction in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, certain Jomon figurines could pass as works of Picasso or Miro. At times the features of the body were rendered recognizably, but usually they were totally stylized and integrated into the figure as part of some larger interest in material and pure form. It was a noble beginning for what would be a permanent Japanese interest in the look and feel of natural clay.When the Jomon were displaced around the third centuryb.c.by the Yayoi, their beautiful figurine art disappeared, and for several centuries Japan produced mainly pedestrian crocks and drinking vessels. The few figurines created retained little of the sophisticated Jomon abstraction. Around the turn of the fourth centurya.d.,however, Yayoi potters found their metier, and began the famoushaniwafigurines, hollow-eyed statuettes in soft brown clay which were used to decorate aristocratic tombs, and simple but elegant vases and water pots in low-fired brown clay, which often were dyed with cinnabar and which give evidence of being thrown on some form of primitive wheel.This domestic ware was in such demand that a class of professional potters came into being—inevitably leading to a gradual falling off of the individualistic character of the pots, as craftsmen began to mass-produce what had previously been a personal art form. The Korean Buddhist culture which reached Japan in the fifth and sixth centuries brought the Japanese new techniques for high-firing their stoneware pots, introducing a process whereby ashes from the kiln were allowed to adhere to the surface of a piece to produce a natural glaze. These new high-temperature pots had a hard surface texture and an ashen- gray color, while the existing native wares of low-fired porous clays retained their natural brown hues.Typically the average Japanese preferred the natural-colored, soft clay vessels, and so the two types of pottery continued to be produced side by side for several hundred years, with the aristocracy choosing the hard-surfaced mainland-style gray worksand the common people continuing to use the simpler, underrated brown vessels, which were often fashioned by hand. The importance of this instinctive Japanese reaction for the later acceptance of Zen-inspired ceramic art cannot be over-stressed. Not only did the Japanese love of natural clay make them reject glazes for centuries after they had learned the necessary techniques, they also seem to have had little spontaneous interest in decorating their pots or using high-firing or mechanized techniques for their production, perhaps because the technology came between man and object, distancing the potter too far from his handiwork. Japanese potters cherished their regional individuality, and they continued to express their personal sensibilities in their work, so there were a multiplicity of rural kilns and a wide variety of styles.The passion for Chinese culture during the Nara period of the eighth century led to a brief fling with Tang Chinese-style three-color glazed wares among the imitative Japanese aristocracy; but these seem to have been too much at odds with native instincts, for they were soon forgotten. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the Heian era, both the indigenous pottery techniques—the low-fired, brown, porous pots for the common people and the high-fired, gray, polished bowls for the aristocracy—continued to thrive side by side. However, technical advances in the high-firing kilns brought about subtle changes in the mock-glazes of the aristocratic wares. It was discovered that if they were fired in an atmosphere where there was abundant oxygen, the fused particles of fueled ash on the surface would turn amber, whereas if oxygen was excluded from the kiln, the surface ash would fuse to a pastel green. Thus by varying the baking process, Heian potters could produce a variety of light colors, creating a pottery considerably more delicate than had been possible before. Aside from this refined technique for firing, however, the Japanese steadfastly refused to change their traditional methods of making pots.For this reason, Japanese ceramics were deliberately kept at a technically primitive stage until the early part of the thirteenth century while the Chinese were making considerable advances in the art. During the years from the ninth to the thirteenth century, while the Japanese isolated themselves from the mainland, the Sung Chinese were learning of new glazes far more subtle and refined than those employed during the T'ang. In the early years of the thirteenth century, when Japanese monks journeyed to China to study the new faith of Zen, they were dazzled by the sophisticated new Chinese wares they encountered. Through the offices of Zen a second revolution in Japanese ceramics occurred.The instrument for this second revolution (according to tradition) was the priest Dogen, founder of Japanese Soto Zen, who on one of his trips to China was accompanied by a Japanese potter known as Toshiro. Toshiro stayed in China for six years, studying the Sung techniques of glazing, and on his return he opened a kiln at Seto, where he began copying Sung glazed wares. Although he has been called the father of modem Japanese ceramics, his attempts to duplicate the highly praised Sung products were not entirely successful. Furthermore, the wares he did produce, decorative and thick-glazed, found no acceptance except among the aristocracy and priesthood, both of whom favored Seto wares for the new pastime of drinking Chinese tea. But while the Zen aesthetes and tea drinkers amused themselves with Seto's fake Sung celadons, the commoners continued to use unglazed stoneware.All this changed dramatically around the middle of the sixteenth century with the rise of an urban middle class and the sudden popularity of the Zen tea ceremony among this new bourgeoisie. Zen, which had brought Chinese glazes to Japan in the thirteenth century, sparked the emergence of a brilliant era of glazed ceramic art in the sixteenth. No longer content with primitive stoneware or reproductions of Chinese vessels, the potters of Japan finally developed native styles at once uniquely Japanese and as sophisticated as any the world has seen. It was another triumph for Zen culture. Rural kilns with long traditions of stoneware water vessels converted to the production of tea-ceremony wares, and throughout the land the search was on for colored glazes. The craze reached such heights that the shogun generals Nobunaga and Hideyoshi rewarded their successful military commanders not with decorations but with some particularly coveted tea-ceremony utensils.Although ceramic tea caddies and water jars were required for the ceremony, the real emphasis was on the drinking bowl, for this was the piece that was handled and admired at close range. A proper bowl, in addition to being beautiful, had to be large enough and deep enough to allow sufficient tea for three or four drinkers to be whisked; it had no handle and consequently had to be of a light, porous, nonconducting clay with a thick, rough glaze to act as a further insulator and to permit safe handling between drinkers; the rim had to be thick and tilted slightly inward, to provide the participants with a pleasant sensation while drinking and to minimize dripping. In other words, these bowls were as functionally specialized in their own way as a brandy snifter or a champagne glass of today.A number of styles of tea bowl developed during the sixteenth century, reflecting the artistic visions of various regional potters and the different clays available. What these bowls had in common, beyond their essential functional characteristics, was an adherence to the specialized dictates of Zen aesthetic theory. Equally important, they were a tribute to the historic Japanese reverence for natural clay. Even though they were glazed, portions of the underlying clay texture were often allowed to show through, and the overall impression was that the glaze was used to emphasize the texture of the underlying clay, not disguise it. The colors of the glazes were natural and organic, not hard and artificial.The social unrest preceding the rise of Nobunaga caused a number of potters to leave the Seto area, site of the fake Sung production, and resettle in the province of Mino, where three basic styles of tea bowl eventually came to prominence. First there was the Chinese-style tea vessel, which had been the mainstay of the older Seto kilns. Yellow glazes, once the monopoly of Seto, were also used at Mino, but different clays, combined with advancing technical competence and a new willingness to experiment, produced a new "Seto" ware that was a rich yellow and considerably more Japanese than Chinese. Second there was a new, thoroughly Zen-style bowl developed by the Mino potters. It was broader-based than the Chinese style, with virtually straight sides, and it was covered with a thick, creamy off-white glaze. Warm and endearing in appearance, with a flowing sensuous texture inviting to the touch, it became known as Shino.Some say Shino bowls were named after a celebrated master of the tea ceremony, while others maintain the term was taken from the Japanese word for white,shiro. Whatever the case, this was the first glazed ware of truly native origins; and it marked the beginning of a new Japanese attitude toward pottery. No longer inhibited by reverence for Chinese prototypes, the makers of Shino let their spontaneity run wild. The new white glaze was deliberately applied in a haphazard manner, often covering only part of the bowl or being allowed to drip and run. Sometimes part of the glaze was wiped off after it had been applied, leaving thin spots where the brown under-clay could show through after the firing. Or bubbles, bums, and soot were allowed to remain in the glaze as it was fired. Sometimes the white glaze was bathed in a darker coating in which incisions were made to allow the white to show through. At other times, sketchy designs, seemingly thrown down with a half-dry brush, were scribbled on the white bowls so that they appeared to be covered with Zen graffiti. Throughout all these innovations, the potters seemed to want to produce works as rough, coarse, and unsophisticated as possible. Before long they had a gray glaze as well, and finally they produced a shiny black glaze whose precise formulation remains one of the unsolved mysteries of Momoyama art.The next color to enter the Mino repertory, after yellow, white, gray, and black, was a stunning green. This was the third style of Mino tea bowl, and it was invented by a disciple of Rikyu whose name, Oribe, has been given to an incredible variety of wares—tea bowls, tea caddies, water jars, incense burners, and a host of dishes for serving food. Sometimes the wares were solid green, but Oribe also had a habit of splashing the green over one section of a piece, or allowing it to run into one corner of a plate and freeze there in a limpid puddle. The portions of Oribe wares not covered with the splash of green were dull shades, ranging from gray to reddish brown, and on this background artists began to paint decorative designs- flowers, geometrical figures, even small sketches or still-lifes—something new and revolutionary for Japanese ceramics, but the forerunner of the profusion of decorative wares that appeared after the Momoyama. Shino had broken the bonds of the centuries of unglazed stoneware and proper copies of Chinese pots by introducing a native style of glazing and a new aesthetic freedom; Oribe led the way into a new world of anything-goes pottery, with half-glazes, painted decorative motifs, and experimentation in new, hitherto unknown shapes and types of vessels.While the native Japanese potters at Mino were expanding their craft, another important development with far-reaching consequences for the Zen arts was taking place in the far south of the Japanese archipelago near the Korean peninsula. The ceramic arts of Korea were quite advanced at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with high-fired glazed wares as heavy and sturdy as the peasant stock from which they sprang. But the pots were made by building up coils of clay and beating them into a solid walled vessel rather than throwing them on a wheel. This combination of high and low seems to have appealed to the Japanese clans living near the Korean mainland, for they brought a number of Korean potters to the southern city of Karatsu and started an industry.The staple product of the Korean craftsman was a crude medium-sized bowl with sloping sides, used in their homeland for individual servings of rice. The primitive quality of these bowls perfectly suited the growing inverse snobbery of the tea ceremony, and soon Japanese aesthetes were drinking tea and admiring the Zen beauty in the Korean rice bowl. While the Mino potters were deliberately making the Sung tea bowl rougher and rougher (that is, addingwabi), those in Karatsu found themselves with a foreign bowl ready-made for tea.When Hideyoshi invaded Korea during the last decade of the sixteenth century, he and his generals were careful to kidnap as many Korean potters as possible, whom they settled over a large part of Japan. No longer restricted to a small area in the south, the Koreans injected a vigorous transfusion of peasant taste into all of Japanese ceramic art, extinguishing the last remnants of the refined Sung ideals. The Momoyama tea masters were given a new but still foreign standard of rustic chic perfectly in accord withwabitea.Not surprisingly, it was Sen no Rikyu who synthesized the new native freedom and the fresh influx of mainland technology to create the undisputed glory of Japanese ceramics—the famousraku. Unquestionably Japan's most original contribution to the history of ceramics,rakuis produced in a manner entirely different from earlier techniques, and it is impossible to speak ofrakuwithout speaking of Zen. As might be expected,rakuwas invented in the Zen center of Kyoto, a city with no previous history of ceramic production, and it came into being when Rikyu happened to take a fancy to the roof tiles being produced by a Korean workman named Chojiro. Rikyu hit upon the notion that the texture and feel of these tiles would be perfect forwabi-style tea, and he encouraged Chojiro in the making of a few tea bowls with the materials and firing techniques used for tiles.The bowls Chojiro made were neither thrown on a wheel nor built up from coils, but molded and carved like sculpture.A mixture of clays was first blended to gain the desired consistency of lightness and plasticity, after which a spatula and knife were used to shape a rough-sided, textured bowl whose sense of process was flaunted rather than obscured—an overt tactile quality perhaps first seen in the West in the rough-hewn sculptures of Rodin. These bowls were fired in a most unconventional manner: rather than being placed cold in a wood-burning kiln and gradually heated, baked, and cooled over a period of days, they, like the tiles, were thrust directly into a torrid charcoal kiln for a blistering thermal shock, which gave them an instant look of the ravaged face of ancientsabi. Raku wares were first made in black with an iron-like glaze that is almost like frozen lava, but the later repertory included glazes that were partly or wholly red or off-white. Unlike the Shino and Oribe bowls,rakupieces were not decorated with designs or spots of color; they werewabiandsabiwith unpretentious, weathered grace. The last term you think of when seeingrakuis ornate.Rikyu foundrakubowls perfect for the tea ceremony; they were austere, powerful, seemingly wrenched from melted rock. In shape they were broad-based with gently rounded, one might almost say organically rounded, sides leading to an undulating lip, wrapping in slightly over the tea, thereby holding the heat and preventing drips. Not only were they light and porous, allowing for minimal heat conduction and comfortable handling, their center of gravity was so low they were almost impossible to tip over, permitting easy whisking of the powdered tea as they rested on thetatami-matted floor of the tea room. (It should be noted that special bowls for summer usage de-emphasized certain of these characteristics: they were thinner-walled and shallower, since the object in hot months was to dissipate heat rather than conserve it.) But the most appealing qualities of therakuwere its sculptural sense of natural plastic form and its soft, bubbly, almost liquid glaze, which virtually invites one to hold it in his lips. Also, the colors of the glazes just happen to contrast beautifully with the pale sea-green of the powdered tea.This was the end of the search for the perfect Zen tea bowl, and Hideyoshi was so pleased with Chojiro's handiwork that he gave the potter's family a seal bearing the word that would give the form its name:raku, meaning pleasure or comfort. Chojiro's descendants became therakudynasty, as generation after generation they set the standards for others to follow.Hideyoshi's act of official recognition meant that Japanese potters were no longer merely craftsmen, but fully accredited artists. In later years, Japanese ceramics became distinguished in many areas—from the traditional wares produced at a multiplicity of local kilns to a vast new nationwide porcelain industry producing decorative works for both export and home consumption. Tea-ceremony vessels were created in great profusion as well, but, unfortunately, genuine art cannot be mass-produced. By the eighteenth century, the great age of Zen ceramic art was over, never to be recovered. Today the early wares of the Zen Momoyama artists command their weight in gold, perhaps platinum. This is the great irony of thewabitea vessels, if not of all Zen culture.Tea bowls, the major expression of Zen art, seem at once both primitive and strikingly modern. To begin to understand this contradiction we must go back to our own nineteenth century in the West, when tastes ran to decoration for its own sake and the rule of perfect, symmetrical, polished form was the aesthetic ideal. Into this smug, serene sea of aesthetic sureties, which in some ways reached back to the ancient Greeks, the English critic John Ruskin threw a boulder when he wrote:Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. . . . [t]he demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. . . . Imperfection is in some sort essential to all we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body. . . . To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed.1Ruskin was rediscovering a large piece of Zen aesthetic theory while laying the groundwork for many of our modern ideals of beauty.To see the similarity, let us examine for a moment a few of the finer points of Zen aesthetic theory as exemplified in the classic tea bowls. In form the bowls are frequently asymmetrical and imperfect; the glaze seems to be a species of moss still in the process of spreading over portions of the sides it somehow never managed to reach, and it is uneven, marred by cracks, lumps, scratches, and foreign contaminants. If imperfection is the goal, these bowls extend well beyond Ruskin's original standards. But not only are they imperfect, they also seem old and weathered, with the natural patina of a dried-up riverbed. They show absolutely no evidence that any conscious attempt was made to create a work of art; they appear to be completely functional.It is all a deception. Master potters spend literally decades perfecting the Zen art of the controlled haphazard. One of the first principles they honor iswabi, which deplores nonfunctional decorative objects, polished surfaces, artificiality in shape or color, and anything unnatural to the materials used. Works of art withoutwabimay have superficial external beauty, but they forfeit inner warmth. Bowls out of shape, with cracks, blobs, and ashes in the glaze, invite us to partake of the process of creation through their asymmetry and imperfection. They also lead us past the surface by virtue of its being deliberately marred.Making a bowl withwabiis considerably more difficult thanmaking a smooth, symmetrical, perfectly glazed piece. The creation of contrived "accidents," on which much of the illusion of artlessness depends, is particularly difficult. Everywhere there are scars, contaminants, spotty glaze—all as deliberate as the decoration on a Dresden plate; connoisseurship consists in admiring how the artist managed to make it seem so natural and unavoidable.The same skill goes to make a piece look old, the essential quality ofsabi. By suggesting long years of use, the bowls acquire humility and richness. There is no need to "wear the new off" in order to give them character; they are already mellow and unpretentious. The potter's genius has gone to create the sense of wear, a quality considerably more difficult to realize than an aura of newness.The potter wants the Zen connoisseur to understand what he has done: to see the clay, to feel and admire its texture, to appreciate the reasons for the type and color of the glaze. 'The pieces are carefully contrived to draw attention to both their original elements and the process by which these elements were blended. For example, a bowl whose glaze only partially covers its clay provides a link with the natural world from which it came. Its texture springs out, like that of a piece of natural driftwood. At the same time, the bald clay, the streaks of glaze, the hand-formed sculpture, allow one to recognize the materials and the process of formation. When the potter keeps no secrets, one enters into the exhilaration of his moment of creation. Once again, this is a deliberate aesthetic device, reminding one that the potter is an individual artist, not a faceless craftsman. The look and feel of Zen ceramics make them seem forerunners of the modern craft-pottery movement, but few modern potters are blessed with the rich legacy of Zen aesthetic ideals that made these ceramics possible. The secret lies deep in ancient Zen culture, which taught the Momoyama masters how the difficult could be made to seem effortless.CHAPTER FIFTEENZen and HaikuMusic, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory—Percy Bysshe ShelleyHaiku is regardedby many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes ofkoanriddles,sutras, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional Japanese poetry—an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the Japanese of the early Zen masters.On first acquaintance Japanese seems an unlikely language for poetry. It is a syllabic tongue with each syllable ending in a vowel or the nasal n; consequently there are only five true rhymes in the entire language. Italian poets overcame a somewhat similar handicap, but their language is stressed, which Japanese is not. With no usable rhymes and no stress, how can the music of poetry be created? Over the centuries, the Japanese solved this problem by replacing meter with a system of fixed syllables—either five or seven—for each line. (This means that some lines of Japanese poetry may have only one word, but the system seems to work.) In place of rhyme, Japanese poets learned to orchestrate the pitch of individual vowels within a single line to give a sense of music. This device was illustrated by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth using a poem from the classical era. (The vowels are pronounced as in Italian.)Fu-ta-ri yu-ke-doYu-ki su-gi ga-ta-kiA-ki ya-ma woI-ka-de ka ki-mi gaHi-to-ri ko-ge na-muIn his analysis of this particular poem, Rexroth has pointed out that the first and last lines contain all five vowels in the language, whereas the middle lines contain various combinations and repetitions, which produce a pronounced musical effect.1The ability to create such music without rhyme, one of the finer achievements of Japanese poetry, is far more difficult than might at first be imagined and leads naturally to assonance, or the close repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repetition of similar consonant sounds. Some of the vowels have psychological overtones, at least to the sensitive Japanese ear: u is soft, a is sharp and resonant, o connotes vagueness tinged with profundity.2Various consonants also convey an emotional sense in a similar manner.Another clever device of the early Japanese versifiers was the use of words with double meanings. One example of this is the so-called pivot word, which occurs approximately halfway through a poem such as the above and serves both to complete the sense of the first part of the poem with one meaning and to begin a new sense and direction with its second meaning. This can at times produce a childish effect, and it does not always elevate the overall dignity of the verse. Another use of double meaning is far more demanding. Since the Japanese kana script is entirely phonetic and allows for no distinction in spelling between homonyms, words which sound alike but have different meanings, it is possible to carry two or more ideas through a poem. (A somewhat labored example in English might be, "My tonights hold thee more," "My two knights hold the moor." If these were written alike and pronounced alike, then the poem could mean either or both.) The first meaning may be a concrete example of a lover pining for his love, and the second a metaphor. Ideally, the two meanings support each other, producing a resonance said to be truly remarkable.The early Japanese poets overcame the limitations of the Japanese language both by attuning their ears to the music of the words and by capitalizing on the large incidence of homonyms. They settled the matter of meter, as noted, by prescribing the number of syllables per line, with the principal form being five lines with syllable counts of 5,7,5,7, and 7. This thirty-one-syllable poem, known as thewaka, became the Japanese "sonnet" and by far the most popular poetic form during the Heian era. Almost all a poet can do in five lines, however, is to record a single emotion or observation. The medium governed the message, causing Japanese poets early on to explore their hearts more than their minds. Thewakabecame a cry of passion; a gentle confirmation of love; a lament for the brevity of blossoms, colored leaves, the seasons, life itself. A sampling ofwakafrom the early classical era shows the aesthetic sense of the seasons and lyric charm of these verses.Tsuki ya aranuCan it be that the moon has changed?Haru ya mukashi noCan it be that the springHaru naranuIs not the spring of old times?Waga mi hitotsu waIs it my body aloneMoto no mi nishiteThat is just the same?3Judged on its concentrated power alone, for this is virtually all an English reader can evaluate, this poem is a masterpiece. Its content can be condensed into five lines because much of its impact lies in its suggestiveness. It is, however, closed-ended, with no philosophical implications other than a wry look at human perceptions. Haiku added new dimensions to Japanese poetry.The early aristocratic era gave Japanese poetry its form, the five-linewaka, and its subject matter, nature and the emotions. Later the familiar Japanese idea that life is but a fleeting moment and all things must blossom and fade was added. One critic has noted that as this idea took hold, poems gradually changed from praise of the plum blossom, which lasts for weeks, to praise of the cherry blossom, which fades in a matter of days.Hisakata noOn a day in springHikari nodokekiWhen the light throughout the skyHaru no hi niWarms with tranquility.Shizugokoro nakuWhy is it with unsettled heartHana no chiru ranThat the cherry flowers fall?4Japanese poetry of the pre-Zen period has been handed to us primarily in a few famous collections. The first great anthology of Japanese poetry is the Manyoshu, a volume of verses from the middle of the eighth century. A glance through the Manyoshu shows that the earliest poets did not confine themselves to five-line verses, but indulged in longer verses on heroic subjects, known aschoka. The tone, as Donald Keene has observed, is often more masculine than feminine, that is, more vigorous than refined. As sensibilities softened in the early part of the Heian era and native verse became the prerogative of women, while men struggled with the more "important" language of China, the feminine tone prevailed to such an extent that male writers posed as women when using the native script. The next great collection of verse, the Kokinshu, published in the tenth century, was virtually all five-linewakaconcerned with seasons, birds, flowers, and fading love, and embracing the aesthetic ideals ofaware,miyabi, andyugen.As the aristocratic culture gradually lost control in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new verse form, derived from thewaka, came into being:renga. This form consisted of a string of verses in the repeated sequence of 5,7,5 and 7,7 syllables per line—in reality a related series ofwakabut with the difference that no two consecutive two-or three-line verse sequences could be composed by the same individual. At first this new form seemed to offer hope of freeing poets from the increasingly confining range of subject matter prescribed for thewaka. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Before long therengawas saddled with a set of rules covering which verse should mention what season; at what point the moon, cherry blossoms, and the like should be noted; and so forth. Little creativity was possible under such restrictions. Versifying became, in fact, a party game much in favor with provincialsamuraiand peasants alike in times. While the remaining Kyoto aristocrats tried to keep theirrengain the spirit of the classicalwaka, with allusions to Chinese poems and delicate melancholy, the provincials threwrengaparties whose only aesthetic concern was adherence to the rules of the game. During the Ashikaga age,rengaand sake parties were the most popular forms of entertainment, butrenga'sonly genuine contribution to Japanese poetry was the use of the vernacular by provincial poets, which finally broke the stranglehold of Heian feminine aesthetics.By the beginning of the Momoyama era, linked verse hadrun its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga. Thewakahad been aristocratic, and the bestrengaprovincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant class. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first calledhaikai, after the first verse of therenga, which was called thehokku. The term "Haiku" actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant class, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older classical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in Japanese verse. This was the man now considered Japan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to Japanese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694).Basho was born asamuraiin an age when it was little more than an empty title, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperousdaimyowho transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to shift for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho "school," as well as making him a welcome guest atrengagatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors:Red pepper pods!Add wings to them,and they are dragonflies!5This verse is certainly "open-ended" insofar as it creates a reverberation of images in the mind, and, what is more, the effect is achieved by the comparison of two concrete images. There is no comment; the images are simply thrown out to give the mind a starting point. But the overall impact remains merely decorative art. It reflects the concept ofaware, or a pleasing recognition of beauty, rather thanyugen, the extension of awareness into a region beyond words.When he was about thirty-five, Basho created a Haiku that began to touch the deeper regions of the mind. This is the famousKare-eda niOn a withered branchkarasu-no tomari-keria crow has settled—aki-no-kureautumn nightfall.6As a simple juxtaposition of images the poem is striking enough, but it also evokes a comparison of the images, each of which enriches the other. The mind is struck as with a hammer, bringing the senses up short and releasing a flood of associations. Its only shortcoming is that the scene is static; it is a painting, not a happening of the sort that can sometimes trigger the sudden sense of Zen enlightenment.Perhaps Basho realized that his art had not yet drunk deeply enough at the well of Zen, for a few years after this poem was written he became a serious Zen student and began to travel around Japan soaking up images. His travel diaries of the last years are a kind of Haiku "poetics," in which he extends the idea ofsabito include the aura of loneliness that can surround common objects. Zen detachment entered his verses; all personal emotion was drained away, leaving images objective and devoid of any commentary, even implied.More important, the Zen idea of transience appeared. Not the transience of falling cherry blossoms but the fleeting instant of Zen enlightenment. Whereas the antilogickoananecdotes were intended to lead up to this moment, Basho's Haiku were the moment of enlightenment itself, as in his best-known poem:Furu-ike yaAn ancient pondkawazu tobi-komuA frog jumps inmizu-no-otoThe sound of water.These deceptively simple lines capture an intersection of the timeless and the ephemeral. The poem is said to have described an actual occurrence, an evening broken by a splash. The poet immediately spoke the last two lines of the poem, the ephemeral portion, and much time was then devoted to creating the remaining static and timeless part. This was as it should be, for the inspiration of a Haiku must be genuine and suggest its own lines at the moment it occurs. Zen eschews deliberation and rational analysis; nothing must come between object and perception at the critical moment.With this poem Basho invented a new form of Zen literary art, and Haiku was never the same afterward. To write this kind of poem, the artist must completely disengage—if only for an instant—all his interpretive faculties. His mind becomes one with the world around him, allowing his craft to operate instinctively in recording the image he perceives. For a moment he is privy to the inexpressible truth of Zen—that the transient is merely part of the eternal—and this instantaneous perception moves directly from his senses to his innermost understanding, without having to travel through his interpretive faculties. Earlier Zen writings in both Japan and China had described this process, but none had captured the phenomenon itself. By catching the momentary at the very instant of its collision with the eternal, Basho could produce a high-speed snapshot of the trigger mechanism of Zen enlightenment. In a modern metaphor, the Haiku became a Zen hologram, in which all the information necessary to re-create a large three-dimensional phenomenon was coded into a minuscule key. Any interpretation of the phenomenon would be redundant to a Zen adept, since the philosophical significance would re-create itself spontaneously from the critical images recorded in the poem. Thus a perfect Haiku is not about the moment of Zen enlightenment; it is that moment frozen in time and ready to be released in the listener's mind.Haiku is the most dehumanized of all poetry. Instead of the artist's sensations and feelings, we get simply the names of things. By Western standards they are hardly poems at all, merely a rather abbreviated list. As the critic-poet Kenneth Yasuda has pointed out, a Haiku poet does not give us meaning, he gives us objects that have meaning; he does not describe, he presents.7And unlike the poetry of the No, Haiku seems a form strangely devoid of symbolism. The tone seems matter-of-fact, even when touching upon the most potentially emotional of subjects. Take, for example, Basho's poem composed at the grave of one of his beloved pupils.Tsuka mo ugokeGrave mound, shake too!waga naku koe waMy wailing voice—aki-no-kazethe autumn wind.8No betrayal of emotion here, simply a comparison of his grief-ridden voice, a transient thing, with the eternal autumn wind. It is a Zen moment of recognition, devoid of emotion or self-pity, and yet somehow our sympathies spring alive, touching us in a way that the early classical poems on the passage of time never could.Love in Haiku is directed toward nature as much as toward man or woman. Part of the reason may be the stylistic requirement that every Haiku tell the reader the season. This is done by the so-called season word, which can either be an outright naming of the season (such as the "autumn" wind above) or some mention of a season-dependent natural phenomenon, such as a blossom, a colored leaf (green or brown), a summer bird or insect, snow, and so on. The tone is always loving, never accusatory (a tribute to the nature reverence of ancient Japan), and it can be either light or solemn. Chirps of insects, songs of birds, scents of blossoms, usually serve as the transient element in a Haiku, whereas water, wind, sunshine, and the season itself are the eternal elements.
When all the guests have arrived, they sound a wooden gong, and the host silently appears to beckon them to the tea room. Each guest in turn stops at the water basin for a sip. At closer range, the teahouse turns out to be a rustic thatch-roofed hut with gray plaster walls and an asymmetrical supporting framework of hand-hewn woods. The floor is pitched above the ground as in the traditional house, but instead of a doorway there is a small square hole through which one must climb on his knees—a psychological design feature intended to ensure that all worldly dignity is left outside. Only the humble can enter here, for each must kneel in the sight of the others present.
The interior of the tea room may feel cramped at first. Although the room is virtually bare, there seems little space left after the other guests have knelt about the central hearth. The room is in thesukiyastyle favored by Rikyu, with the walls a patchwork of dull plaster, raw wood, a fewshojirice-paper windows, and a smalltokonomaart alcove. The only decoration is a single object on thetokonomadais and the hanging scroll against the back wall. This impression of simple rusticity is deliberately deceptive, however, for the tea room is actually fashioned from the finest available woods and costs considerably more per unit area than the host's home. It is ironic that the sense of poverty and anti-materialism pervading the tea room can be achieved only at enormous expense, yet this deceit is one of the outstanding creations of Zen culture. The room and its psychological impact have been eloquently analyzed by the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki.
As I look around, in spite of its obvious simplicity the room betrays every mark of thoughtful designing: the windows are irregularly inserted; the ceiling is not of one pattern; the materials used, simple and un-ornamental . . . the floor has a small square opening where hot water is boiling in an artistically-shaped iron kettle.
The paperedshojicovering the windows admit only soft light, shutting out direct sunshine. . . . As I sit here quietly before the fireplace, I become conscious of the burning of incense. The odor is singularly nerve soothing. . . . Thus composed in mind, I hear a soft breeze passing through the needle leaves of the pine tree; the sound mingles with the trickling of water from a bamboo pipe into the stone basin.1
The tea ceremony is intended to engage all the senses, soothing each in turn. As described by Suzuki, the organs of sight, hearing, and smell are all embraced even before the ceremony begins. The purpose, of course, is to create a feeling of harmony and tranquility conducive to the reverential spirit of the Zen sacrament. The surroundings massage your mind and adjust your attitude. This point is particularly stressed by Suzuki.
Where [tranquility] is lacking, the art will lose its significance altogether. . . . The massing of rocks, the trickling of water, the thatched hut, the old pine trees sheltering it, the moss-covered stone lantern, the sizzling of the kettle water, and the light softly filtering through the paper screens—all these are meant uniformly to create a meditative frame of mind.2
If a multicourse ceremony is in store, a light meal ofhors d'oeuvresand sake is served first. If the dinner hour is near, it may in fact be a substantial repast, all of which is eaten from lacquer or porcelain bowls set on a tray on the floor. After the food is consumed, the guests file out of the teahouse and wait for the host to announce the beginning of the actual tea ceremony. When they return, the ambience of the tea room has been subtly changed: the hanging scroll has vanished from thetokonomato be replaced by a simple vase containing one or two partially opened buds; and a cheerful charcoal fire, seasoned with pine needles and a touch of incense, glows from the sunken hearth in the center of the room there. Water is boiling in a kettle, emitting a sound that suggests wind in a pine forest, a subtle aural effect caused by small bits of iron attached to the bottom of the vessel.
Beside the seated host are the implements of the ceremony: a lacquer or ceramic tea caddy with the powdered green tea
(koicha), a jar of cold water for replenishing the kettle, a bamboo dipper, a new bamboo whisk, a receptacle for waste water, a linen napkin for the bowl, and, finally, the tea bowl itself, best described as a Zen loving cup or chalice. All the utensils have been selected for their special aesthetic qualities, but the bowl is always the unchallengedpiece de resistanceand may well be an heirloom from the hand of a seventeenth-century potter. Each guest is also provided with tiny sweet cakes, to salve his mouth against the bitter tea.
With everything at hand, the host begins to prepare the whipped green tea. It is a seated dance, an orchestrated ritual, as deliberate, paced, and formal as the elevation of the host in a Catholic Mass. All the gestures have been practiced for years, until they fit together in a fluid motion. First the bowl is rinsed with hot water from the kettle and wiped with a napkin. Next the bamboo scoop is used to transport the powderedkoichafrom the caddy into the bowl, after which boiling water is added from the bamboo dipper. The host then proceeds, with measured motions, to blend the tea with the bamboo whisk, gradually transforming the dry powder and boiling water into a jade blend as exquisitely beautiful as it is harshly bitter.
The guest of honor has the first taste. Taking the bowl, he salutes the host and then samples the preparation, complimenting the host on its quality. After two more precise sips, he wipes the lip with a napkin he has brought for that purpose, rotates the bowl, and passes it to the next guest, who repeats the ritual. The last to drink must empty the bowl. Curiously enough, only the host is denied a taste of his handiwork. After the formal drinking ofkoicha, the bowl is rinsed and a second batch of tea is made—this time a thinner variety known asusucha. Although it is also whipped Sung-style, it is considerably lighter in consistency and taste.
After the second cup of tea, the formal part of the ceremony is completed, and the guests are at liberty to relax, enjoy sweets, and discuss Zen aesthetics. The focus of conversation is usually the tea bowl, which is passed around for all to admire in detail. Comments on the flower arrangement are also in order, as is a bit of poetry appropriate to the season. What is not discussed—indeed, what no one wants to discuss—is the world outside the garden gate. Each guest is at one with himself, his place, and the natural setting. Values have been subtly guided into perspective, spirits purified, appreciation of beauty rewarded; for a fleeting moment the material world of dualities has become as insubstantial as a dream.
The tea ceremony is the great parable of Zen culture, which teaches by example that the material world is a tThef depriving us of our most valuable possessions—naturalness, simplicity, self-knowledge. But it is also much more; its underlying aesthetic principles are the foundation of latter-day Zen culture. It is a perfect blending of the three faces of Zen. First there are the physical art forms themselves: the tea ceremony deeply influenced architectural tastes, bringing into being the informalsukiyastyle to replace the rigidshoinformulas of thesamuraihouse; the art of flower arrangement, or Ikebana, owes much to the floral arrangements required for the ceremony; painting and calligraphy were influenced by the understated decorative requirements of thetokonomahanging scroll; lacquer ware developed in directions designed to complement the artistic principles of the ceremony utensils; and, finally, the growth of Japanese ceramic art from the fifteenth century onward was largely due to the particular aesthetic and practical needs of the tea ceremony.
The second face of Zen, tranquility in a troubled world, found its finest expression incha-no-yu, which demonstrates as no sermon ever could the Zen approach to life.
The third face of Zen is that of aesthetics. By becoming a vehicle for the transmission of Zen aesthetic principles,cha-no-yuhas preserved Zen culture for all times. It has given the people at large a standard of taste, guaranteeing that certain basic ideals of beauty will always be preserved against the ravages of mechanical civilization. And it is in this connection that we must examine the special features of the tea ceremony introduced by Hideyoshi's tea master, Sen no Rikyu. To the ancient Zen ideas ofyugenandsabihe brought the new concept ofwabi.
Yugen, the realization of profundity through open-ended suggestion, found its finest expression in No poetry.Sabigrew out of the Heian admiration for lovely things on the verge of extinction. By the period this curious attitude was extended to things already old, and so entered the idea ofsabi, a term denoting objects agreeably mellowed with age.Sabialso brought melancholy overtones of loneliness, of age left behind by time. New objects are assertive and striving for attention; old, worn objects have the quiet, peaceful air that exudes tranquility, dignity, and character. Although there is no word in a Western language precisely equivalent tosabi, the ideal is well understood. For example, we say that the sunburned face of a fisherman has more character than that of a beardless youth. But to the Japanesesabiis first and foremost the essence of beauty, whether in a weathered house or temple, the frayed golden threads of fabric binding a Zen scroll, a withered bough placed in thetokonomaalcove, or an ancient kettle rusty with time. The ideal ofsabi, which became part of the Zen aesthetic canon of beauty, was perfectly at home in the tea ceremony, where even the utensils were deliberately chosen for their weathered look.
Sabi, however, seemed an incomplete ideal to Sen no Rikyu. The fact that rich objects are old does not make them less rich.Sabican still encompass snobbery. As tea master for both Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, Rikyu was so pained by their ostentation that he eventually revolutionized the tea ceremony and created a new aesthetic standard:wabi, a deliberate restraint, which is exemplified in his tea party of the single morning glory.Wabi, now a cornerstone of Zen aesthetic theory, is well described in a poem by Rikyu, which includes the lines:
How much does a person lack himself,
Who feels the need to have so many things.
In a sense,wabiis the glorification of artificial poverty, artificial because there must be the element of forced restraint and in genuine poverty there is nothing to restrain. Thewabitea ceremony permits no hint of wealth to be in evidence; those who enter the tea garden must leave their worldly status at the gate. Similarly, thesukiya-style teahouse must look like a rustic hut—not made out of something new, for that would destroysabi, but not out of expensive antique woods, either. This ideal extends even to the floral arrangement, one or at most two buds; the clothes one wears, simple not dressy; the pots and cups, plain and undecorated.
Wabipurged the tea ceremony of all its lingering aristocratic qualities, bringing into beingcha-no-yuas it is practiced today. Today many Japanese, even those who practice neither tea drinking nor Zen, know and appreciate the ideals preserved in the ceremony. In recent years the concept ofwabihas become the rallying point for those who regret the intrusions of the modern West into traditional Japanese culture, andcha-no-yuis valued as never before as a lesson in life's true values.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Zen Ceramic Art
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity.
John Keats,Ode on a Grecian Urn
Shino tea bowl
Raku tea bowl
Although Japanhad been a nation of potters almost from prehistoric times, it was only after the rise of Zen influence and a popular interest in the tea ceremony that ceramics was raised from craft to high art. The great age of Japanese ceramics occurred several hundred years after the heroic periods of Chinese ceramic art in the T'ang and Sung dynasties, but, as in other cases, the Japanese eventually equaled and in some ways surpassed their mainland teachers.
The Stone Age Jomon tribes in Japan created some of the richest figurine art of any of the world's prehistoric peoples. These Jomon figurines, fired at low temperatures and rarely over six or eight inches in height, are a classic puzzle to anthropologists and art historians, for they sometimes seem Polynesian, sometimes pre-Columbian, and sometimes pure abstraction in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, certain Jomon figurines could pass as works of Picasso or Miro. At times the features of the body were rendered recognizably, but usually they were totally stylized and integrated into the figure as part of some larger interest in material and pure form. It was a noble beginning for what would be a permanent Japanese interest in the look and feel of natural clay.
When the Jomon were displaced around the third centuryb.c.by the Yayoi, their beautiful figurine art disappeared, and for several centuries Japan produced mainly pedestrian crocks and drinking vessels. The few figurines created retained little of the sophisticated Jomon abstraction. Around the turn of the fourth centurya.d.,however, Yayoi potters found their metier, and began the famoushaniwafigurines, hollow-eyed statuettes in soft brown clay which were used to decorate aristocratic tombs, and simple but elegant vases and water pots in low-fired brown clay, which often were dyed with cinnabar and which give evidence of being thrown on some form of primitive wheel.
This domestic ware was in such demand that a class of professional potters came into being—inevitably leading to a gradual falling off of the individualistic character of the pots, as craftsmen began to mass-produce what had previously been a personal art form. The Korean Buddhist culture which reached Japan in the fifth and sixth centuries brought the Japanese new techniques for high-firing their stoneware pots, introducing a process whereby ashes from the kiln were allowed to adhere to the surface of a piece to produce a natural glaze. These new high-temperature pots had a hard surface texture and an ashen- gray color, while the existing native wares of low-fired porous clays retained their natural brown hues.
Typically the average Japanese preferred the natural-colored, soft clay vessels, and so the two types of pottery continued to be produced side by side for several hundred years, with the aristocracy choosing the hard-surfaced mainland-style gray works
and the common people continuing to use the simpler, underrated brown vessels, which were often fashioned by hand. The importance of this instinctive Japanese reaction for the later acceptance of Zen-inspired ceramic art cannot be over-stressed. Not only did the Japanese love of natural clay make them reject glazes for centuries after they had learned the necessary techniques, they also seem to have had little spontaneous interest in decorating their pots or using high-firing or mechanized techniques for their production, perhaps because the technology came between man and object, distancing the potter too far from his handiwork. Japanese potters cherished their regional individuality, and they continued to express their personal sensibilities in their work, so there were a multiplicity of rural kilns and a wide variety of styles.
The passion for Chinese culture during the Nara period of the eighth century led to a brief fling with Tang Chinese-style three-color glazed wares among the imitative Japanese aristocracy; but these seem to have been too much at odds with native instincts, for they were soon forgotten. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the Heian era, both the indigenous pottery techniques—the low-fired, brown, porous pots for the common people and the high-fired, gray, polished bowls for the aristocracy—continued to thrive side by side. However, technical advances in the high-firing kilns brought about subtle changes in the mock-glazes of the aristocratic wares. It was discovered that if they were fired in an atmosphere where there was abundant oxygen, the fused particles of fueled ash on the surface would turn amber, whereas if oxygen was excluded from the kiln, the surface ash would fuse to a pastel green. Thus by varying the baking process, Heian potters could produce a variety of light colors, creating a pottery considerably more delicate than had been possible before. Aside from this refined technique for firing, however, the Japanese steadfastly refused to change their traditional methods of making pots.
For this reason, Japanese ceramics were deliberately kept at a technically primitive stage until the early part of the thirteenth century while the Chinese were making considerable advances in the art. During the years from the ninth to the thirteenth century, while the Japanese isolated themselves from the mainland, the Sung Chinese were learning of new glazes far more subtle and refined than those employed during the T'ang. In the early years of the thirteenth century, when Japanese monks journeyed to China to study the new faith of Zen, they were dazzled by the sophisticated new Chinese wares they encountered. Through the offices of Zen a second revolution in Japanese ceramics occurred.
The instrument for this second revolution (according to tradition) was the priest Dogen, founder of Japanese Soto Zen, who on one of his trips to China was accompanied by a Japanese potter known as Toshiro. Toshiro stayed in China for six years, studying the Sung techniques of glazing, and on his return he opened a kiln at Seto, where he began copying Sung glazed wares. Although he has been called the father of modem Japanese ceramics, his attempts to duplicate the highly praised Sung products were not entirely successful. Furthermore, the wares he did produce, decorative and thick-glazed, found no acceptance except among the aristocracy and priesthood, both of whom favored Seto wares for the new pastime of drinking Chinese tea. But while the Zen aesthetes and tea drinkers amused themselves with Seto's fake Sung celadons, the commoners continued to use unglazed stoneware.
All this changed dramatically around the middle of the sixteenth century with the rise of an urban middle class and the sudden popularity of the Zen tea ceremony among this new bourgeoisie. Zen, which had brought Chinese glazes to Japan in the thirteenth century, sparked the emergence of a brilliant era of glazed ceramic art in the sixteenth. No longer content with primitive stoneware or reproductions of Chinese vessels, the potters of Japan finally developed native styles at once uniquely Japanese and as sophisticated as any the world has seen. It was another triumph for Zen culture. Rural kilns with long traditions of stoneware water vessels converted to the production of tea-ceremony wares, and throughout the land the search was on for colored glazes. The craze reached such heights that the shogun generals Nobunaga and Hideyoshi rewarded their successful military commanders not with decorations but with some particularly coveted tea-ceremony utensils.
Although ceramic tea caddies and water jars were required for the ceremony, the real emphasis was on the drinking bowl, for this was the piece that was handled and admired at close range. A proper bowl, in addition to being beautiful, had to be large enough and deep enough to allow sufficient tea for three or four drinkers to be whisked; it had no handle and consequently had to be of a light, porous, nonconducting clay with a thick, rough glaze to act as a further insulator and to permit safe handling between drinkers; the rim had to be thick and tilted slightly inward, to provide the participants with a pleasant sensation while drinking and to minimize dripping. In other words, these bowls were as functionally specialized in their own way as a brandy snifter or a champagne glass of today.
A number of styles of tea bowl developed during the sixteenth century, reflecting the artistic visions of various regional potters and the different clays available. What these bowls had in common, beyond their essential functional characteristics, was an adherence to the specialized dictates of Zen aesthetic theory. Equally important, they were a tribute to the historic Japanese reverence for natural clay. Even though they were glazed, portions of the underlying clay texture were often allowed to show through, and the overall impression was that the glaze was used to emphasize the texture of the underlying clay, not disguise it. The colors of the glazes were natural and organic, not hard and artificial.
The social unrest preceding the rise of Nobunaga caused a number of potters to leave the Seto area, site of the fake Sung production, and resettle in the province of Mino, where three basic styles of tea bowl eventually came to prominence. First there was the Chinese-style tea vessel, which had been the mainstay of the older Seto kilns. Yellow glazes, once the monopoly of Seto, were also used at Mino, but different clays, combined with advancing technical competence and a new willingness to experiment, produced a new "Seto" ware that was a rich yellow and considerably more Japanese than Chinese. Second there was a new, thoroughly Zen-style bowl developed by the Mino potters. It was broader-based than the Chinese style, with virtually straight sides, and it was covered with a thick, creamy off-white glaze. Warm and endearing in appearance, with a flowing sensuous texture inviting to the touch, it became known as Shino.
Some say Shino bowls were named after a celebrated master of the tea ceremony, while others maintain the term was taken from the Japanese word for white,shiro. Whatever the case, this was the first glazed ware of truly native origins; and it marked the beginning of a new Japanese attitude toward pottery. No longer inhibited by reverence for Chinese prototypes, the makers of Shino let their spontaneity run wild. The new white glaze was deliberately applied in a haphazard manner, often covering only part of the bowl or being allowed to drip and run. Sometimes part of the glaze was wiped off after it had been applied, leaving thin spots where the brown under-clay could show through after the firing. Or bubbles, bums, and soot were allowed to remain in the glaze as it was fired. Sometimes the white glaze was bathed in a darker coating in which incisions were made to allow the white to show through. At other times, sketchy designs, seemingly thrown down with a half-dry brush, were scribbled on the white bowls so that they appeared to be covered with Zen graffiti. Throughout all these innovations, the potters seemed to want to produce works as rough, coarse, and unsophisticated as possible. Before long they had a gray glaze as well, and finally they produced a shiny black glaze whose precise formulation remains one of the unsolved mysteries of Momoyama art.
The next color to enter the Mino repertory, after yellow, white, gray, and black, was a stunning green. This was the third style of Mino tea bowl, and it was invented by a disciple of Rikyu whose name, Oribe, has been given to an incredible variety of wares—tea bowls, tea caddies, water jars, incense burners, and a host of dishes for serving food. Sometimes the wares were solid green, but Oribe also had a habit of splashing the green over one section of a piece, or allowing it to run into one corner of a plate and freeze there in a limpid puddle. The portions of Oribe wares not covered with the splash of green were dull shades, ranging from gray to reddish brown, and on this background artists began to paint decorative designs- flowers, geometrical figures, even small sketches or still-lifes—something new and revolutionary for Japanese ceramics, but the forerunner of the profusion of decorative wares that appeared after the Momoyama. Shino had broken the bonds of the centuries of unglazed stoneware and proper copies of Chinese pots by introducing a native style of glazing and a new aesthetic freedom; Oribe led the way into a new world of anything-goes pottery, with half-glazes, painted decorative motifs, and experimentation in new, hitherto unknown shapes and types of vessels.
While the native Japanese potters at Mino were expanding their craft, another important development with far-reaching consequences for the Zen arts was taking place in the far south of the Japanese archipelago near the Korean peninsula. The ceramic arts of Korea were quite advanced at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with high-fired glazed wares as heavy and sturdy as the peasant stock from which they sprang. But the pots were made by building up coils of clay and beating them into a solid walled vessel rather than throwing them on a wheel. This combination of high and low seems to have appealed to the Japanese clans living near the Korean mainland, for they brought a number of Korean potters to the southern city of Karatsu and started an industry.
The staple product of the Korean craftsman was a crude medium-sized bowl with sloping sides, used in their homeland for individual servings of rice. The primitive quality of these bowls perfectly suited the growing inverse snobbery of the tea ceremony, and soon Japanese aesthetes were drinking tea and admiring the Zen beauty in the Korean rice bowl. While the Mino potters were deliberately making the Sung tea bowl rougher and rougher (that is, addingwabi), those in Karatsu found themselves with a foreign bowl ready-made for tea.
When Hideyoshi invaded Korea during the last decade of the sixteenth century, he and his generals were careful to kidnap as many Korean potters as possible, whom they settled over a large part of Japan. No longer restricted to a small area in the south, the Koreans injected a vigorous transfusion of peasant taste into all of Japanese ceramic art, extinguishing the last remnants of the refined Sung ideals. The Momoyama tea masters were given a new but still foreign standard of rustic chic perfectly in accord withwabitea.
Not surprisingly, it was Sen no Rikyu who synthesized the new native freedom and the fresh influx of mainland technology to create the undisputed glory of Japanese ceramics—the famousraku. Unquestionably Japan's most original contribution to the history of ceramics,rakuis produced in a manner entirely different from earlier techniques, and it is impossible to speak ofrakuwithout speaking of Zen. As might be expected,rakuwas invented in the Zen center of Kyoto, a city with no previous history of ceramic production, and it came into being when Rikyu happened to take a fancy to the roof tiles being produced by a Korean workman named Chojiro. Rikyu hit upon the notion that the texture and feel of these tiles would be perfect forwabi-style tea, and he encouraged Chojiro in the making of a few tea bowls with the materials and firing techniques used for tiles.
The bowls Chojiro made were neither thrown on a wheel nor built up from coils, but molded and carved like sculpture.
A mixture of clays was first blended to gain the desired consistency of lightness and plasticity, after which a spatula and knife were used to shape a rough-sided, textured bowl whose sense of process was flaunted rather than obscured—an overt tactile quality perhaps first seen in the West in the rough-hewn sculptures of Rodin. These bowls were fired in a most unconventional manner: rather than being placed cold in a wood-burning kiln and gradually heated, baked, and cooled over a period of days, they, like the tiles, were thrust directly into a torrid charcoal kiln for a blistering thermal shock, which gave them an instant look of the ravaged face of ancientsabi. Raku wares were first made in black with an iron-like glaze that is almost like frozen lava, but the later repertory included glazes that were partly or wholly red or off-white. Unlike the Shino and Oribe bowls,rakupieces were not decorated with designs or spots of color; they werewabiandsabiwith unpretentious, weathered grace. The last term you think of when seeingrakuis ornate.
Rikyu foundrakubowls perfect for the tea ceremony; they were austere, powerful, seemingly wrenched from melted rock. In shape they were broad-based with gently rounded, one might almost say organically rounded, sides leading to an undulating lip, wrapping in slightly over the tea, thereby holding the heat and preventing drips. Not only were they light and porous, allowing for minimal heat conduction and comfortable handling, their center of gravity was so low they were almost impossible to tip over, permitting easy whisking of the powdered tea as they rested on thetatami-matted floor of the tea room. (It should be noted that special bowls for summer usage de-emphasized certain of these characteristics: they were thinner-walled and shallower, since the object in hot months was to dissipate heat rather than conserve it.) But the most appealing qualities of therakuwere its sculptural sense of natural plastic form and its soft, bubbly, almost liquid glaze, which virtually invites one to hold it in his lips. Also, the colors of the glazes just happen to contrast beautifully with the pale sea-green of the powdered tea.
This was the end of the search for the perfect Zen tea bowl, and Hideyoshi was so pleased with Chojiro's handiwork that he gave the potter's family a seal bearing the word that would give the form its name:raku, meaning pleasure or comfort. Chojiro's descendants became therakudynasty, as generation after generation they set the standards for others to follow.
Hideyoshi's act of official recognition meant that Japanese potters were no longer merely craftsmen, but fully accredited artists. In later years, Japanese ceramics became distinguished in many areas—from the traditional wares produced at a multiplicity of local kilns to a vast new nationwide porcelain industry producing decorative works for both export and home consumption. Tea-ceremony vessels were created in great profusion as well, but, unfortunately, genuine art cannot be mass-produced. By the eighteenth century, the great age of Zen ceramic art was over, never to be recovered. Today the early wares of the Zen Momoyama artists command their weight in gold, perhaps platinum. This is the great irony of thewabitea vessels, if not of all Zen culture.
Tea bowls, the major expression of Zen art, seem at once both primitive and strikingly modern. To begin to understand this contradiction we must go back to our own nineteenth century in the West, when tastes ran to decoration for its own sake and the rule of perfect, symmetrical, polished form was the aesthetic ideal. Into this smug, serene sea of aesthetic sureties, which in some ways reached back to the ancient Greeks, the English critic John Ruskin threw a boulder when he wrote:
Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. . . . [t]he demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. . . . Imperfection is in some sort essential to all we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body. . . . To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed.1
Ruskin was rediscovering a large piece of Zen aesthetic theory while laying the groundwork for many of our modern ideals of beauty.
To see the similarity, let us examine for a moment a few of the finer points of Zen aesthetic theory as exemplified in the classic tea bowls. In form the bowls are frequently asymmetrical and imperfect; the glaze seems to be a species of moss still in the process of spreading over portions of the sides it somehow never managed to reach, and it is uneven, marred by cracks, lumps, scratches, and foreign contaminants. If imperfection is the goal, these bowls extend well beyond Ruskin's original standards. But not only are they imperfect, they also seem old and weathered, with the natural patina of a dried-up riverbed. They show absolutely no evidence that any conscious attempt was made to create a work of art; they appear to be completely functional.
It is all a deception. Master potters spend literally decades perfecting the Zen art of the controlled haphazard. One of the first principles they honor iswabi, which deplores nonfunctional decorative objects, polished surfaces, artificiality in shape or color, and anything unnatural to the materials used. Works of art withoutwabimay have superficial external beauty, but they forfeit inner warmth. Bowls out of shape, with cracks, blobs, and ashes in the glaze, invite us to partake of the process of creation through their asymmetry and imperfection. They also lead us past the surface by virtue of its being deliberately marred.
Making a bowl withwabiis considerably more difficult than
making a smooth, symmetrical, perfectly glazed piece. The creation of contrived "accidents," on which much of the illusion of artlessness depends, is particularly difficult. Everywhere there are scars, contaminants, spotty glaze—all as deliberate as the decoration on a Dresden plate; connoisseurship consists in admiring how the artist managed to make it seem so natural and unavoidable.
The same skill goes to make a piece look old, the essential quality ofsabi. By suggesting long years of use, the bowls acquire humility and richness. There is no need to "wear the new off" in order to give them character; they are already mellow and unpretentious. The potter's genius has gone to create the sense of wear, a quality considerably more difficult to realize than an aura of newness.
The potter wants the Zen connoisseur to understand what he has done: to see the clay, to feel and admire its texture, to appreciate the reasons for the type and color of the glaze. 'The pieces are carefully contrived to draw attention to both their original elements and the process by which these elements were blended. For example, a bowl whose glaze only partially covers its clay provides a link with the natural world from which it came. Its texture springs out, like that of a piece of natural driftwood. At the same time, the bald clay, the streaks of glaze, the hand-formed sculpture, allow one to recognize the materials and the process of formation. When the potter keeps no secrets, one enters into the exhilaration of his moment of creation. Once again, this is a deliberate aesthetic device, reminding one that the potter is an individual artist, not a faceless craftsman. The look and feel of Zen ceramics make them seem forerunners of the modern craft-pottery movement, but few modern potters are blessed with the rich legacy of Zen aesthetic ideals that made these ceramics possible. The secret lies deep in ancient Zen culture, which taught the Momoyama masters how the difficult could be made to seem effortless.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Zen and Haiku
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Haiku is regardedby many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes ofkoanriddles,sutras, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional Japanese poetry—an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the Japanese of the early Zen masters.
On first acquaintance Japanese seems an unlikely language for poetry. It is a syllabic tongue with each syllable ending in a vowel or the nasal n; consequently there are only five true rhymes in the entire language. Italian poets overcame a somewhat similar handicap, but their language is stressed, which Japanese is not. With no usable rhymes and no stress, how can the music of poetry be created? Over the centuries, the Japanese solved this problem by replacing meter with a system of fixed syllables—either five or seven—for each line. (This means that some lines of Japanese poetry may have only one word, but the system seems to work.) In place of rhyme, Japanese poets learned to orchestrate the pitch of individual vowels within a single line to give a sense of music. This device was illustrated by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth using a poem from the classical era. (The vowels are pronounced as in Italian.)
Fu-ta-ri yu-ke-do
Yu-ki su-gi ga-ta-ki
A-ki ya-ma wo
I-ka-de ka ki-mi ga
In his analysis of this particular poem, Rexroth has pointed out that the first and last lines contain all five vowels in the language, whereas the middle lines contain various combinations and repetitions, which produce a pronounced musical effect.1The ability to create such music without rhyme, one of the finer achievements of Japanese poetry, is far more difficult than might at first be imagined and leads naturally to assonance, or the close repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repetition of similar consonant sounds. Some of the vowels have psychological overtones, at least to the sensitive Japanese ear: u is soft, a is sharp and resonant, o connotes vagueness tinged with profundity.2Various consonants also convey an emotional sense in a similar manner.
Another clever device of the early Japanese versifiers was the use of words with double meanings. One example of this is the so-called pivot word, which occurs approximately halfway through a poem such as the above and serves both to complete the sense of the first part of the poem with one meaning and to begin a new sense and direction with its second meaning. This can at times produce a childish effect, and it does not always elevate the overall dignity of the verse. Another use of double meaning is far more demanding. Since the Japanese kana script is entirely phonetic and allows for no distinction in spelling between homonyms, words which sound alike but have different meanings, it is possible to carry two or more ideas through a poem. (A somewhat labored example in English might be, "My tonights hold thee more," "My two knights hold the moor." If these were written alike and pronounced alike, then the poem could mean either or both.) The first meaning may be a concrete example of a lover pining for his love, and the second a metaphor. Ideally, the two meanings support each other, producing a resonance said to be truly remarkable.
The early Japanese poets overcame the limitations of the Japanese language both by attuning their ears to the music of the words and by capitalizing on the large incidence of homonyms. They settled the matter of meter, as noted, by prescribing the number of syllables per line, with the principal form being five lines with syllable counts of 5,7,5,7, and 7. This thirty-one-syllable poem, known as thewaka, became the Japanese "sonnet" and by far the most popular poetic form during the Heian era. Almost all a poet can do in five lines, however, is to record a single emotion or observation. The medium governed the message, causing Japanese poets early on to explore their hearts more than their minds. Thewakabecame a cry of passion; a gentle confirmation of love; a lament for the brevity of blossoms, colored leaves, the seasons, life itself. A sampling ofwakafrom the early classical era shows the aesthetic sense of the seasons and lyric charm of these verses.
Tsuki ya aranu
Can it be that the moon has changed?
Haru ya mukashi no
Can it be that the spring
Haru naranu
Is not the spring of old times?
Waga mi hitotsu wa
Is it my body alone
Moto no mi nishite
That is just the same?3
Judged on its concentrated power alone, for this is virtually all an English reader can evaluate, this poem is a masterpiece. Its content can be condensed into five lines because much of its impact lies in its suggestiveness. It is, however, closed-ended, with no philosophical implications other than a wry look at human perceptions. Haiku added new dimensions to Japanese poetry.
The early aristocratic era gave Japanese poetry its form, the five-linewaka, and its subject matter, nature and the emotions. Later the familiar Japanese idea that life is but a fleeting moment and all things must blossom and fade was added. One critic has noted that as this idea took hold, poems gradually changed from praise of the plum blossom, which lasts for weeks, to praise of the cherry blossom, which fades in a matter of days.
Hisakata no
On a day in spring
Hikari nodokeki
When the light throughout the sky
Haru no hi ni
Warms with tranquility.
Shizugokoro naku
Why is it with unsettled heart
Hana no chiru ran
That the cherry flowers fall?4
Japanese poetry of the pre-Zen period has been handed to us primarily in a few famous collections. The first great anthology of Japanese poetry is the Manyoshu, a volume of verses from the middle of the eighth century. A glance through the Manyoshu shows that the earliest poets did not confine themselves to five-line verses, but indulged in longer verses on heroic subjects, known aschoka. The tone, as Donald Keene has observed, is often more masculine than feminine, that is, more vigorous than refined. As sensibilities softened in the early part of the Heian era and native verse became the prerogative of women, while men struggled with the more "important" language of China, the feminine tone prevailed to such an extent that male writers posed as women when using the native script. The next great collection of verse, the Kokinshu, published in the tenth century, was virtually all five-linewakaconcerned with seasons, birds, flowers, and fading love, and embracing the aesthetic ideals ofaware,miyabi, andyugen.
As the aristocratic culture gradually lost control in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new verse form, derived from thewaka, came into being:renga. This form consisted of a string of verses in the repeated sequence of 5,7,5 and 7,7 syllables per line—in reality a related series ofwakabut with the difference that no two consecutive two-or three-line verse sequences could be composed by the same individual. At first this new form seemed to offer hope of freeing poets from the increasingly confining range of subject matter prescribed for thewaka. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Before long therengawas saddled with a set of rules covering which verse should mention what season; at what point the moon, cherry blossoms, and the like should be noted; and so forth. Little creativity was possible under such restrictions. Versifying became, in fact, a party game much in favor with provincialsamuraiand peasants alike in times. While the remaining Kyoto aristocrats tried to keep theirrengain the spirit of the classicalwaka, with allusions to Chinese poems and delicate melancholy, the provincials threwrengaparties whose only aesthetic concern was adherence to the rules of the game. During the Ashikaga age,rengaand sake parties were the most popular forms of entertainment, butrenga'sonly genuine contribution to Japanese poetry was the use of the vernacular by provincial poets, which finally broke the stranglehold of Heian feminine aesthetics.
By the beginning of the Momoyama era, linked verse had
run its course and the time was ripe for a new form. The new form was Haiku, which was nothing more than the first three lines of a renga. Thewakahad been aristocratic, and the bestrengaprovincial, but the Haiku was the creation of the new merchant class. (To be rigorously correct, the form was at first calledhaikai, after the first verse of therenga, which was called thehokku. The term "Haiku" actually came into use in the nineteenth century.) Although the Haiku was a response to the demands of the merchant class, its composers almost immediately split into two opposing groups, superficially similar in outlook to the older classical and provincial schools. One group established a fixed set of rules specifying a more or less artificial language, while the other turned to epigrams in the speech of the people. The form was on the way to becoming yet another party game when a disenchanted follower of the second school broke away and created a personal revolution in Japanese verse. This was the man now considered Japan's finest poet, who finally brought Zen to Japanese poetry: the famous Haiku master Basho (1644-1694).
Basho was born asamuraiin an age when it was little more than an empty title, retained by decree of the Edo (Tokyo) government. He was fortunate to be in the service of a prosperousdaimyowho transmitted his interest in Haiku to Basho at an early age. This idyllic life ended abruptly when Basho was twenty-two: the lord died, and he was left to shift for himself. His first response was to enter a monastery, but after a time went to Kyoto to study Haiku. By the time he was thirty he had moved on to Edo to teach and write. At this point he was merely an adequate versifier, but his technical competence attracted many to what became the Basho "school," as well as making him a welcome guest atrengagatherings. His poems in the Haiku style seem to have relied heavily on striking similes or metaphors:
Red pepper pods!
Add wings to them,
and they are dragonflies!5
This verse is certainly "open-ended" insofar as it creates a reverberation of images in the mind, and, what is more, the effect is achieved by the comparison of two concrete images. There is no comment; the images are simply thrown out to give the mind a starting point. But the overall impact remains merely decorative art. It reflects the concept ofaware, or a pleasing recognition of beauty, rather thanyugen, the extension of awareness into a region beyond words.
When he was about thirty-five, Basho created a Haiku that began to touch the deeper regions of the mind. This is the famous
Kare-eda ni
On a withered branch
karasu-no tomari-keri
a crow has settled—
aki-no-kure
autumn nightfall.6
As a simple juxtaposition of images the poem is striking enough, but it also evokes a comparison of the images, each of which enriches the other. The mind is struck as with a hammer, bringing the senses up short and releasing a flood of associations. Its only shortcoming is that the scene is static; it is a painting, not a happening of the sort that can sometimes trigger the sudden sense of Zen enlightenment.
Perhaps Basho realized that his art had not yet drunk deeply enough at the well of Zen, for a few years after this poem was written he became a serious Zen student and began to travel around Japan soaking up images. His travel diaries of the last years are a kind of Haiku "poetics," in which he extends the idea ofsabito include the aura of loneliness that can surround common objects. Zen detachment entered his verses; all personal emotion was drained away, leaving images objective and devoid of any commentary, even implied.
More important, the Zen idea of transience appeared. Not the transience of falling cherry blossoms but the fleeting instant of Zen enlightenment. Whereas the antilogickoananecdotes were intended to lead up to this moment, Basho's Haiku were the moment of enlightenment itself, as in his best-known poem:
Furu-ike ya
An ancient pond
kawazu tobi-komu
A frog jumps in
mizu-no-oto
The sound of water.
These deceptively simple lines capture an intersection of the timeless and the ephemeral. The poem is said to have described an actual occurrence, an evening broken by a splash. The poet immediately spoke the last two lines of the poem, the ephemeral portion, and much time was then devoted to creating the remaining static and timeless part. This was as it should be, for the inspiration of a Haiku must be genuine and suggest its own lines at the moment it occurs. Zen eschews deliberation and rational analysis; nothing must come between object and perception at the critical moment.
With this poem Basho invented a new form of Zen literary art, and Haiku was never the same afterward. To write this kind of poem, the artist must completely disengage—if only for an instant—all his interpretive faculties. His mind becomes one with the world around him, allowing his craft to operate instinctively in recording the image he perceives. For a moment he is privy to the inexpressible truth of Zen—that the transient is merely part of the eternal—and this instantaneous perception moves directly from his senses to his innermost understanding, without having to travel through his interpretive faculties. Earlier Zen writings in both Japan and China had described this process, but none had captured the phenomenon itself. By catching the momentary at the very instant of its collision with the eternal, Basho could produce a high-speed snapshot of the trigger mechanism of Zen enlightenment. In a modern metaphor, the Haiku became a Zen hologram, in which all the information necessary to re-create a large three-dimensional phenomenon was coded into a minuscule key. Any interpretation of the phenomenon would be redundant to a Zen adept, since the philosophical significance would re-create itself spontaneously from the critical images recorded in the poem. Thus a perfect Haiku is not about the moment of Zen enlightenment; it is that moment frozen in time and ready to be released in the listener's mind.
Haiku is the most dehumanized of all poetry. Instead of the artist's sensations and feelings, we get simply the names of things. By Western standards they are hardly poems at all, merely a rather abbreviated list. As the critic-poet Kenneth Yasuda has pointed out, a Haiku poet does not give us meaning, he gives us objects that have meaning; he does not describe, he presents.7And unlike the poetry of the No, Haiku seems a form strangely devoid of symbolism. The tone seems matter-of-fact, even when touching upon the most potentially emotional of subjects. Take, for example, Basho's poem composed at the grave of one of his beloved pupils.
Tsuka mo ugoke
Grave mound, shake too!
waga naku koe wa
My wailing voice—
aki-no-kaze
the autumn wind.8
No betrayal of emotion here, simply a comparison of his grief-ridden voice, a transient thing, with the eternal autumn wind. It is a Zen moment of recognition, devoid of emotion or self-pity, and yet somehow our sympathies spring alive, touching us in a way that the early classical poems on the passage of time never could.
Love in Haiku is directed toward nature as much as toward man or woman. Part of the reason may be the stylistic requirement that every Haiku tell the reader the season. This is done by the so-called season word, which can either be an outright naming of the season (such as the "autumn" wind above) or some mention of a season-dependent natural phenomenon, such as a blossom, a colored leaf (green or brown), a summer bird or insect, snow, and so on. The tone is always loving, never accusatory (a tribute to the nature reverence of ancient Japan), and it can be either light or solemn. Chirps of insects, songs of birds, scents of blossoms, usually serve as the transient element in a Haiku, whereas water, wind, sunshine, and the season itself are the eternal elements.