Seeds From a Birch Tree

Haiku is, after all, the only form of poetry in world literature that takes plants and animals, weather and the very landscape itself as its primary subject matter.

It teaches us that we are born into a world where everything is alive. We are not separate from that world. And we have no destiny apart from it.

For haiku is the one poetic form in all of world literature that concerns itself primarily with nature, the one form of poetry that makes nature a spiritual path.

Bashō’s famous admonition, “Do not seek after the sages of the past. Seek what they sought.”

Shasei stressed direct observation in the manner of a landscape painter who carries his sketchbook to the field and draws exactly what he sees. More than realism, however, the sketch from life offered Shiki and his followers a way of seeing nature as though for the very first time.

we have forgotten nature, there is a feeling of loss at the heart of modern people. We try to fill that inner lack with wealth and power, or with distraction, but this does no good at all.

As haiku poets, we begin simply, by carrying a notebook and walking in nature every day. Then, gradually, we learn to sketch from life. At the end of each notebook I fill with haiku, I am always struck by how much more of the world I have seen, and how much more in love with life I have become.

Haiku is not an ideology. That is the essence of haiku art. Because haiku demands a fresh creative response to each new situation, and because it places images before ideas, it is guarded from becoming a religion.

A haiku is a seventeen-syllable poem about the season. Arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, and balanced on a pause, a haiku presents one event from life happening now. However much we may say about haiku, its history or its various schools, it is difficult to go beyond these three simple rules: form, season, and present mind.

In the year before he died, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō wrote the following verse:   chrysanthemums bloom in a gap between the stones of a stonecutters yard   A Japanese critic once said that a poem like this, which is plain but evocative, can be written only by a total amateur or a great master.

The more we learn about haiku, the more we may be tempted to think of ourselves as experts. If we go too far in that direction, however, our poems will lose their freshness.

When the form remains unfixed, however, then poets become stuck at the level of form. Paradoxically, by rejecting it, they become its captive.

Nearly every haiku contains a kigo, or “season word.” From the beginning the purpose of haiku was to evoke a seasonal feeling—the

seasonal feeling always has two aspects: the fleetingness of life and the eternal harmony of the natural world—in other words, the passing seasons.

“The things of nature,” wrote Kenneth Yasuda, “are born and fade away in the rhythm of the seasons.” The same holds true for humankind and all its works.

In its simplest form, writing a haiku is closer to collecting shells than searching for the proper word.

Matsuo Bashō once wrote, “There is one thing which flows through all great art, and that is a mind to follow nature, and return to nature.”

Compared to people living only a century ago, we are almost all like this. The rhythms of nature are the same, but the world we have constructed for ourselves does not always account for nature. Nature occupies a small place in our lives, if and when we really notice it at all.

Bashō had once said. When asked the meaning of “lightness,” he replied, “Just observe what children do.”

The task of the haiku poet is not to explain such moments, but to live them, and to capture their life in words.

Masaoka Shiki is sometimes referred to as the father of modern haiku, but the truth is, his life barely poked through the bottom of this century.

Without the freshness and vitality of Shiki’s “sketch from life” approach, haiku might not have survived into the twentieth century, and it is doubtful whether it would have traveled from Japan to so many different countries around the world.

It is the eyes which always stir me most: clear, calm, perhaps a little detached. Their vision is plain, even literal. It is a gaze in which intelligence, not yet having come to rest on any single thought, is everywhere apparent in the air about the body, which is also like an eye. Dark as it is, the photograph shimmers with its light.

rather than just looking at the breath, we want to watch ourselves looking at it. We want to include the self. We want some judgment.

Gradually, however, we learn just to look at the breath without becoming too invested in whether we are really looking or not—without trying to determine whether or not the meditation is working and we are making progress. This is real looking.

Whether written in English or Japanese, a haiku is poetry, not prose. That is, its purpose is not to convey information, but the feeling of a particular place and time. And in haiku, as in all forms of poetry, feeling lies in sound.

In the beginning most of us are distrustful of inspiration. It seems to come and go in a flash without any explanation. The temptation is to grasp frantically at such moments when they occur, or to force them when they don’t. Of course, neither method produces haiku.

For if we cultivate a strong desire to write a haiku, the haiku will never come. In the absence of that desire, however, the frantic, grasping quality of mind disappears, and inspiration is free to do its work at somewhat more leisure. In Japanese, this quality of mind, at once fully engaged and detached from concern with a result, is called fūryū (“wind flow”), which is a lovely way of describing how inspiration works naturally, even playfully, in accordance with circumstances as they arise.

Masaoka Shiki advocated “the sketch from nature”—composing haiku on the spot.

If we want to use haiku as a spiritual practice, the most important thing is to be fully present. My Japanese Zen teacher used to say, “No dress rehearsal!” He meant, “This is it! Now! This moment of life is unrepeatable.”

As modern human beings we spend much of our lives wrapped up inside ourselves. The Way of Haiku is to “come unwrapped” and thereby notice what lies outside of the self.

The scholar R. H. Blyth explained that a haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. If the finger is too beautiful, then we will notice the finger, not the moon. Likewise, of course, it must not be ugly. In that case also we would also notice the finger instead.

Sentimentality is self-conscious emotion. It happens when, in the midst of emotion, we want to watch ourselves having that emotion.

Only about 4 percent of classical haiku depart from the five-seven-five form, and even then, usually by not more than one syllable.

Haiku is both a very outward and a profoundly contemplative, inner kind of art. It is not possible to sacrifice either way and still be writing haiku.

When I left the monkhood in 1990, my Japanese Zen teacher told me that a student never fully appreciates his teacher until they have been separated for at least ten years.

As time goes on, however, and we learn more about haiku, we tend to lose this fresh “beginner’s mind.” We become too interested in being clever or profound. Unfortunately, as a result of this attitude, our haiku only become predictable and stale. They begin to have a tainted look, as though they had been handled too much in the making.

The Way of Haiku begins to emerge when, having mastered the subtleties of the art, one “forgets” them, becoming like a beginner again.

Having cultivated a deep understanding of haiku over many years of practice in contemplating nature, the master can afford to forget it all and just work naturally from the heart.