Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Published by Buddhist Books International first published May 16th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about Pure Land Haiku , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Apr 08, William rated it it was amazing. Mr Lanoue does an excellent job on taking Issa's vast collection of Haiku and pulling out the gems for discussion.
The author further catagorizes them into sections that any Buddhist or person interested in Buddhism would find helpful. As a Haikuist I love this book for the collection itself and reread the Haiku in it for enjoyment. I highly recommend this book. Alan Summers rated it really liked it Nov 01, The full passage is reprinted below with the permission of translator Sam Hamill. There is no title because the Japanese masters rarely used titles in their journals. Still clothed in the dust of this suffering world, I celebrate the first day in my own way.
Kobayashi Issa
And yet I am like the priest, for I too shun trite popular seasonal congratulations. The customary New Year pine will not stand beside my door. I leave it all to Buddha, as in the ancient story. The way ahead may be dangerous, steep as snowy trails winding through high mountains. Nevertheless I welcome the New Year just as I am. David Lanoue, whose Haiku Guy website on Issa is perhaps the best internet resource, puts it this way:. His vision is unpretentious, blunt, non-censoring and, often, tongue-in-cheek, as any random sampling of his many thousands of verses attests. Issa, I think, would approve of this perception, since he forged it with the aggressive persistence of a Hollywood publicist.
This is not to say that his poetic persona is false or not representative of the real man.
I am only suggesting that we should keep in mind that our image of Issa is a consciously designed literary construct. I enjoyed his openness in sharing thoughts and feelings. I add to the quasi-fictional information with research excursions into biographies and history. So by no means is this essay to be viewed a scholarly treatment. I gratefully leave that to scholars and translators. A spiritual quest forms the basis for the journal. Initially, he states his feelings about the falseness and materialism of Japanese holidays:.
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The answer is, of course, no. Like all texts, hokku survive the demise of the events that produced them, taking on a different life. The internet can be a rich source of contextual information. The gods are said to descend from the heavens and dwell in the earthly realm for three days, after which time the decorations are burnt, releasing the spirits back to their realm. A second prose theme in Oraga Haru alludes to the difficulties of the path Issa has chosen:.
I live in a tiny cottage that might be swept away at any moment by a blast from the wild north wind.
Learning Haiku by Reading and Doing: Glossary and Works Cited
I will leave all to Buddha, and though the path ahead be difficult and steep, like a snow-covered road winding through the mountains, I welcome the New Year — even as I am. Again, context is important, but not essential. This passage serves as a preface to the start of his travel as a spiritual journey and, as we learn as we read further in his journal, to the difficulties that he is likely to encounter. Indeed, the journey was so trying, he considered turning back many times. A haiku that indicates his feelings about the suffering he witnessed and about the indifference of those better off is:.
The haiku is perhaps an apt depiction of first-world readers who are likely to understand such wholesale suffering only from a distance.
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Yes, some of us contribute funds, encourage foreign aid, adopt children, sponsor various development missions, help build schools, fund medical teams and contribute to food banks. In the next passage, Issa shifts from his negative attitudes about the rituals to the family gatherings surrounding those rituals.
Here he expresses his joy of seeing his young daughter explore the world. And again, context lends further understanding: For us, the rice cake offered to his daughter would be viewed as a sparse and inexpensive celebration treat. After all, our typical holiday banquets consist of abundant spreads of sumptuous foods and our problem is obesity, not near starvation.
As for the seeming incongruence about his daughter having been born only the previous May and yet being two years old, traditionally in many Asian cultures, babies are considered one year old when they are born. About this, Lanoue writes: This year, Issa vows to do otherwise. I was enchanted, for example, when my young daughters, dressed as elves, delivered the gifts handed to them by my father-in-law, dressed as Santa.
It is practiced today with ritualistic splendour. Here Issa is sharing his delight in watching a crow enjoy a bath in a rain puddle. And who among us has not enjoyed watching birds sparrows, jays, robins in my backyard enjoying puddles and even dust baths? In my culture, the crow is considered by many to be a noisy, invasive pest, and in a mythical or superstitious sense, a harbinger of bad news or even death.
In China and Japan, for example, the crow has a positive mythology: If one passes through it, one is protected from infectious diseases.
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In this haiku, both a crow and a nightingale pass through, suggesting that the hoop welcomes both commoners crows and nobility nightingales. He is simply looking both inward and outward, mingling memory with perception. Earlier cultural narratives infiltrate his consciousness and join with the immediate impressions of his five senses, producing haiku in which past stories and present situations seamlessly combine. On one of that book's deeply yellowed pages, we find the words: As an example of a "dirty" kitanai poem, Fujimoto cites: Even Makoto Ueda, one of Issa's champions among today's haiku scholars, ends the argument of his recent English-language book, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa , with this somber summation: Iconoclastic jokester, wounded stepchild To this list we might add: What many critics miss is the fact that Issa, the creator of these images, uses them metaphorically.
As I propose in my book, I believe that his "carefully crafted self-portraits reveal an Everyman whose private joys and sorrows broaden in relevance as they are artistically transformed on the page" Yes, he writes from real life, but his art transcends autobiography.
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His recognition of his friends' writing, grounded in real experience, inspires a poem drenched with universal significance and emotion that, in Wordsworth's phrase, "doth lie too deep for tears. The phrase, "Master Issa," does sound a bit too important to fit the "human" image of Issa that the original Issa myth-maker Issa himself puts forth. The poet of poop, piddle and snot-leeks and bull's balls-doesn't quite seem to belong on the high, golden dais reserved for masters.
If posterity puts him there, Issa will probably, frog-like, hop down to rejoin the crowd below. Perhaps this is the final test of the true "master" of haiku: He records his experiences and theirs with the kind of immediacy and honesty that were unknown in haiku before he came along. Jean Cholley notes that in the poultry market in the Muromachi district of Edo today's Tokyo , the eyes of the doomed birds were sewn shut to keep them immobile while being fattened in their cages Issa sketches this not-pretty scene with blunt honesty.