Alan Watts on the Origins of Haiku and the Democratization of Zen
How Bashō and Bankei demystified Zen for everyday Buddhists
YouTube is so bursting full of clips filleted from Alan Watts’s (literal) hundreds of hours of recorded talks that you might not feel the need to delve into his full lectures. Or lecture series. But I think you’d be missing out. Especially if you’re interested in Eastern philosophy beyond its black light-friendly elements.
Watts wasn’t just a philosopher and speaker. He was a passionate scholar and historian with regards myth, ritual, and worship all around the world. He was an ordained Episcopal priest, who traveled extensively through the East, sought out the company of spiritual intellectuals, and even had some-formal formal Zen training. Peppered into his genuinely fun and surprisingly funny talks are all manner of humanizing anecdotes and fascinating lessons from theological history.
Case in point: This bit from Out of Your Mind: The World as Just So, in which he recounts the important “division in the history of Zen” that, to me, seems foundational to his easy and open attitude toward spirituality…
“There was a critical point in the seventeenth century when there were two very great masters: Hakuin and Bankei. Now, the seventeenth century is tremendously important in Japanese history because that was a time of what you might call the democratization of culture.
“Bashō invented haiku poetry so that everyone could be a poet. Not necessarily for publication, but for one’s own fun. People didn’t write poems for publication, necessarily — they wrote poems for parties. And he invented the seventeen-syllable haiku as a result of his Zen feeling for nature so that he could put this within the reach of everybody.
“What had happened to poetry before that time was that it had become so obscure, and so effete, and so sophisticated that only great literati could do it at all. This happened to Chinese poetry; there were so many references to other poems it was like reading T. S. Eliot.”
At this point, Watts goes into a fascinating little diversion on all the literary allusions you’d need to get intuitively to fully understand half the shit that Eliot was on about.
“Bashō popularized the haiku, and the haiku are originally based on the Zenrin poems. They take their flavor from that. There is one, you see: ‘The bird calls, mountain changes to be more mysterious.’ The first line of that says, ‘The wind drops, but the flowers keep on falling. The bird calls, and the mountain becomes more mysterious.’ And so haiku developed from that kind of short insight, that glimpse of nature.
“Now, while Bashō was taking poetry to the peasants, Bankei was taking Zen to them as well — to the farmers. And he ran his Zen on an entirely different system. He talked, mainly, about what he called fushō. Fushō is the unborn; that which has not yet arisen and which, as a matter of fact, never does arise. And so he said there is in you the unborn mind which was given to you by your parents.”
Here, he opens a book and reads some wonderful verses from Bankei’s teachings. They’re worth sharing separately, I think.
“Bankei was the abbot of Myōshin-ji — the rōshi — and he stopped the monks from using the kaiseki stick to hit them when they weren’t meditating or sleeping in meditation, because he said, ‘Even a sleeping man is still a Buddha, and you shouldn’t be disrespectful.’ And he attempted a Zen of no methods. You can meditate if you want to, that’s fine. But that’s like polishing a brick to make a mirror. And he used to say, too, that trying to purify your mind is like trying to wash off blood with blood.
“But Bankei’s Zen was elusive. Hakuin had eighty successors, Bankei had none. And some people think that that was the most admirable thing about him.”
I’ll be honest and admit that I knew vanishingly little about Asian history for most of my adult life. Less still about the intra-sect politics among Edo-period Japanese mystics. So, I am very fertile ground for this stuff, and I think it’s just fascinating.
I particularly love Watts’ anecdotes of Zen monks and their monastery training. A lot of it is really fucking hilarious. Considering his experiences, it seems reasonable to assume that a lot of these anecdotes came to him orally. They feel imbued with something more than just an academic’s understanding.
I will definitely be sharing more eventually.
