The Moon Glows the Same

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The Moon Glows the Same

Matsuo Bashō 1687

“The Moon Glows the Same,” written by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, was published in 1687. A haiku, “The Moon Glows the Same” comprises only seventeen syllables. Bashō is credited with transforming haiku from a predominantly humorous form based on wit and word play into a means for evocative philosophical observations. Bashō skillfully described common settings in Japanese life, often scenes from nature, and through his descriptions composed allegories on the nature of life. Bashō’s poetic skills increased throughout his life, and his poems written after 1686 are considered among his most accomplished. In “The Moon Glows the Same,” Bashō describes the relationship between the moon and the clouds, particularly the way in which the drifting clouds alter the appearance of the moon. However, he is also commenting on the relationship between the infinite and unchanging, represented by the moon, and the finite and temperate, represented by the clouds. The comparison between contrasting aspects of nature is a familiar theme in Bashō’s poetry.

Author Biography

Little information exists about Matsuo Bashō’s early life. The son of a low-ranking samurai, Bashō is generally believed to have been born in 1644 in the Iga province of Japan. Bashō became a page to, and formed a close friendship with, Todo Yoshitada,

a young samurai two years his elder. Yoshitada shared Bashō’s intense interest in haikai, a form of long poem from which haiku derives. Intending to become a samurai himself, Bashō acquired the samurai name Munefusa, but he abandoned his training when Yoshitada died unexpectedly in 1666. Scholars believe both grief over his friend’s death and apprehension about a new, less amicable master led Bashō to abandon his career as a samurai. Some also include an unhappy love affair as a factor that hastened his departure, although others consider this theory a romantic fabrication of Bashō’s early biographers. What Bashō did during the next several years is unknown, but he is believed to have lived for some time in Kyoto, which was then the capital of Japan, studying philosophy and poetry. Bashō’s poetry was published in at least four anthologies between 1667 and 1671. He moved to Edo (present-day Tokyo) in 1672 and began to write under the pseudonym Tosei. His reputation as a haiku master steadily increased in Edo, and he began to attract a large following of disciples, who supplied him with a small hut in which he could write and teach. A banana tree, exotic to Japan, was planted in front of the hut, and it pleased the poet so much that he took for his writing name “Bashō,” the Japanese word for “banana plant.”

After about eight years, Bashō increasingly felt a sense of purposelessness and spiritual disquiet after achieving artistic and material success. Consequently, he began the study of Zen Buddhist meditation and embraced an ascetic lifestyle. Seeking an exercise in spiritual and artistic discipline, Bashō undertook a pilgrimage on foot across the Japanese countryside in 1684. Although this journey proved to be physically trying for him, Bashō made numerous other pilgrimages, visiting religious and secular sites, disseminating his ideas on haiku to fellow poets, and often begging alms for subsistence. His accounts and haiku recollections of these travels, especially The Narrow Road to the Deep North, are considered his most accomplished and lasting literary works. When he was not on a journey, Bashō secluded himself in remote huts in the wilderness, until 1691 when he returned to Edo. Finding himself again besieged by followers, Bashō struggled with a spiritual conflict between his religious desire to transcend worldly affairs and his poetic avocation that focused attention upon himself. Bashō left Japan in 1693 to escape this conflict, but he returned the following year to begin a series of travels along the country’s Pacific Coast. That spring, his health forced Bashō to stop in Osaka, where he died of a stomach ailment in the summer of 1694.

Poem Text

The moon glows the same:
  it is the drifting cloud forms
  make it seem to change.

Poem Summary

Line 1

In his poetry, Bashō was fond of comparing dissimilar aspects of nature. Initially, “The Moon Glows the Same” does not seem to fit this pattern, but on a closer reading we can see that Bashō is not only comparing the moon to the clouds, but he is also contrasting the unchanging to the temporal. In the first line, Bashō makes a bold but seemingly obvious statement: the moon glows the same throughout the night.

Lines 2-3

In lines two and three, Bashō clarifies the meaning of the statement from line one. The clouds

Media Adaptations

An audiocassette titled The Poetry of Matsuo Bashō was released by the Australia Broadcast Co. in 1977.
Richard Wernick produced a record album called Haiku of Bashō: Moonsongs from the Japanese that was released by CRI in 1997.
Bashō: A Celebration, a videocassette, is available from Gustavus Adolphus College Media Services, in St. Peter, Minnesota.
Lyceum Productions released a filmstrip titled Inscape: The Realm of Haiku in 1976.

drifting across the night sky pass between the watcher and the moon, causing the moon to appear to change in shape and color. While the observer is gazing at the night sky, the moon’s appearance is actually constant and only the clouds change. Bashō seems to be implying that there are aspects of life that are also unchanging and constant, like the light of the moon. However, they may appear to be transformed through their relationship with transient events and objects.

Themes

Appearances and Reality

The most obvious theme of “The Moon Glows the Same”—communicated directly and plainly to the reader via the text—is that there is a contrast between what appears to occur and what really is happening. At first, this seems to be a case of stating a very simple, basic truth that is almost too obvious to mention. Optical illusions are all around us in our everyday lives: objects far away are not really any smaller than they are when they are near, for instance, nor is a person wearing vertical stripes necessarily any taller or thinner than one wearing plaid. If a reader were to quickly skim this poem, it might seem trite, but it is the very familiarity of its message that makes “The Moon Glows the Same” significant. The stillness of the moon, which Bashō makes a point of drawing readers’ attention to, can be seen as a parallel to the message of the poem itself, which is just as solid, basic, and un-moving: in the same way that our eyes attribute the motion to the moon instead of to the drifting clouds, so too the reader’s desire for “meaning” might draw him or her to see a message beyond what is actually present. Western readers in particular will often be eager to find a hidden layer to this poem that is, according to the standard metaphor of literary interpretation, “buried” beneath the surface. To a great extent, the idea of frustrating the reader’s search for meaning is the point of haiku in general, because this poetic form tends to emphasize life’s simplicity over its apparent complexity.

Nature

The majority of haiku concern themselves with small events in nature, showing situations in the natural world that can be compared to those that result from human behavior. In “The Moon Glows the Same,” there is a vaguely implied sense of rivalry between the moon and clouds, based on what observers perceive to be the function of each. In general, the moon attracts more attention from humans than do clouds. Clouds, which are readily visible in the daytime, seem mundane due to their ubiquitousness; conversely, the moon tends to inspire awe because it is a solitary entity whose reflective property allows it to glow and single-handedly light up the night sky. Bashō’s point is that people should not think that, just because it is conspicuous, the moon has the ability to alter the shifting patterns of moonbeams that fall across the earth. The drifting cloud formations that are introduced in the poem’s second line are responsible for the appearance of change. Readers who notice parallels between the underrated clouds and the overrated moon can perceive their relative positions as reflections of human interactions, where false assumptions are often made about abilities and responsibilities. The illusion of shifting moonlight—this interplay of darkness, shade, and light—could make it seem that there is something more mysterious going on than there actually is: Bashō uses the flat, tonal style of the haiku to demystify nature—to explain a simple, mechanical process so that imaginary relationships are not necessary.

Permanence

“The Moon Glows the Same” debunks the notion that the moon has the ability to change its light,

Topics for Further Study

Try writing your own haiku: take note of some basic, striking truth of nature and record it in three lines. For this type of poem, there is no need to explain the significance of the event; just try to record it clearly.
Draw a diagram explaining the mechanical action of moonlight, showing how the light of the sun bounces off of the moon during different phases, how the light is refracted or absorbed by cloud cover, etc.
What kind of music do you think should accompany a poem like this one? Compose a tune or find one that has already been recorded. Your song may require you to repeat the poem several times.
Assuming that the meaning of this poem is more far-reaching than just the one stated scientific fact, what conclusions do you draw about human life and behavior after reading this poem? Why?

thus giving a somewhat tempered account of the moon’s capabilities. At the same time, however, the poem also bestows an even greater degree of admiration upon the moon for its steadfast prominence. The opening line of “The Moon Glows the Same” is phrased in such a way as to emphasize the moon’s strength, not its weakness. The idea that the moon does not change could be stated in any number of ways, but a poem—especially a poem like a haiku that uses so few words—must narrow all possible wordings down to the single correct one. Bashō is not trying to leave readers with diminished respect for the moon’s mystical presence; he is only drawing attention to the simple beauty of reality. It is the strength of permanence that renders this work an homage to the moon, making an otherwise routine observation seem bold and thought provoking. In this haiku, plain speaking affirms the power of durability.

Style

“The Moon Glows the Same” is written in haiku, a Japanese form of poetry. The modern haiku consists of three lines with a total of seventeen syllables. The first and third lines consist of five syllables and the second line is comprised of seven syllables. Although haikus are short, they are challenging to write. Their brevity requires the poet to be very efficient and selective with word choice. Japanese haikus, such as “The Moon Glows the Same,” use images of nature to consider larger messages about life and spirituality.

Historical Context

Matsuo Bashō started out his adult life as a samurai, a member of the warrior class, at a time when Japan was starting to acclimate to living in peace after more than a century of constant civil strife. Being soldiers during peacetime gave many samurai the opportunity to turn their attention to intellectual pursuits, such as religion and philosophy. After the end of the Onin War in 1477, more than two hundred years before Bashō wrote this poem, the Japanese social structure was in crisis. The national government had lost its authority to rule, and, as a result, the lords of small provinces across the land fought one another for local control; they built fortresses, amassed armies, and engaged in perpetual warfare. This era, known as the Period of Warring States, continued until the latter part of the 1500s, when, as the rivalries progressed, several leaders rose to national prominence. One was Oda Nobunaga, the leader of a successful clan that, over the course of several generations, built its influence with military victories and alliances. Starting in 1568, Oda Nobunaga tried to establish a central control to rule the whole country, and to a large degree he was successful, but he was assassinated in 1582. He was followed in his attempt for national unification by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had served as a general under Oda. Toyotomi implemented policies that strengthened the federal government, such as land surveys (to help the government organize a tax system) and confiscating weapons from the peasantry (to suppress uprisings). Toyotomi was clearly the most powerful person in the country, but the emperor could not name him as Japan’s military leader, or Shogun, because he came from the lower class. Toyotomi instead

Compare & Contrast

1687: Isaac Newton publishes Philosophia naturalis principia mathematica, which introduces his law of gravity and the principle of universal motion.

1916: Albert Einstein presents his theory of relativity, which gives a more accurate explanation of the natural world than had been supplied by Newtonian physics.

Today: Einstein’s theories have been challenged by advances in quantum mechanics. At the quantum (size of atoms or smaller) level, the familiar laws of physics do not apply; instead, events seem to be governed by probabilities, or random choices.
1687: The thirteen colonies comprised New England. The American Midwest was being seen by the first Europeans, as an expedition led by French explorer Sieur de La Salle traveled the Mississippi from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

1849: News of gold discoveries in California brings hundreds of thousands of settlers to the western end of the continent. By the following year, California’s population had increased almost twenty times.

1999: Urban sprawl is a problem for many U.S. cities. In Atlanta, Georgia, for instance, the population has increased by 25 percent since 1990; estimates put the loss of “green space” at 50 acres per day, and the congested city is in violation of clean-air standards.
1687: Japan is isolated from the rest of the world, with little trade and restricted social interaction.

1854: American Naval Commander Matthew Perry signs a trade agreement that opens trade relations with Japan.

1998: Japan has the world’s second-largest economy.

ruled as the Imperial Regent, from 1585 until his death in 1598.

In 1603, Tokugawa leyasu accepted the title of Shogun from the Japanese emperor, who, despite his title, held little actual power over the government. This was the beginning of a period of peace and cultural isolation that lasted for more than 250 years. For fifteen generations, the Tokugawa dynasty exercised control over the country, a span of time often referred to as the Edo period of Japanese history (Edo, or present-day Tokyo, was the capital from which the Tokugawa ruled). Tokugawa leyasu had spent thirteen years of his childhood living with his enemies, as a willing hostage to his family’s rivals, the Oda and Imagawa clans. After Oda Nobunaga’s death, leyasu struck a bargain of peace with Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and while Hideyoshi was busy trying to impose a rational system of political order on the country, leyasu built his family’s fortune and power. When Hideyoshi was dying, leyasu successfully prevented him from naming his son as his successor, citing the family’s lower-class heritage. Eleven years into his own reign, while he was still powerful, leyasu turned his position of Shogun over to his own son, starting a dynasty that would last until 1867.

Society settled into a more systemized order during the Tokugawa dynasty, in large part because of the stricter laws that were imposed. Peasants were taxed heavily and subjected to prison, torture, or having their land confiscated if they could not or would not pay. Land was redistributed, and those who had shown loyalty to leyasu benefited greatly. Society was divided into four formal classes: samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants. Early in leyasu’s reign, he was a supporter of foreign trade, but as Christian missionaries from Holland and Portugal became successful in converting hundreds of thousands of Japanese, he took steps to curtail religious freedom. In 1614 leyasu expelled all foreign priests from the country. Later, Christianity was outlawed completely, and as a result of the attempts to keep outside religious influences from reaching Japanese citizens, the country became isolated from the rest of the world. Trade and travel abroad were virtually nonexistent throughout the rest of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. There was, however, a flourishing in the arts, especially during the period from 1677 to 1703, which is referred to as the Genroku period. Haiku developed in poetry, kabuki theater emerged, and origami, the art of artistic paper folding, reached the height of its popularity as cheap, mass-produced paper came into existence.

Critical Overview

Critics agree that Bashō is primarily responsible for developing the modern style of haiku. Some scholars, such as Makoto Ueda in his Matsuo Bashō, claim that Bashō is the greatest haiku writer. In Japanese Literature, Roger Bersihand writes that Bashō “made the entertaining epigram into delicate poetry, which suggests rather than expresses an idea, using simple, evocative touches under which is often a profound symbolism.” However, many critics suggest that Bashō developed his style of poetry throughout his adult years and that his later poetry is notably superior to his earlier efforts. “The Moon Glows the Same” was written during one of the later stages of Bashō’s development, when he was at the peak of his abilities. As Ueda explains in Matsuo Bashō, the poetry Bashō wrote from 1686 to 1691 “centers on the merging of the temporal into the eternal, of the mutable into the indestructible, of the tiny and finite into the vast and infinite, out of which emerges a primeval lonely feeling shared by all things in this world.”

Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of creative writing at several community colleges in Illinois. He also writes fiction and drama. In the following essay, Kelly finds “The Moon Glows the Same” to be a one of Bashō’s lesser haiku, violating the “show don’t tell” principle that much modern poetry relies on; at the same time, however, he considers it a good “beginner” haiku for students who are used to longer works.

In trying to understand Matsuo Bashō’s poem “The Moon Glows the Same,” as with just about any poem, the reader has to put him- or herself into the situation that is described. Poetry is short, and haiku is even shorter; not much is given to us except a few bordering images, from which we are left to fill in an entire rich, broad scene. In this piece, readers are given a moon and some drifting cloud forms to work with, and they must conjure the poet’s worldview out of that. It is not easy. Most haiku present contrasting images with no direct connection, but, in this one, the images are quite clear in their relationship to one another. The typical haiku leaves it up to readers to figure out how seemingly unrelated things are actually bound together within the natural world, but this one explains its point directly. It is not the strongest work in the canon of more than a thousand haiku written by Matsuo Bashō, because it lacks the air of transcendent mystery that makes his most accomplished works capable of changing a reader’s way of feeling about the world. It is, however, a good haiku for beginners, because it incorporates the form’s common features and hints at the things that await readers who manage to acquire a taste for works that are more complex and indirect.

Bashō is, of course, the single most important author in the history of haiku; he is often credited with turning it into a tool for expressing serious ideas. Before Bashō, haiku were light verse, used to show off the writer’s wit. Bashō, by all accounts a man who could enjoy a good joke, was also a thoughtful man; he was a student of the Japanese religion/philosophy practice known as Zen, and he was a contemplative man who lived alone in a small hut and took journeys of hundreds of miles by foot. He thought about the moon frequently and would go to great lengths to see the moon over a particular landscape, sometimes gathering with other poets for a moon-viewing party (according to Makoto Ueda in Matsuo Bashō). There is some dissension, but Bashō is generally credited with being the first major poet to use the haiku form to express serious thoughts. Consider what an achievement it would be if, for example, some poet could make the limerick respectable by making it a portal to the human soul, and you may appreciate how Bashō changed the haiku. In this sense, “The Moon Glows the Same” is a very clear example of Bashō’s work: it takes a subject—the moon—that he considered

What Do I Read Next?

The Essential Bashō, with poems translated by Sam Hammill, was published in 1999 by Random House.
Bashō traveled extensively during his lifetime. His travel writings are collected in a volume called The Narrow Road to the Deep South, and other Travel Sketches, which was translated from the Japanese with an introduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa and published by Penguin in 1966.
Hub Editions recently reprinted some of Bashō’s poetry that first appeared in a 1691 anthology called The Monkey’s Raincoat. The new book, published in 1998, is titled Renga From “The Monkey’s Raincoat.”
Karatani Kojin’s 1993 work Origins of Modern Japanese Literature is considered a landmark. Kojin, a professor of literature at Hosei University in Tokyo, explains how various cultural influences—including the haiku tradition—molded contemporary literature.
One of the most influential Japanese haiku writers of the twentieth century is Seishi Yamaguchi. In 1993, Mangajin Inc. published the definitive collection of his works under the title The Essence of Modem Haiku.
Several generations of beginning haiku writers have learned from William J. Higginson’s The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share and Teach Haiku. This book not only covers matters of style, such as themes and subjects, but also such practical information as how to lay out pages and publish your own work.
An Introduction to Haiku by Harold G. Henderson gives a rich sampling of the greatest haiku writers in history: Bashō, Buson, Issa, Shiki, and their contemporaries. First published in 1957 and available continuously since then, the most recent publication was in 1992.

to be serious and manages to explore it with the haiku’s miniaturized form.

What is missing from “The Moon Glows the Same” is the sense of fun that the best haiku generally have. Carrying on from its tradition in light verse—and perhaps due to the need for verbal compression in such a shortened form—haiku often use words or ideas that have double meanings, which is a central component to wit and wisecracking. Also, as mentioned previously, haiku often force a comparison between two distinct images by mentioning them in close proximity to one another and leaving readers to discover how they relate. For example, this poem by Buson, who wrote almost a century after Bashō:

Seated in the palace,
Listening at night
To the distant frogs.

Buson’s poem does not try to tell readers the relationship between the palace and the frogs, or between the mental states within a person who is allowed the social privilege of sitting in the palace; instead, it is tuned in to what is happening out in the marsh. We can, however, find many relationships or contrasts here, and most of them have to do with the lowly being raised to the level of the mighty. Also, it is always more fun to discover meaning than to have it served up to us.

Throughout the twentieth century, the prevailing rule in poetry has been to “show, don’t tell.” Writers have been less confident about explaining the internal causes that rule the situations they present and less willing to tell readers what the moral significance of their materials is. As William Carlos Williams, one of the leading poets of the Imagist movement that changed the face of literature in the early part of the century, put it, “all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declare or explain: it presents” (quoted in Yasuda’s The Japanese Haiku). There are numerous theories about why this change in attitude about the artist’s job has become

“[‘The Moon Glows the Same’] is not the strongest work in the canon of more than a thousand haiku written by Matsuo Bashō, because it lacks the air of transcendent mystery that makes his most accomplished works capable of changing a reader’s way of feeling about the world.”

prevalent. One of the most significant theories links the rise of psychology, which became popular at about the same time that poets started stressing objectivity. As psychology put the responsibility for interpreting into the hands of common people—making personal fulfillment a function of reading hidden connections—artists moved away from explaining and concentrated more on presenting.

The Imagists looked frequently to Japanese haiku as a source of inspiration, because this principle of showing but not telling had been worked out in Japanese art centuries before it was widely adopted in the West. In Bashō’s own work, there is a great variety in the extents to which he explains his subjects. There are poems like “The Moon Glows the Same,” which is all explanation, reading like a sentence out of a textbook on visual perception, but there are also many like the following, which holds back its point for each individual reader to decipher:

Ah, this abode.
Oft the woodpecker
Will peck at its posts.

Readers can surmise that, as in the example from Buson, this poem is playing around with humans’ sense of self-importance by reminding us that nature is still all around us. Nothing to that effect is ever explicitly stated, however; the opening line, breathed with a sigh, comes close to conveying the emotional position of the poem’s speaker, but it is up to each, individual reader to decide whether “Ah” is supposed to reflect frustration, contentment, or bemusement.

One more example from Bashō might help readers appreciate the full scope of possibility that is covered in his work. In this haiku, he does not address his point as directly as he does in “The Moon Glows the Same,” but it also is not as unclear or obscure as readers might find the “woodpecker” poem to be:

Against the brushwood gate
Dead tea leaves swirl
In the stormy wind.

There is a mood of sorrow conveyed here: the words “dead” and “stormy” definitely cast a melancholy tone over the poem that cannot be merely coincidental. With a poem like this, readers are inclined to make something out of what has been given to them. Why does the poem mention a brushwood gate? Where are the tea leaves from? This haiku does not display Bashō’s sense of humor, but the reverence it holds for life’s mystery is very close to the ambiguity that makes witticism work. The poem seems to want to tell us that there is something unique about the way that the gate, leaves, and wind interact; unlike “The Moon Glows the Same,” however, it does not direct readers to the point that it is making.

There is much to be said for a poem like “The Moon Glows the Same.” For readers who are used to gobbling down huge amounts of information as quickly as possible, these three brief lines steer one to a quiet, still place for a few moments of reflection. The poem even stirs one’s sense of wonder at the same time that it seems to state the obvious. In fact, it is exactly because its message is so openly clear that readers are inclined to wonder about the speaker—about why he is so interested in this strange, visual effect occurring in the sky. This haiku does raise issues of the broadest nature; it touches on the ultimately religious question of humanity’s place in the universe, even though it addresses readers with language that is flat and too mechanical to stir up much inspiration.

Other haiku, including others written by Bashō, do a much more effective job of presenting the wonders of the world and leaving it to readers to make sense of them. This is the kind of poetry we have come to value in the modern world; it mimics the trend that poetry has tilted toward for nearly a hundred years. Poetry’s mission is to provoke thought, and though “The Moon Glows the Same” appears, at first glance, to provide thought, it is a curious enough piece to draw new readers into the unique ways of haiku.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Lucien Stryk

In the following excerpt, Stryk provides an overview of the life and poetical works of Matsuo Bashō.

It is night: imagine, if you will, a path leading to a hut lost in a wildly growing arbor, shaded by the bashō, a wide-leafed banana tree rare to Japan. A sliding door opens, an eager-eyed man in monk’s robe steps out, surveys his shadowy thicket and the purple outline of a distant mountain, bends his head to catch the rush of river just beyond. Then he looks up at the sky, pauses, a while, and claps his hands. Three hundred years pass—the voice remains fresh and exciting as that moment:

Summer moon—
clapping hands,
I herald dawn.

So it is with Matsuo Kinsaku (1644-1694), who would change his name to Bashō, in honor of the tree given him by disciples, the first great haiku poet.

Bashō came onto the scene soon after the so-called Dark Age of Japanese literature (1425-1625), a time of the popularization of the purely native art of versification, the brilliant beginning of the Tokugawa era (1603-1867). The haiku was already well-established, with highly distinct rules, but in the hands of rule-smiths (as in the sonnet of Western verse) it was expiring of artificiality. Almost alone, Bashō reinvigorated the form. How he did so is, fortunately, well-known, for among his many admirers were a few farseeing enough to record his comments, literally catch him on the run, for he was a compulsive traveler, seeking over all his life new sights, new experiences throughout Japan.

He wrote at least one thousand haiku, and a number of travel sketches, which contain some of his finest poems. One of the sketches, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, begins with a most revealing account of what poetry meant to him:

In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes ... All who achieve greatness in art—Saigyo in traditional poetry, Sogi in linked verse, Sesshu in painting, Raikyu in tea ceremony—possess one thing in common: they are one with nature.

Toward the end of his life Bashō cautioned fellow haiku poets to rid their minds of superficiality with what he called karumi (lightness). This quality, so important to all arts linked to Zen (Bashō had become a monk), is the artistic expression of non-attachment, the result of calm realization of profoundly felt truth. Here, from a preface to one of his works, is how the poet pictures karumi: “In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse, and the joining of its two parts, seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.”

Bashō’s mature haiku style, Shofu, is known not only for karumi, but also for two other Zeninspired aesthetic ideals, sabi and wabi. Sabi implies contented solitariness, and in Zen is associated with every monastic experience, when a high degree of detachment is cultivated. Wabi can be described as the spirit of poverty, an appreciation of the commonplace. It is perhaps most fully achieved in the tea ceremony which, from the simple utensils used in preparation of the tea to the very structure of the tea hut, honors the humble.

Somehow Bashō intuited, early in his career, that the first haiku writers, like Sokan (1458-1546) and Moritake (1472-1549), while historically of much importance, had little to offer poets of his day. These early writers created the haiku form by establishing the autonomy of the parts of haikai renga, linked verse of 17 syllables composed by poets working together. Though their poems possessed the desired terseness, they did not adequately express nature and, for the most part, lacked karumi. Bashō centered his poems so deeply in his feeling that at times he dared to ignore timehonored elements of the form, including the syllabic limitation. The following piece, among his greatest, consists in the original (here romanized) of 18 syllables:

Kareeda ni
Karasu no tomarikeri
Aki no kure
 
On the dead limb
squats a crow—
Autumn night.

So rare in the history of haiku was such license that three hundred years after such poems were made a new haiku school, the Soun (free verse) school, justified its abandonment of syllabic orthodoxy on the grounds that Japan’s greatest poet had not been constrained by such rules. In most respects, however, Bashō was fully traditionalist, his poems following very closely the expected structural development: two elements divided by a break (kireji: cutting word, best rendered in English by emphatic punctuation). The first element, simply put, represents the condition or situation—“Spring air,” in the first of the following examples, the other the sudden perception, preceded by kireji (in these pieces a dash).

Spring air—
woven moon
and plum scent.
 
Early Autumn—
rice field, ocean,
one green.
 
Unknown Spring—
plum blossom
behind the mirror.

So the poet presents an observation of a natural, often commonplace event, in plainest diction, without verbal trickery. The effect is of great bareness, yet the reader is aware of a microcosm related to transcendent unity. A moment, crystallized, distilled, grasped from time’s flow, and that is enough. All suggestion and implication, the haiku event is held precious because, in part, it demands the reader’s participation: without a sensitive reader there could not be an impressive poem. Haiku’s great popularity is only in part due to its avoidance of forbidding obscurities found in other kinds of verse. Most important, it is likely to reveal, to the reader, hitherto unrecognized depths in himself.

As we have seen, the sobriquet Bashō, amusing even to his fellow countrymen, was taken by the poet because of trees around the hut in which he lived and met disciples. Perhaps it well suggested the lightness he sought in life and art. He loved the name, making many references to it in writing. In Japan, too cold to bear the fruit, the tree was thought exotic, and though its trunk had no practical use its big soft leaves offered fine shade in summer. Each of three huts the poet was to own throughout his life was called the Bashō hut, the tree transplanted wherever he settled. Even on his journeys he seemed never to be away from his hut, as the following poem suggests:

Banana leaves hanging
round my hut—
must be moon-viewing.

Little is known of the poet’s early life. It is believed he was born in or near Ueno in Iga Province, about thirty miles southeast of Kyoto. He had an elder brother and four sisters. His father, Matsuo Yozaemon, possibly a low-ranking samurai, farmed in times of peace, making a modest yet respectable living. Of the poet’s mother all we know is that it is unlikely that she was a native of Ueno. About the time of his father’s death, in 1656, Bashō entered the service of the samurai Todo Yoshitada, a young relative of the local feudal lord. He was very well treated, and began writing verse (his earliest preserved work is dated 1662). When Yoshitada died, prematurely, in 1666, the poet resigned his position and probably moved to Kyoto. A few of Bashō’s biographers mention a mistress, who was to become a nun named Jutei, even a child or two—but all concerning that part of his life is sheerest speculation.

It is known for certain that by 1672 Bashō was in Edo (modern Tokyo), hoping for a literary career. He wrote, among other things, a pair of hundred-verse renku with another poet, critical commentaries for Haiku Contests in Eighteen Rounds, produced an anthology including his own and his best pupils’ work, Best Poems of Tosei’s Twenty Disciples (he was then called Tosei), and as all haiku teachers, then and since, judged contest after contest, among them “The Rustic Haiku Contest” and “The Evergreen Haiku Contest.” Soon he was to settle in his first Bashō hut, built for him in 1680 by an admirer, Sampu, in Fukagawa, in an isolated spot near the Sumida River. Now he began gathering not pupils, but disciples, and from the start of a career as established master attracted the most promising young Edo haiku poets, who came seeking advice and, on occasion, to engage in composition of linked verse. Later, there were periods when he found visitors no longer bearable, so he would keep his gate locked:

Morning glory trailing—
all day the gate-
bolt’s fastened.

Bashō needed and loved solitude: “I am like a sick man weary of society,” he wrote. “There was a time I wanted an official post, land of my own, another time I would have liked to live in a monastery. Yet I wandered on, a cloud in the wind, wanting only to capture the beauty of flowers and birds.” Yet from the start of his residence near Edo he discussed the art of haiku with disciples in profoundest terms, and was soon known as the foremost living theorist. Here, one of his disciples, Doho, writes of the poet’s conversation:

The master said, “Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.” What he meant was that the poet should detach his mind from self ... and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and its feelings. Whereupon a poem forms itself. Description of the object is not enough: unless a poem contains feelings which have come from the object, the object and the poet’s self will be separate things.

To give an indication of the importance of such comments to the subsequent practice of the art, a contemporary haiku school, Tenro, possesses a creed, Shasei (on-the-spot composition, with the subject “traced to its origin”), virtually based on the theoretical statements and practice of Bashō. Tenro has some two thousand members all over Japan, and it is customary for groups to meet at a designated spot, perhaps a Zen temple in a place famous for its pines or bamboo, and there write as many as one hundred haiku in a day, attempting to enter the object, “share its delicate life and feelings.” As might be expected there is much imitation of the master. Yet Bashō was severe with disciples who did little more than imitate him:

Rhyming imitators—
musk melons
whacked to halves.

... Like other haiku poets of his time Bashō considered himself Zenist, indeed was thought to be a Zen monk. It is known he practiced the discipline under the master Buccho, with whom, according to D. T. Suzuki in The Essentials of Zen Buddhism (1963), he had the following exchange:

Buccho: “How are you getting along these days?”
Bashō: “After a recent rain the moss has grown
      greener than ever.”
Buccho: “What Buddhism is there prior to the
      greenness of moss?”
Bashō: “A frog jumps into the water, hear the
      sound!”

It has been claimed that this exchange, concluding with one of the poet’s best-known poems, began an epoch in the history of haiku.

Bashō’s discussion of poetry was always tinged by Zen thought, and what in his maturity he advocated above all was the realization of muga, so close an identification with the things one writes of that self is forgotten. As Zen’s Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng (637-712) put it, one should not look at, but as, the object. It is of course one thing to voice ideals, another to attain. Bashō’s late poems demonstrate that, in spite of periods of acute self-doubt, he was able to achieve a unity of life and art, the great hope of Zen creators. “What is important,” he wrote, “is to keep mind high in the

“Bashō strove to place his readers within an experience, whose unfolding might lead to revelation, the eternal wrested from the phenomenal world.”

world of true understanding, then, returning to daily experience seek therein the true and the beautiful. No matter what the activity of the moment, we must never forget it has a bearing on everlasting self, our poetry.”

As D. T. Suzuki explains, haiku has always been one with Zen:

When a feeling reaches its highest pitch, we remain silent, even 17 syllables may be too many. Japanese artists ... influenced by the way of Zen tend to use the fewest words and strokes of brush to express their feelings. When they are too fully expressed no room for suggestion is possible, and suggestibility is the secret of the Japanese arts.

All his life itinerant, Bashō took full advantage of the safe conduct—important to the traveler of his day—and mobility Zen priesthood offered. He gave up virtually all possessions, his only concern spiritual and artistic discovery.

First Winter rain—
I plod on,
Traveler, my name.

Though inspired by Zen, Bashō’s haiku avoided the didactic tone of much classical Zen poetry....

Bashō strove to place his readers within an experience, whose unfolding might lead to revelation, the eternal wrested from the phenomenal world. As mystic, he knew the unconditioned is attainable only within the conditioned, nirvana within samsara—that the illuminations sought were to be found in the here and now of daily life....

Occasionally, to be sure, Bashō wrote poems as explicit in their Zen intention as any master’s:

Skylark on moor—
sweet song
of non-attachment.
 
Monks, morning-glories—
how many under
the pine-tree Law?

Four temple gates—
under one moon,
four sects.

Yet surely the chief reason for the poet’s universal appeal is that he never leaves nature, which—East, West—is one, through all processes and manifestations the sole unchanging thing we know. Throughout his life as wanderer Bashō sought to celebrate: whether his eyes turned to mountain or gorge, whether his ears heard thunder or bird-song, whether his foot brushed flower or mud, he was intensely alive to the preciousness of all that shared the world with him. Even his final poem, written for disciples shortly before his death, reaches for the unknown:

Sick on a journey—
over parched fields
dreams wander on.

Source: Lucien Stryk, “Matsuo Bashō,” The American Poetry Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, March/April, 1984, pp. 33-5.

Sources

Bersihand, Roger, Japanese Literature, Walker and Company, 1965, 115 p.

Busch, Noel F., The Horizon Concise History of Japan, New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1972.

Keene, Donald, “The World of Haikai Poetry,” in his Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture, Kodanshan International Ltd., 1971, pp. 71-130.

Kirkwood, Kenneth P., Renaissance in Japan: A Cultural Survey of the Seventeenth Century, Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1970.

“Oh No, It’s Spreading!” in Newsweek, http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/issue/03_99b/printed/us/na/atlanta_l.htm, accessed August 1, 1999.

Sansom, George, A History of Japan, 1615-1867, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963.

Ueda, Makoto, Matsuo Bashō, Twayne, Inc., 1970, 195 p.

Ueda, Makoto, “Matsuo Bashō: The Poetic Spirit, ‘Sabi’, and Lightness,” in his Zeami, Bashō, Yeats, Pound: A Study in Japanese and English Poetics, Mouton & Co., 1965, pp. 35-64.

For Further Study

Frederic, Louis, Japan: Art and Civilization, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1969.

This massive book presents a chronicle of the visual arts in Japanese history, going back to ancient times. The final chapter covers the shogun period in which Bashō lived.

Totman, Conrad, Japan Before Perry: A Short History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981.

Divided into three parts (classical, medieval and early modern Japan), this book examines life in Japan before it was open to Westerners.

Ueda, Makoto, Matsuo Bashō, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970.

This book provides a good overview of Bashō’s life and work, in a style designed for students.

Yasuda, Kenneth, The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples, Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1973.