Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/51

Rh in their freedom, the results were often chaotic. For Bashō both change and permanence had to be present in his haiku. In some of his greatest poems we find these elements present, not only in the sense just given, but also, if we may state the terms geometrically, as an expression of the point where the momentary intersects the constant and eternal. We find it, for example, in what was perhaps his most famous haiku: In the first line, Bashō gives us the eternal component of the poem, the timeless, motionless waters of the pond. The next line gives us the momentary, personified by the movement of the frog. Their intersection is the splash of the water. Formally interpreted, the eternal component is the perception of truth, the subject of countless Japanese poems; the fresh contribution of Bashō is the use of the frog for its movement, instead of its pleasing cries, the hackneyed poetical image of his predecessors.

If the “perception of truth” is indeed the subject of the poem, we may recognize in it the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, which taught, among other things, that enlightenment was to be gained by a sudden flash of intuition, rather than by the study of learned tomes of theology, or by the strict observance of monastic austerities. When an acolyte enters the Zen priesthood, he is made to sit for long hours in a prescribed position, with his eyes half-closed, and his mind on the Great Nothingness. As he sits there gently swaying, hearing the monotonous incantation of a priest intoning a sutra, and breathing the heavy fragrance of incense, he will suddenly be struck from behind with a light wooden stick, and then, if ever, can occur the flash of