James Abrams
"Hail in the Begging Bowl: The Odyssey and Poetry of Santoka,"
in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol . XXXII , No. 3, Autumn 1977, pp. 269-302.
[This essay originally
contained ideographic characters, which have been removed for this reprinting; ō and ū
replaced with the plain letters o and u; notes have been left out.]
Into my metal bowl too,
hail.
Santoka
hail.
Santoka
Taneda Santoka, 1882-1940, is one of the most
recent and perhaps one of the last of a long and colorful line of priest-poets
in Japanese literary history. An alcoholic and business failure who became a
Buddhist priest after an attempted suicide at the age of forty-two, Santoka
spent the last sixteen years of his life as a raucous itinerant monk who
survived through begging and the good graces of his many acquaintances.
Throughout this period he was a voracious observer of life, nature and self in
his prolific free-verse haiku. When Santoka died in October 1940 he was still a
penniless alcoholic whose years of wandering and solitude had only made him
more acutely aware of how far he remained from happiness and personal
salvation. He had published seven small books of poetry which had been well
received by his poetic circle but were almost entirely unknown by the Japanese
literary world.
It has only been in the last ten years, with the
publication of several biographical sketches of his life, that a minor 'Santoka
boom' has brought the poet a measure of fame and reputation. The reasons for
his recent rise to acclaim are not difficult to discern. People are first of
all attracted to his lifestyle, the vagabond existence in which the road and
pace of one's life are chosen by day-to-day inclinations. It is a lifestyle
that despite its inevitable mental and physical hardships has an alluring sense
of romanticism and nostalgia for the majority of people burdened with the
responsibilities of family and job.
The image of Santoka the man is also extremely
appealing. A literate and garrulous man, he considered a good conversation and
a bottle of sake to be the ultimate source of pleasure. He was welcomed
with open arms into the homes of friends and strangers all over the country,
despite the common knowledge that the priest would drink their sake,
share their bed, and then cheerfully bid farewell the next morning without a
word about repaying the hospitality. Photographs of the poet present us with an
almost comic figure, large bamboo hat, priest's garb, thick spectacles, metal
begging bowl, and two spindly legs supported on a pair of straw sandals. But if
the pictures somehow epitomize the incongruity of his role as a priest and
expose the eccentricity of the man, they also hint at a robust spirit,
boundless curiosity, and a large capacity for friendship.
Then finally there are his poems, which for all
their simplicity seem to have struck a harmonious chord with many Japanese.
Sometimes as short as two words and seldom more than ten, Santoka's free-verse
haiku possess a degree of sincerity and involvement that is often lacking in
Japanese poetry so dominated by form and convention.
Sincerity, of course, does not necessarily make for
great poetry, and Santoka certainly did not possess the poetic genius of
itinerant nature poets such as Saigyo or Basho or the intellectual skills and
polish of semi-recluses such as Kamo no Chomei or Buson. Yet the intricate
relationship between his artistic and experiential lives, coupled with his
training in Zen and Buddhist thought, gives his work an acuteness of expression
and at times a striking freshness.
This essay will in the main be devoted to an
introduction to Santoka's poetic works. To clarify his poems I have added a
prefatory introduction to Santoka's life and have tried to arrange his poems to
give a clear image of his physical and mental transitions after he entered the
priesthood. The poems selected are grouped mainly by subject matter rather than
time period. I have tried to picture the man and the poet by choosing poems
that best represent his feelings toward the subjects mat were of primary
concern to him—nature, religion, travel, sake, poetry, solitude, and
death. Excerpts from his diary are also included.
SANTOKA'S LIFE
Santoka was born as Taneda Shoichi, the oldest son
of Takejiro and Fusa, on 3 December 1882 in Bofu, Yamaguchi prefecture, a rural
area in western Japan. His father was a well-off landowner who kept two or
three mistresses and seems to have been generally too busy with his affairs of
the heart to properly manage his business. When Shoichi was ten years old, his
mother, who had given birth to five children, committed suicide at the age of
thirty-three by jumping into the family well. She was probably driven to the
act by her husband's dissipation and neglect of the family. The children were
thereafter raised by an aunt.
Shoichi was a good student who from an early age
showed an interest in literature. At the age of nineteen he left home for Tokyo
to prepare for entering university, and in the following year he was admitted
into the Department of Literature, Waseda University. It was in this period
that he first began to use the pen name Santoka. It was also at this time that
Shoichi first began to drink heavily. His inability to keep up with his classes
was doubtlessly in part a result of his drinking habits, and in 1904, at the
age of twenty-two, he suffered a nervous breakdown, dropped out of school, and
returned to his father's home. Takejiro, whose intemperate habits had not
mellowed with age, was forced to sell his property in 1906, and in the same
year father and son opened a sake brewery in a nearby village. However,
from the start neither the womanizing father nor the drinking son showed much
proclivity for. running the business.
Unlike his father, Shoichi was throughout his life
only minimally interested in women. He admits in his writings that the suicide
of his mother had deeply wounded him and had left a void in his spirit which no
other woman was ever able to fill. Despite his protests that he was determined
to enter the priesthood and had no need for a wife, his father forced him into
a marriage in 1909 with Sato Sakino, the oldest daughter of a man from a neighboring
village. The new couple seem to have been on good terms for a few months,
during which time Sakino became pregnant with their first and only child, Ken.
But Shoichi began returning home drunk or staying out all night, and there was
soon little or no intimacy between the two.
In 1911 Shoichi contributed translations of
Turgenev and Maupassant to the literary journal Seinen. Two years later,
at the age of thirty-one, he became a disciple of the poet Ogiwara Seisensui, a
leader of the 'new tendency school' of haiku, which discarded the traditional
use of seasonal words and the 5-7-5 syllables for a freer verse form. Shoichi,
now using his literary name Santoka, at the same time began writing for
Seisensui's poetry journal, Soun. In 1916, the same year in which he
joined the staff of Soun as a poetry editor, the sake business
went bankrupt after father and son had allowed the sake to go sour for
two straight years. Taking his wife and child, Santoka moved to Kumamoto city,
where poetry acquaintances helped him to set up a secondhand bookstore.
His attempt to settle down into a normal life was
again disrupted in 1918 when his younger brother Jiro committed suicide and
Tsuru, the aunt who had raised him after his mother's death, died. Santoka left
the management of the bookstore and a later picture-frame shop to his wife, and
more and more often had to be bailed out by his friends after running up
drinking bills which he had no way of paying. In 1919 he left his wife to find
work in Tokyo and in the following year Sakino obtained a divorce from him.
Santoka found a job in Tokyo as a librarian, but after two years, in December
1922, he quit after another nervous breakdown. He stayed in Tokyo long enough
to experience the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake in September 1923, soon
after which he returned to Kumamoto.
On a night in December 1924 a very intoxicated
Santoka tried to commit suicide by standing in the path of an oncoming train.
The engineer spotted him in time and the train managed to pull up before bitting
him. Santoka was taken to a Zen temple in Kumamoto to recuperate and it was
there that he resolved to begin training for the priesthood. In the following
months he underwent a great change, forcing himself into a rigidly fixed
regimen, and in February 1925, at the age of forty-two, he was ordained as a
priest and assigned as custodian of a small temple in rural Kumamoto. For a
year he served faithfully at the temple, opening a Sunday school and a night
school for the villagers, while concentrating on his poetry. But he was
continually plagued by the idea that a man of his spiritual weakness was in no
way qualified to minister to the souls of die villagers who fed him and paid
for the upkeep of the temple. Finally, unable to bear the isolation and his
spiritual turmoil, he gave up his post in April 1926 and set off as a mendicant
priest on wanderings that continued almost uninterrupted for six years.
Santoka was to destroy the diary of his early years
on the road, and there is no clear record of where the priest's wanderings took
him. He apparently traveled throughout Kyushu, crossed over to Shikoku, and
begged his way through most of the western end of the main island of Honshu. In
1929 and 1930 he returned briefly to Kumamoto and stayed with Sakino, helping
in her store. He also again started to contribute to Soun and began
publication of his own poetry journal, Sambaku.
By now his life had settled into a familiar
pattern: an earnest attempt to lead a serious life, followed by a drinking and
spending spree, deep repentance, and the start of another directionless,
soul-cleansing journey. Santoka walked from village to village, chanting for
alms at every farmhouse he passed by. He spent his nights in cheap lodging
houses, which he paid for with his day's take of coins and rice. Increasingly
in his later years he also used his pilgrimages as an excuse to visit his wide
range of poetry colleagues in western Japan, staying for a few days of good
food and abundant sake before setting off for the next village or the
next friend.
In the autumn of 1932, with the financial
assistance of his admirers he settled into a country hermitage he named
'Gochuan', literally, 'Cottage in that Midst', in the village of Ogori,
Yamaguchi prefecture. In the same year he published his first book of poems, Hachi
no ko (Rice Bowl Child), and put out a few more issues of Sambaku.
He planted his first garden, and took pride in the fact that at least to a
limited extent he could lead a self-dependent life. In the spring of 1934 the
restless Santoka set off on a trip into the central mountains of Shinshu, but
his fifty years of age were beginning to tell on him and he was hospitalized with
acute pneumonia. Early in the following year, back at Gochuan, physically and
mentally exhausted and increasingly obsessed with death, Santoka again tried to
kill himself by taking a large quantity of sleeping pills. But by the following
spring, 1936, he was back on the road, traveling to Tokyo for a meeting of Soun
backers and then heading north into the Tohoku region.
The last few years of his life were spent in active
writing and continual drifting. As he noted in his diary at that time, his only
two purposes in life were 'to produce all the true poems that are within me'
and 'to die a blessed death, without lengthy pain, without being a burden to
others.' In 1938 he finally abandoned Gochuan, and after another trip eastward
crossed over to Shikoku where, in December 1939, he settled down in a temple
hermitage, again provided through the assistance of poetry colleagues, near the
city of Matsuyama.
On 10 October 1940, his poetry companions gathered
at the cottage for their regular discussion meeting and found Santoka in what
seemed to be a drunken stupor, not an unusual condition. They left him sleeping
and went ahead with their meeting, but after they had all returned home, a
neighbor came by to check on him late that night and, finding his condition worsened,
called a doctor. Santoka died early the next morning, shortly before his
fifty-eighth birthday, of an apparent apoplexy.
MOTION
The resolution of spiritual doubts through physical
movement is hardly a new phenomenon peculiar to Santoka or Japanese priest-poets.
Moses wandered through the desert for forty years before finding the Promised
Land. Parcival and his contemporaries in die Middle Ages discovered the secrets
of the heart and spirit after years of wandering from one adventure to another.
Kerouac and his generation made the highway the modern path to salvation. What
Santoka in particular inherited was a deeply ingrained Japanese tradition of
seeking in nature itself a release from worldly anxiety and an opening to
spiritual enlightenment. Since ancient times the excursion into nature has been
linked with, and to a large extent indistinguishable from, the religious
pilgrimage.
In the Heian period emperors and nobles led their
entourages down rivers and into mountains for the dual purpose of visiting
shrines or temples and stimulating the poetic and aesthetic sensibilities of
the court. In the Middle Ages Saigyo and Chomei, together with thousands of
other priests and social outcasts, found that by retreating into nature they
could to some extent relieve the burdens of living in a very troubled world.
Yet while their Western counterparts have tended to seek wisdom and reason in
their natural environment, Japanese nature-lovers asked of nature no more than
to give them peace of mind. For some this meant silent and meditative
absorption into nature; for others such as Santoka, it meant an exhausting
physical experience, the positive and aggressive exposure of self to blazing
suns, freezing rain, and endless roads of dust and mud.
What distinguishes Santoka in this long tradition
is the almost desperate quality about his journeys. There were times when it
was only motion, only day after day of walking, that maintained his sanity. As
he notes in his diary:
Wordlessly I cross mountain after mountain. To an
almost overpowering degree I feel the loneliness and tranquility of isolation.
Thus I continue to walk, with questions of what will come next, what will I do,
what ought I to do, and still I walk. There is nothing I can do but walk. To
walk—that alone is far enough.
This idea of the vital necessity of movement and
the partial release it brings to the anguish of his soul is a constant theme in
his poems.
There can be no other way,
I keep walking.
I keep walking.
Seeking something,
walking through the wind.
walking through the wind.
There is no road but this
road,
a spring snow falls.
a spring snow falls.
Open to the wind,
over and over condemning myself, I walk.
over and over condemning myself, I walk.
The muddied waters flow
on,
clearing as they go.
clearing as they go.
Laying on the grass,
I open the wounds of this trip to the sun.
I open the wounds of this trip to the sun.
Santoka's literary mentor Seisensui commented,
'Santoka walks without purpose, walks like the clouds or the rivers, because he
has to keep moving, because walking is living for him.' This life force that
refused Santoka an end to his journey is best illustrated in one of his most
famous poems:
I push my way through,
push my way through,
green mountains.
push my way through,
green mountains.
Anyone who has ever climbed a mountain knows the
experience of being certain that the ridge ahead must surely be the peak, only
to discover that there is yet another ridge towering up behind it. For Santoka
this feeling of frustration, mixed with determination to continue on, was not
confined to one mountain top or one long day of traveling, but to years of
wandering without finding his destination. He might scale one peak, find one
moment of respite, but always with the final realization that there lay yet
another road and another mountain in front of him.
Santoka was himself greatly concerned about the
unproductive, unstable nature of his life. Both before and after becoming a
priest he made furiously enthusiastic attempts to reform himself and take
proper care of his family. Through the years 1930 and 1931 he spent
considerable time with his former wife Sakino in Kumamoto, trying to convince
himself that he could be satisfied helping her tend the store, looking after
their son Ken, and occupying himself with his poetry journals and poetry
acquaintances. In 1933 and 1934 he temporarily found some degree of peace and
calmness in his country retreat at Gochuan. But in the end it was the very determination
to settle down to a normal, secure life that led to his overpowering sense of
guilt and self-condemnation when he found himself at the end of another
drinking spree and forced him into yet another pilgrimage to cleanse his soul.
As Santoka left Gochuan in December 1935 after
another suicide attempt, he wrote:
Above the water passes the
shadow of a cloud,
something will not let me be at peace.
something will not let me be at peace.
And on the same trip he expressed his feelings as
the sweet exhaustion of movement began to warm his body and heal his battered
soul:
One more layer stripped
off,
from journey to journey.
from journey to journey.
SELF-INTERROGATION
It is essential to an understanding of Santoka's
inner turmoil to remember that when he did finally turn to religion it was to
Zen and not to another Buddhist or Christian sect. As the following quotations
from his diary reveal, what Santoka sought was not a god who would embrace him
or a faith that would soothe his spirit, but a frame of mind that would permit
him to strip himself of all his hypocrisies and teach him to accept with
tranquility his place in the universe.
There is nothing so easy to say but so hard to do
as 'give up'. Resignation is not self-abandonment, nor blind obedience.
Resignation is the spiritual peace permitted only after one has exhausted the
heart and mind of things.
It was through Zen, which teaches that salvation
can be reached only through self-discipline and order, not doctrine or faith,
that Santoka tried to achieve this resignation and spiritual peace that so
eluded him.
The following excerpts from his diary may also help
to illustrate the nature of his harsh self-interrogation:
How can the man who cannot believe in himself
possibly believe in God?
One day's life resolves for that day alone one's
doubts about the universe.
Human life begins in conquest of one's self and it
ends in conquest of one's self.
A man who has consumed all his power and has never
known a word of prayer is a hero free of illusions.
If you find you must pray, turn toward yourself and
pray.
Self-love is not self-flattery, it is not tolerance
toward oneself. The man who loves himself is the most severe, the most
heartless toward himself.
Weep not for seeking and not obtaining, but for
seeking and not being fulfilled in what is gained.
The life of the weak is a continuing chain of acts
of repentance. And this repentance is no more than repentance for its own sake.
In the strong too there are times of repentance,
but there is no repentance of the kind that does not give rise to the bud of
new life.
The truth is both full of mercy and at the same
time brutal. Just as there is truth in God there is also truth in the devil.
To live the true life is to know suffering.
What we find in these aphorisms, a pursuit of
Santoka's into which he put a great deal of effort in his middle years, is the
image of a sick man determined to cure himself through naked exposure to the
elements, an existentialist who must interminably suffer the recognition of his
inability to cope with life. Santoka sought to overcome his spiritual weaknesses
by negating any outer source of salvation and putting all his energy into
self-interrogation and self-revelation. But in his pursuit of the truth about
himself he was to find that his weaknesses became all the more apparent, that
he was undeniably a bogus priest who was unable to control his physical
appetites and lived off the good will of his friends. Thus the truth led to
suffering, and suffering became almost an aesthetic virtue worthy of
cultivation. He wrote:
The honest man must suffer. The honest man becomes
honest in proportion to his suffering. Pain deepens thought and strengthens
life. Pain is the purification of life.
If the search for truth results not in the
salvation of peace of mind but in the further accumulation of suffering, and if
by choice or fate the final escape of death is not yet open, then suffering has
to be recognized for its inextricable relationship to life.
Even when he doubted god, doubted man, and even
doubted himself, he could never doubt the fact of his own suffering. To that
extent was his suffering deeply embedded and deeply rooted in his existence.
Pain always comes from within, never from without.
The seed of pain that we plant, we ourselves must harvest and drink of its
fruit. Pain cannot be broken, it can only be embraced. We must grasp the dark
power at the bottom of pain.
Yet Santoka was not unaware of the dangerously
sentimental and masochistic nature of his excessive inclination to suffer. As
noted above, he found his purposeless acts of repentance nothing more than an
additional form of weakness, to be scorned and ridiculed.
Just as there is seduction in pleasure, there is
attraction in pain. Those people whose lives are nothing but pain yet have no
fear of death often continue to live, not because of the will for existence but
because they have grasped the sweetness at the bottom of pain.
To taste pain is valuable, but to become accustomed
to pain is fearful.
The emptiness of those who torture their flesh in
order to soothe their spirit.
This last statement reads like a condemnation of
his entire course of life. The man who will walk thousands of miles to calm his
spirit realizes even before the journey has begun that it will all be
meaningless and futile. But it is also the only course left to him, and he must
travel it with humility and dignity.
The man who has come from hell does not shout and
run. Silently, gazing fixedly at the earth, he walks.
NATURE AND SIMPLICITY
Santoka's path away from the established life of
man into nature has been followed by numerous religious and intellectual
figures in Japanese history. The world of nature has offered a limitless arena
of serenity, inevitability, and unalterable flow for those who had been too
caught up in the worldly affairs of man to contemplate mortal life and universal
eternity.
But Santoka was also a priest who never believed in
an eternal afterlife and who had despaired of ever achieving salvation. As a
consequence his perception of the hundreds of mountains and rivers he crossed
in his journeys was of a different dimension from the view of those who sought
in nature a definition of life. Santoka never attempted to solve the divine
pattern manifested in nature, nor did he try to find in nature a symbolic
equivalent to human mortality.
While Santoka's poetry abounds in images from
nature, he almost completely ignores such traditional images as the plum and
cherry blossoms, the nightingale, wild geese, and maple leaves. He was
consciously trying to break away from binding poetic conventions, and he was
not interested in the well-established religious and philosophical connotations
that they suggested. Santoka was to find expression for his own state of being
in the growth and decay of nature, but he was far too involved in revealing his
own individual soul to find universal truths in the scattering of blossoms or
the falling of autumn leaves. His religious deference to nature is of a more
undefinable, emotional quality, a sense of awe before the miracle and
profundity of life:
Sacredness,
a pure white chicken.
a pure white chicken.
What is sown will grow,
I tread firmly the calmness of the earth.
I tread firmly the calmness of the earth.
Receiving the deep autumn
waters,
I return.
I return.
A voice stirring above the
wind,
'Praise to Kannon.'
'Praise to Kannon.'
The first of the above poems was written when
Santoka spotted a chicken perched on the roof of a temple he was visiting. He
finds that the strikingly white living animal is able to convey a deeper
impression of sacredness than the temple and the religious images within it.
The next two poems express a sense of joyful thanksgiving on experiencing the
bountifulness of nature. Nature is a religious altar, offering worshipers
myriad rewards. And in the final poem he hears a voice real or imagined, or
perhaps his own, that seems to harmonize with the wind in an endless, amorphous
chant to Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy.
But much more than the reverence for nature's
mystery and profundity, it was the sense of serenity and in some instances joy
in the simplicity and unequivocality of nature that sustained Santoka on his
journeys and provided the source of his poetry. He approached nature in
literally an almost naked state, carrying his alms bowl and one pair of
chopsticks as his luggage. In his view, to protect himself from nature was a
sacrilege against his self-proclaimed discipline of simplicity. He even went to
the extent of refusing to wear false teeth after all his teeth had fallen out
and, except in the most dire cases, declining the use of mosquito nets, both
needless artifices for a man who has opened himself up to nature in its
entirety. Santoka was rewarded while this tenacity of spirit lasted with a view
of life and nature at its most basic and unadorned, and this view at times
filled him with a joy as profound as his grief could be limitless.
With a buoyant heart,
I taste the water.
I taste the water.
Santoka's love of cold, clear water was almost as
great as his taste for sake. In this small but spirited verse the poet's
heart surges with pleasure as the cool liquid circulates through his hot and
tired body. He does not drink the water but tastes it, absorbs it into himself.
Other poems with water as the theme include:
The going gets late,
how sweet this water tastes.
how sweet this water tastes.
Winter-withered mountain,
all the water one can drink.
all the water one can drink.
Together with the sound of
water
I have descended to the village.
I have descended to the village.
Santoka's poems expressing his real joy in the
simplicity of his life on the road or at the hermitage, and the unambiguity
with which the natural scene complements this joy, are among his very best. To
give a small sampling:
Ah, the sparrow dances,
Ah, the dandelions scatter.
Ah, the dandelions scatter.
Finally it has blossomed,
the flower is white.
the flower is white.
Stretching out my legs
to take in the day's last rays of sun.
to take in the day's last rays of sun.
Evening sky,
the silhouettes of farmers in their fields
deepen.
the silhouettes of farmers in their fields
deepen.
Not a wisp of cloud,
I take off my bamboo hat.
I take off my bamboo hat.
The wind through the pines
is cool,
man eats,
horse eats.
man eats,
horse eats.
As I walk, buttercups,
as I sit, buttercups.
as I sit, buttercups.
The ground moist with
morning dew,
I go where I want.
I go where I want.
Suddenly,
something grazing past in the wind.
something grazing past in the wind.
The hotness, sweetness of
potato gruel,
autumn has come.
autumn has come.
The sun's rays
lingering on withered leaves—
the color is sad.
lingering on withered leaves—
the color is sad.
Santoka tells of one small town in Kagoshima where
the police would not allow him to beg. Buying a newspaper, he spent the day
lounging in the sun, then checked into a cheap lodging house where he was
quartered with a Korean peddler, a traveling masseur, and a stone polisher.
After exchanging stories with these other men of the road, he wrote letters for
both the illiterate masseur and polisher, and then when all had gone to bed he
took out his diary and wrote of his day:
At last they are all
asleep,
ah, it's a good, moonlight night.
ah, it's a good, moonlight night.
He found particular attraction in the fertility and
tenacity of weeds, writing in his diary, 'My existence is not different from
that of wild grass. But in that alone I find satisfaction.' The following poem
expresses the wild beauty and vitality of weeds:
In its natural state
as a weed,
it shoots forth its buds.
as a weed,
it shoots forth its buds.
Just as Santoka sang of the white chicken perched
on the temple roof, he found in the whiteness and plainness of his main and
often only food, rice, a constant source of celebration:
The sweetness of rice,
a blue, blue sky.
a blue, blue sky.
The fallen leaves are
warm,
from the rice I chew a glow.
from the rice I chew a glow.
Light fills the air,
the rice is shining white.
the rice is shining white.
The sweet taste of rice,
alone, chewing.
alone, chewing.
Crickets,
only enough rice for tomorrow.
only enough rice for tomorrow.
A moonlight night,
polishing the only rice I have.
polishing the only rice I have.
Another joy was a hot morning bath. Santoka loved
the hot springs of Kyushu, and when he had the money he spent long days
luxuriating at the baths:
Soaking in the quietness
of a brimming morning bath.
of a brimming morning bath.
The pleasantness of a
morning bath,
quietly waiting my turn in the steam.
quietly waiting my turn in the steam.
My stark naked body,
revealed to the sun.
revealed to the sun.
Even in the last year of his life, with his
physical energy sorely reduced and in a deepened state of depression over his
incorrigible lifestyle, he was able to write verses full of wonder at the
beauty and simplicity of nature:
A persimmon resting on my
palm,
fascinatingly red.
fascinatingly red.
If Santoka denied an afterlife, he was still a firm
believer in the perpetual present, and nature, always changing but always the
same, was the manifestation of this tenseless world. In the preface to his
poetry collection Sanko Suiko ('Mountain Travels, Water Travels'), he
writes the poem,
When in the mountains,
I will watch the mountains,
On rainy days
I will listen to the rain,
Spring, summer, fall, winter,
Morning is good,
Evening is good.
I will watch the mountains,
On rainy days
I will listen to the rain,
Spring, summer, fall, winter,
Morning is good,
Evening is good.
This sense of the world of today, the reduction of
life to a single object and a single moment, is also seen in these poems:
Today,
I pick butterbur flowers,
I eat butterbur flowers.
I pick butterbur flowers,
I eat butterbur flowers.
Today,
the roadside dandelions of this day
have blossomed.
the roadside dandelions of this day
have blossomed.
Endlessness
Yet if there were moments of joy in his travels,
there were also times when Santoka felt the endlessness of his trek and the
vastness of the natural world draining his energy and weighing him down. The
spatial and temporal infinitude of nature made him painfully aware of the
insignificance and the futility of his attempt to confront nature in its rawest
form. He wrote,
In the midst of life and
death,
a steady fall of snow.
a steady fall of snow.
The poem could be translated more prosaically, 'The
snow of life and death falls steadily'—a rather trite statement of the
continuity of nature. A similar poem by the poetry master Saigyo offers a
deeper insight into what Santoka was saying:
Though I know
this cicada-shell body
to be a trifling thing,
this day of falling snow
is bitter cold.
this cicada-shell body
to be a trifling thing,
this day of falling snow
is bitter cold.
Like Santoka, Saigyo was continually struggling
with the contradiction between his desire to come to grips with mortality and
his attachment to life. An d in both of their poems, they have come to the
disheartening realization that their inner struggle is of so little
significance in the face of the reality of a chilling winter snowfall. In
Santoka this despair in the insignificance of his existence is often expressed
in terms of the immeasurable vastness of the world in which he travels:
Waking from an afternoon
nap,
whichever way I look,
mountains.
whichever way I look,
mountains.
The shrikes cry,
there is no place to abandon myself.
there is no place to abandon myself.
My home is far away,
the sprout of a tree.
the sprout of a tree.
Picking up a stick in the
wind,
I walk on.
I walk on.
The sound of water,
from afar, from near,
leading me on.
from afar, from near,
leading me on.
The crow crying,
the crow flying,
no place to settle down.
the crow flying,
no place to settle down.
Sweltering heat,
train tracks straight into the distance.
train tracks straight into the distance.
A crow flies off,
I will cross the water.
I will cross the water.
Unending rain,
mountains,
more mountains,
unknown mountains.
mountains,
more mountains,
unknown mountains.
My spirit is exhausted,
the mountains, the sea,
are too beautiful.
the mountains, the sea,
are too beautiful.
Filled with shades of
night
the water flows on,
autumn lodgings.
the water flows on,
autumn lodgings.
The endless journey, and the insignificance Santoka
attached to man-built monuments, are well expressed in the poem that he wrote
after completing a long journey to the famous ancient city of Hiraizumi in the
northern area of Tohoku in 1936. It was the farthest north Santoka ever
traveled.
I have come this far,
a drink of water, and I am gone.
a drink of water, and I am gone.
Several visits to the coast of the rough Japan Sea
evoked similar sentiments of the vastness of nature:
My heart empty,
the surge and ebb
of pounding waves.
the surge and ebb
of pounding waves.
The sound of waves is
unending,
home is so far away.
home is so far away.
Thrusting my legs into the
wild sea,
a journey stretching into the past,
into the future.
a journey stretching into the past,
into the future.
Now I am here,
the blueness of the sea is infinite.
the blueness of the sea is infinite.
There is also the short but difficult poem:
I ford across
a bone-dry stream.
a bone-dry stream.
One can only guess at the emotions of the poet as he
wrote this last poem, but from his emphasis on 'bone-dry' (Jcarekittd),
it may well be imagined that Santoka here too felt the vitality of his journey
seeping away, that die lifeless riverbed had again reminded him of the ultimate
emptiness and terrible loneliness of his unending path.
LONELINESS
If a sense of insignificance before nature was the
philosophical burden that Santoka had to carry, loneliness and a sense of
isolation were the more visceral feelings he experienced in his life on the
road. By temperament he was a man who loved good companionship, and his forays
into unfamiliar regions where he knew no one were conscious acts of
self-discipline and penitence for his frequent falls from grace. This forced
separation heightened his awareness of the isolation and loneliness of being in
a place where he suddenly had no one to talk to and fall back on. The intensity
of this feeling is shown in some of his poems:
A crow caws,
I too am alone.
I too am alone.
Falling snow,
alone, alone I go.
alone, alone I go.
Watching the moon begin to
sink,
I alone.
I alone.
On a straight road,
so lonely.
so lonely.
In the midst alone,
always alone,
the grass is bursting into bloom.
always alone,
the grass is bursting into bloom.
One can hardly doubt the depth of the poet's
emotions in these poems, but they are perhaps too direct, too filled with
pathos, to escape the charge of being uncomfortably sentimental. Santoka is
better able to convey the feeling without the theatrical pose in his poems in
which he uses a more classical approach of Japanese literature, such as
expressing his loneliness in the sadness of autumn:
Without a home of my own,
the autumn becomes ever deeper.
the autumn becomes ever deeper.
The road has disappeared,
the leaves whisper of their fall.
the leaves whisper of their fall.
The snap of dried twigs,
not a thought in my head.
not a thought in my head.
A single stream of water
drawn down upon a solitary house,
shades of autumn.
drawn down upon a solitary house,
shades of autumn.
The tips of reeds,
walking on
with the path of the wind.
walking on
with the path of the wind.
There is also this moving poem written on returning
to his empty hermitage after a long journey:
Penetrating quiet,
dust on the desk.
dust on the desk.
Various other poems aptly express this mood:
The winter night that has
left me here,
in such a way.
in such a way.
A whole day without a
word,
the sound of waves.
the sound of waves.
Someone speaks
in a voice like my father,
this trip is filled with sadness.
in a voice like my father,
this trip is filled with sadness.
Walking through the autumn
rains,
a village where no one will let me in.
a village where no one will let me in.
Iron begging bowl,
receiving a falling leaf.
receiving a falling leaf.
Into my metal bowl too,
hail.
hail.
This last poem, one of Santoka's best known, was
written on a cold January day as he walked companionless along a deserted
seacoast. It calls on the reader to imagine both the scene and the sound of hail
hitting the metal alms bowl. The dull metallic ring of the bowl shivers through
the body of the solitary figure, increasing his coldness and sense of
isolation.
Mention must also be made of Santoka's deep
attraction to shigure, the long cold drizzles of autumn, as an image to
describe the loneliness of the long journey, both in its figurative and literal
sense. This subject is taken up in an essay on Santoka by the literary scholar
Maruya Saiichi, and I will here present only a few of Santoka's poems on the
subject:
Autumn rains,
walking deep into the mountains
of the autumn rains.
walking deep into the mountains
of the autumn rains.
That sound—
autumn rain?
autumn rain?
From morning an autumn
drizzle,
the beauty of persimmon leaves.
the beauty of persimmon leaves.
Soaked in an autumn rain,
the friend I await has come.
the friend I await has come.
A steady autumn drizzle,
one road, straight ahead.
one road, straight ahead.
A temple among the pines,
the autumn rains have begun,
here I will stay.
the autumn rains have begun,
here I will stay.
BEGGING AND SELF-RIDICULE
Another factor that made his journeys long and
lonely was a strong inner resistance to the act of mendicancy which he demanded
of himself as a monk on pilgrimage. He disliked begging, disliked staying in
cheap, crowded, and noisy inns, and, in the tradition of many of the literary
recluses of Japan, preferred when possible to accept the shelter provided by
his friends and benefactors. He was also aware of the hypocrisy of justifying
his purposeless wandering by the donning of a monk's garb, and he often thought
himself nothing more than a dissipated beggar disguised as a holy man seeking
enlightenment. His friends were in general agreement that Santoka was basically
a poet and not a priest, and that his priest's robes were of secondary
importance in his life and work, but Santoka had to convince himself that his
pilgrimages were not in fact compounding die sinful nature of his life.
He justified his begging by telling himself that he
did not presume to give sermons but did awaken the spirit of Buddha in people
by receiving alms. He also lived by a fairly strict rule mat when he had
received enough for his daily living needs he would stop begging and return to
writing or walking. There were times when he found satisfaction or at least
resignation in this life, as in these poems:
Tossed to me in offering,
the shine of a single coin.
the shine of a single coin.
No more houses where I can
beg,
clouds over the mountains.
clouds over the mountains.
More often he chose to see himself as a humorous
and good-natured, if somewhat ridiculous, oddity. In a poem titled
'Self-image', he describes himself as,
Dressed in rags,
bulging in padded winter-clothes,
a face of innocent happiness.
bulging in padded winter-clothes,
a face of innocent happiness.
He tried to put himself over as a foolish, harmless
old man, not to be held responsible for his eccentricities:
The heaviness of baggage
I cannot bring myself to throw away,
on my front, on my back.
I cannot bring myself to throw away,
on my front, on my back.
In another poem, written in 1931 as he started out
on another trip, he laughs at himself rather ruefully in a poem titled
'Self-ridicule':
A receding figure,
soaked in the autumn rains?
soaked in the autumn rains?
His complete lack of possessions, his primitive way
of living, are laughed at in the poems about his teeth, of which only three
remained by the time he was fifty:
No money,
no possessions,
no teeth,
alone.
no possessions,
no teeth,
alone.
Something missing,
another tooth fallen out,
I heave it into the evening darkness.
another tooth fallen out,
I heave it into the evening darkness.
But there were also times when humor would not
sustain the weight of his self-abuse, as in the autumn of 1930 when, after
drinking up his gains, he cried, 'It is truly shameful that the gifts I receive
are converted directly into alcohol and nicotine.' It was at these times that
his chanting and begging took on a more distracted, guilt-ridden quality.
Walking into the wind,
heaping abuse upon myself.
heaping abuse upon myself.
Taking in the scorching
sun,
begging as I go.
begging as I go.
I go on soaked by the rain
of my selfish, willful journey.
of my selfish, willful journey.
On his way back from a trip to northern Japan in
1936 he stopped wearing his priest's robes in penitence for indulging in an
eating and drinking binge that he could not pay for and again having to be
bailed out by a friend. In the last year of his life when his fortunes were at
an ebb, he once more stripped off his robes and for a short time sought alms
not as a priest but as a mere beggar:
Once again the beggar that
I was,
a single towel.
a single towel.
As his life drew toward its end and he realized
that he was as far away from any kind of enlightenment as ever, Santoka began
to lose confidence in his begging, his efforts became half-hearted, and alms
were often not enough for food and lodging. His despondency was reflected in a
letter he wrote to a young poet who wanted to emulate his lifestyle, for he
sharply rebuked the man for even thinking about leading such an irresponsible
life.
In a short poem titled 'Regrets', written in his
later years, he asks himself:
My bamboo hat—
has it too begun to leak?
has it too begun to leak?
The wide-brimmed kasa that Santoka had worn
for so many years had finally begun to rot and fall apart, and he rather
wistfully ridicules his own tattered, worn-out body as it too gradually begins
to waste away.
SECLUSION
In 1932, at the age of fifty, Santoka found
temporary respite from his long journey when he began to live in the hermitage
that his friends had renovated for him in the village of Ogori. He named it
'Gochuan', 'Cottage in that Midst', from a Kannon surra which contains the
phrase, 'In that midst a solitary man wrote, and this he sang.'
A friend who taught at a local agricultural high
school mobilized his students to rebuild the abandoned cottage, and Santoka's
closest friend, fellow Soun poet Kimura Rokuhei of Kumamoto, was put in
charge of a modest fund to provide him with a periodic allowance. The money was
entrusted to Rokuhei to prevent Santoka from spending it all in one drunken
splurge. The first days at Gochuan were some of the most tranquil Santoka was
ever to experience. After settling down there, he wrote:
Finally I have returned to the world of existence;
I feel that I can actually speak of 'returning home, meditating in peace'. For
a long time I have wandered. Not only my body but my heart has wandered. I have
suffered the fact that I must live. I have found anguish in the necessity of
existence. Thus finally I have been able to find peace with existence, and
through that I have discovered myself.
He busied himself in writing, keeping his few
belongings in spotless order, visiting with neighbors, and receiving old
friends and new acquaintances eager to listen to his endless stories and share
with him a bottle of sake. For the first time he cultivated his own
garden and received great satisfaction from watching the products of his
labors:
Over a red sunrise
a rain is falling,
I will plant radishes.
a rain is falling,
I will plant radishes.
His contentment in this period is reflected in
poems that show a genuine sense of harmony and optimism in life:
The spider weaves his web,
I affirm myself.
I affirm myself.
This morning the sound of
water,
a feeling that good news will come.
a feeling that good news will come.
To live life in
tranquility,
a wren.
a wren.
Opening the window,
a window full of spring.
a window full of spring.
Every day naked,
butterflies,
dragonflies.
butterflies,
dragonflies.
Dusk,
polishing a placid kettle.
polishing a placid kettle.
Receiving,
contented,
alone, I lay down my chopsticks.
contented,
alone, I lay down my chopsticks.
Yet just as on the road Santoka was constantly
battling the loneliness of being in a strange land, so also in his cottage life
there was the oppressing loneliness of silence and long hours of inactivity.
Loneliness is a theme with a long history in Japanese literature, but for
Santoka it was something of a different dimension from the concept of courtiers
such as Murasaki Shikibu or Ki no Tsurayuki, who found in it social refinement,
or the renga masters Sogi and Shinkei, who made it into a standard of
beauty. Loneliness continually gnawed at Santoka, depriving him of the peace of
mind he so desperately sought and driving him to the bouts of self-oblivion and
mindless wandering he so wanted to avoid.
Santoka tried to overcome the pain of loneliness at
Gochuan. He urged himself to surrender to the very essence of solitude. 'We
must bear the loneliness of isolation. We must overcome our own coldness. We
must dig down into there and from that bottom lick the sweet taste of life
oozing out.' He tried to discipline himself to accept solitude coolly, without
emotion: 'D o not write in tears. The poem written in tears is both cowardly
and superficial. Until the tears have completely dried, sit in silence, alone,
and think.'
For the next few years he spent much of his time at
the cottage, often in contentment and often in nearly unbearable restlessness,
but always conscious of being alone.
Snow settles upon snow,
I am in the midst of quietude.
I am in the midst of quietude.
Waking, the snow is
falling,
it is not lonely,
and yet …
it is not lonely,
and yet …
A crow on a withered tree,
The New Year has come and gone.
The New Year has come and gone.
One flower on the desk,
slowly opening.
slowly opening.
One day the longing for a
friend,
buds of trees, buds of grass.
buds of trees, buds of grass.
Always alone,
a red dragonfly.
a red dragonfly.
Feelings of joy,
and feelings of sadness,
thickly growing grass.
and feelings of sadness,
thickly growing grass.
When I calm my heart,
the sound of water.
the sound of water.
Today, too, all day,
no one has come,
fireflies.
no one has come,
fireflies.
This last poem is somewhat reminiscent of Saigyo's
verse,
Deep in the mountains,
in this retreat
where no man comes,
the only sound
is the clamor of monkeys.
in this retreat
where no man comes,
the only sound
is the clamor of monkeys.
While dragonflies and monkeys are quite different
as an artistic image, both poets see or hear another living creature in their
isolated world, and the fact that these living things are beyond the realm of
human communication makes the solitude of the poet even more poignant.
No one to talk to,
I eat my dinner under the mosquito net.
I eat my dinner under the mosquito net.
The shadows subdued,
deep at night
I am eating.
deep at night
I am eating.
At the tobacco shop
no cigarettes,
a cold rain falls.
no cigarettes,
a cold rain falls.
No one is here,
the fallen leaves I swept away,
deep in the day.
the fallen leaves I swept away,
deep in the day.
Despite his sincere efforts to settle down to a
peaceful and moderate life, Santoka would still at times be found passed out
along me road after frantic drinking bouts. He occasionally received funds from
his benefactors, but his drinking kept him destitute most of the time. Leading
a sedentary life, he was unable to consume his excess energy and frustration,
and he came to feel more and more closed in:
Closed in, by myself,
an insect comes rapping
against the sliding door.
an insect comes rapping
against the sliding door.
As time went by his need to travel again began to
stir him, and although he was not to abandon Gochuan for good until 1938, his
interests had long before started to wander, and the cottage gradually fell
into a state of disrepair.
The wall is crumbling,
vines creeping in.
vines creeping in.
FRIENDSHIP
I have nothing at all, nothing except friends. To
have such good friends is a source of pride for me.
It is yet another of the ironies of Santoka's life
that the man who put such faith in self-discovery was ultimately to find his
only real source of pleasure in the companionship of others. He asked much of
his friends and at times caused them a great deal of trouble, but it is a
tribute both to the irresistible warmth of his character and the Japanese
tolerance toward the failings of old friends that they continued to greet him
with genuine pleasure when he appeared at their houses.
Santoka first visited Kimura Rokuhei, his longtime
benefactor, in Kumamoto in 1918. After an evening of convivial conversation
Santoka left for home, but his good spirits led him into a sake shop for
one more round. The next morning Rokuhei received a visit from the police, who
told him that Santoka had landed in jail for getting drunk and being unable to
pay his bill, and that he had told the police to ask his new friend to bail him
out.
Rokuhei did so, as he was to do many times during
their long friendship. It is possible, in fact, that Santoka might have been a
greater poet, of the caliber of Saigyo or Basho, had he not been so well taken
care of by his friends. Santoka would feel deeply repentant after causing his
friends such trouble, but would soon be calling on them again, ready for yet
another round. Some of his friends' wives were less than overjoyed to see the
bedraggled monk turn up again for another disrupting three or four days of
eating and drinking, but few could begrudge the man who accepted their
hospitality with such sincere and ingenuous gratitude.
It would not be difficult to draw parallels between
the broken home life of the boy Shoichi and of the man Santoka, who almost
willfully formed relationships of dependence in his friendships, but it is
perhaps worthwhile emphasizing the deep craving Santoka had for friendship and
the real joy he derived from it.
People's compassion
touches my heart,
I stroke the warm brazier.
touches my heart,
I stroke the warm brazier.
The quilt is long,
the night too is long,
I have been given this place to sleep.
the night too is long,
I have been given this place to sleep.
A well-stuffed quilt,
dreams of home.
dreams of home.
A grasped hand,
chaps.
chaps.
[At the bath]
Naked,
talk jumps back and forth.
Naked,
talk jumps back and forth.
The sound of wind chimes,
at the time when you should come.
at the time when you should come.
As the grass starts to
stir,
for some reason I wait for a friend to come.
for some reason I wait for a friend to come.
When the clouds of dusk
are so beautiful,
I yearn for a friend.
I yearn for a friend.
The sound of voices
approaching,
buds of trees brightly bearing.
buds of trees brightly bearing.
I have nothing particular
to wait for…
In the fall of evening
the cry of cicada.
In the fall of evening
the cry of cicada.
This last poem is similar to one written by the
great Shinkokinshu poetess Shikishi Naishinno:
The fall paulownia leaves
have even now
made passage difficult,
though by no means
is there someone I would wait for.
have even now
made passage difficult,
though by no means
is there someone I would wait for.
Just as friendship was his greatest joy, parting
was for Santoka the hardest of all acts. He tried to make farewells as painless
as possible by exchanging quick, light goodbyes and then briskly setting out
down the road. One poet acquaintance tells of the first time Santoka invaded
his home, when the two drank and talked and slept together for three days; then
at the time of parting, the monk murmured a word of thanks, and, contrary to
Japanese custom, marched off down the road without a glance back at his host
and new friend.
Departing, each on our
separate ways,
I turn my face to the sun.
I turn my face to the sun.
But if Santoka tried to make his partings as
unemotional as possible, both his partings in life and by death left a deep
impression on him.
Face to face we smile,
we who will never meet again.
we who will never meet again.
So easily it darkens
in the reluctance of our parting,
a ten-day moon.
in the reluctance of our parting,
a ten-day moon.
The road of our parting
runs straight ahead.
runs straight ahead.
Drifting off from the
water,
the lamp of the girl
dances in the dark.
the lamp of the girl
dances in the dark.
Perhaps we will not meet
again,
a blur of tree sprouts.
a blur of tree sprouts.
Since we parted,
every day the snow has fallen.
every day the snow has fallen.
Both the snow on a distant
mountain
and a friend who has gone away.
and a friend who has gone away.
My cough won't stop,
no hand to beat my back.
no hand to beat my back.
Of course, the most difficult parting of all was
that of death, not only because of the personal loss involved but also because
the death of another made even more acute Santoka's sense of guilt in not
fulfilling his obligations to the living and his despair over his inability to
achieve a quick and graceful death.
The peach tree has begun
to bear fruit,
you have already died.
you have already died.
With a tomato in my palm,
in front of Buddha,
in front of my father,
in front of my mother.
in front of Buddha,
in front of my father,
in front of my mother.
No trace left of the house
of my birth,
fireflies.
fireflies.
SAKE
If there was only one thing that remained constant
throughout Santoka's chaotic life, it was his weakness for sake. Sake
was for him both an elixir and the source of his destruction; despite his
periodic feeble attempts at abstinence, it played, as Santoka well realized, an
integral role in determining the course of his life. His friends and
acquaintances generally agree that Santoka was a confirmed alcoholic, and it
would be difficult to find fault with that diagnosis. His drinking was
certainly to some extent moderated by his constant lack of funds, but when he
was treated by friends, he drank with a relish and abandon that filled people
with amazement and consternation. That drink was another form of escape, a mental
pilgrimage not essentially different in purpose from his constant urge to
wander, is undeniable. Sake released him briefly from his unhappy
childhood, his inability to take care of his family, and his guilt over his
dissipated course of life.
His poetry mentor Seisensui said that as the years
went by Santoka was no longer able to distinguish between the worlds of
drunkenness and sobriety, that it was only through drinking that he was able to
attain some level of sobriety. While Seisensui's theory may appear somewhat
oversimplified, it seems to be true that when Santoka drank he enjoyed those
few delicious moments in which the mental state which he had been seeking
through Zen and through begging—a calm acceptance of life, a feeling of
security, and confidence in himself and his relationships with people—were
suddenly opened up to him. According to Santoka, 'Dreams are the sake of
the consoled spirit. Sake is the dream of the anguished flesh.' The
sense of transcendence brought on by sake may indeed be an illusion, a
dream that makes the attainment of real enlightenment even more difficult, yet
for Santoka this temporary respite from the anguished flesh was irresistible.
In his diary Santoka constantly lectures himself on
how to drink in order to enjoy its many virtues without suffering from its many
evils. For example, 'There is no crime in intoxicating sake. There is
poison in sake that does not intoxicate.'
Also,
The sake we drink is sake drunk for
its taste; it is sake that we should sip, sake drunk with a
smile. Do not drink in tears—drink laughing. Do not drink alone—drink shoulder
to shoulder. Do not drink sake that, no matter how much you drink,
cannot make you drunk; drink sake that intoxicates while the taste is
still on the lips. Do not drink bitter sake—drink sweet sake.
The man who cannot spontaneously become intoxicated
must finally destroy himself.
Sake
ought not to be drunk in times of discontent. Drinking when we are not
discontented, we can penetrate to the true taste of the liquid.
There were times when Santoka expressed the pure
delight of drinking, as in his famous poem:
A soft whirling drunk,
a scattering of leaves.
a scattering of leaves.
The poem revolves around the adverb horohoro,
which signifies a mellow, blissful, sentimentally happy state of drunkenness,
and also describes the fluttering and dancing of falling leaves. The drunken
poet is like the leaves—floating, weightless, carried aimlessly to and fro by
the cool autumn breeze.
He also wrote about the mental and physical pain
his drinking brought him:
The pitifulness
of not being able to get drunk,
the crickets cry.
of not being able to get drunk,
the crickets cry.
Waking from drunkenness,
the wind blows mournfully through.
the wind blows mournfully through.
In September 1940, just one month before his death,
his body weakened but his thirst unabated, he wrote:
No more sake,
staring fixedly
at the moon.
staring fixedly
at the moon.
One of the best illustrations of Santoka's powerful
craving for drink is an incident which took place when he came down with acute
pneumonia while traveling in the snowy Japan Alps in early 1934. The hospital
which took him in refused to accept his claim that alcohol was his 'best
medicine', so the thirsty Santoka was obliged to sneak out in his hospital
slippers to down a few hot sake drinks at a nearby restaurant. Feeling
thoroughly recovered after this refreshment, he boarded the next train and
began the long journey back to Gochuan.
WRITING
Santoka tends to leave the impression of a talented
but undisciplined poet who did little more than jot down his tiny vignettes of
life as they appeared before his eyes. He wrote thousands of poems and to a
certain extent forces upon the reader the task of sifting through them to
decide which are the 'better' works of art. Santoka admits in his diary,
'Rather than poetry produced skillfully, I desire the poem unskillfully born.'
Just as he tried to reduce his way of life to its simplest elements, he
believed that the good poem was one that arose out of the most pure and direct
response to a scene or personal experience. He was an incorrigible romantic,
who dreamed of taking all the artifice out of art and returning it to its
'natural' state. 'I want to make my poems sing like the floating clouds, like
die flow of water, like a small bird, like die dancing leaves.'
While prizing the spontaneity of the poetic
sentiment, however, Santoka also went to surprisingly great pains to polish the
final poetic form. He worked laboriously on his poems, rewriting, discussing
them with friends, and corresponding with other poets for advice. Like many
haiku and short-verse poets in Japan, he was capable of long debates and
considerable personal discomposure over a single grammatical particle or verb
tense. The tremendous energy Santoka spent in reviewing and rephrasing his work
is very much in the tradition of Japan's recluse writers, those poets and
essayists such as Kamo no Chomei and Yoshida Kenko, who to various degrees
withdrew from society and set about trying to communicate their views to that
society in as fluent a manner as possible. This need for the 'detached' writer
to express himself has its elements of irony, especially for such writers as
Saigyo and Santoka who were making very conscious attempts to overcome their
self-centered personalities. But writing, especially poetry, can also be a
means of disciplining the mind and calming the raging spirit, and it was in
this respect that Santoka, and Saigyo, found in poetry a possible road to
salvation.
In preparing his poetry collections Santoka showed
a meticulousness completely out of harmony with his ordinary drunken,
unregulated life. In his collection Sanko Suiko he went through
two thousand of his poems to select a mere 140 which he considered good enough
to include in the work. As an example of his selection process we have his comments
at the end of his collection titled Kaki no ha (Persimmon Leaf):
When I walk,
fruit-bearing grasses,
when I sit,
fruit-bearing grasses.
fruit-bearing grasses,
when I sit,
fruit-bearing grasses.
When I walk,
cuckoos,
when I run,
cuckoos.
cuckoos,
when I run,
cuckoos.
One or the other verse had to be discarded, but it
was difficult for me to discard either of them. I traveled through the Tohoku
region, and in constant surprise at the large number of cuckoos I listened to
their song with great interest. And on the Shinano road for the first time in
my life, I even caught a glimpse of the bird.
After all,
to be alone is good,
wild grasses.
to be alone is good,
wild grasses.
After all,
to be alone is sad,
dried-up grasses.
to be alone is sad,
dried-up grasses.
I am for ever possessed by sentimental feelings of
self-love, but considering that such feelings are not allowed in an individual
collection of verse I arbitrarily chose one for the book. I believe that
readers will be able to understand my frame of mind.
In both cases he chose the second poem for the
collection, not so much on its own merits as an independent poem but on the
degree of his personal involvement with its sentiments.
While living in his new hermitage in Shikoku during
the last year of his life, Santoka wrote about the importance of poetry in his
life:
I am pressed every day to meet the needs of life. I
spent yesterday and today concerned about whether I eat or not. Probably
tomorrow, too—no, it will be so until the day I die.
But every day, every night, I am writing. Even
though I neither drink nor eat, I never neglect writing. In other words, though
my stomach is empty I am able to write. Like the flow of water my poetic spirit
bubbles up and spills over. Living for me is the writing of poetry. Poetry is
my life.
It was the one great consolation of his life that
when all else failed him, when he had hardly enough to eat, his physical
strength broken, and his inability to come to terms with life still plaguing
him, he could still obtain much personal gratification through his poetry.
DEATH
It may be appropriate to conclude this study of
Santoka's life and work by examining his preoccupation and fascination with
death. Death held great attraction for him as the final solution to his search
for harmony with existence. Yet his several suicide attempts were all abortive,
because his disaffection with life was tempered by his fear of what he believed
was the finality of death.
In his study on Santoka, Kaneko Tota observes that
Santoka's life was one of 'stoic decadence', resulting from his lack of value
in life and lack of initiative toward death. Santoka spent his life in endless
dissection of his own character, searching for 'realities' and inner truths
that served little purpose except to further castigate his own restless soul.
After 1924, when he failed in his bid to get run
over by a train and then entered the priesthood, Santoka seemed to have decided
that the end of his life was not to be achieved by a positive act, and thus in
a passive sense he came to accept the fact that his life was for the time being
to continue. Like a man standing on a bridge trying to summon up the courage to
jump into a river, he finally realized that it was not in him to make the leap,
but that the energy he had consumed in the effort had made it impossible for
him to return to the safety of dry land. In 1934 he wrote in the postscript to
his collection Sanko Suiko:
I am now prepared to try to start out again, to
reacknowledge the 'world of existence'. I am reluctant to say whether that is
good or bad; I only know that it comes neither from so-called resignation nor
from what could be termed enlightenment.
What it did mean was that Santoka had tentatively
accepted life but that at least indirectly, through extending his physical and
mental powers of endurance to their limits, he would continue to keep his
options open for leaving this world. He would not personally take the final
plunge, but would Jay himself bare before the forces of life and death in the
hope that death would have no difficulty in snatching him away.
His attraction to death, and the loneliness of his
search for death, is a frequent theme in his poems.
Again the autumn rains?
Death has yet to come.
Death has yet to come.
In the face of death,
a cool wind.
a cool wind.
Even the ring of the wind
chimes,
the approach of death.
the approach of death.
The sound of the waves
fading out, flowing in,
my life draws to its close.
fading out, flowing in,
my life draws to its close.
The rain falls,
the sun shines,
I search for a place to die.
the sun shines,
I search for a place to die.
If this were to be my
deathplace …
The grass grows deeper and deeper.
The grass grows deeper and deeper.
A graveyard basks in
warmth,
the poor children.
the poor children.
The quietness of death,
clear-skied, leafless tree.
clear-skied, leafless tree.
The sound of raindrops,
I have become old.
I have become old.
As he became old, his unsettled way of life came to
tax his physical strength more and more. The cold autumn rain penetrated his
tired body and for perhaps the first time made death a reality to be directly
confronted. But death still eluded him. On his last pilgrimage through Shikoku
in 1939, he wrote:
I cannot seem to die,
on the other bank a red flower blooms.
on the other bank a red flower blooms.
The red flower (higanbana) is associated
with higan, literally 'the other bank', the equinoctial week in which
Buddhists pray for the souls of the dead, and Santoka sees there the beautiful
flower which is still beyond his grasp.
He wanted above all to accept death as easily as
the flowers and the insects followed their natural course of growth and decay.
This plant which at any
time may die,
blossoms and bears fruit.
blossoms and bears fruit.
I plant a tree seed,
the fruit will someday die.
the fruit will someday die.
Peacefully, possessing the
power of death,
grass is withering.
grass is withering.
This is the dance of the
butterflies
before death.
before death.
The Japanese for 'nirvana' is jakumetsu, the
two Chinese characters of which translate as 'solitude' and 'annihilation'. In
an analogous way, Santoka defined salvation as the destruction of an overactive
ego that had isolated him from the natural order. He sought to merge his spirit
with the universal process of the flower or the butterfly, for which to wither
or to die was a natural act of no intrinsic difference from to blossom or to
dance.
Yet in the end his efforts at self-annihilation did
little more than accentuate the tenacity of his ego and his great distance from
salvation. After struggling with his soul for year after year, he died in
October 1940, no more settled, no more sober, and no more at peace with himself
than when he began his odyssey of purification some fourteen years earlier.
That Santoka suffered is undeniable. That this
suffering was motivated more by a masochistic cycle of dissipation and
punishing acts of repentance than by the quest of some noble ideal is equally
true. But Santoka also had a wonderful capacity to celebrate the joys and
sorrows of life, the pure mountain waters, the fragile spring blossoms, the
heights and depths of sake, the smell and taste of cooked rice, and most
of all the warmth of human friendship. As a testimony to these emotions, his
poetry is certainly worthy of attention.
