Mahakasyapa, of all the hundreds of the disciples present, alone discerning what it was in Buddha’s hand, smiled. After a lifetime of verbally explicating his Dharma, on this occasion he wordlessly held up a lotus flower. That simple form lends itself to the direct and concrete, offering uncommon glimpses of the commonplace: through Master Basho’s eyes, glimpses into reality.īasho follows in the lineage of Shakyamuni Buddha, who late in life assembled his disciples on the banks of a pond and delivered what is traditionally known as the Flower Sermon. Haiku-or hokku, as they were known in his lifetime-are composed within fairly exacting guidelines: three lines of seventeen syllables, 5–7–5, usually referencing season. Buddhists of all schools, we are Basho’s Dharma heirs, not of the art of the poetry alone, but more the art of the direct perception that reveals the jewels in our own lives.īasho did not make up the poetic genre for which he is known but refined it to its irreducible essence. Basho, the seventeenth-century Zen poet and pilgrim walking the back roads of Japan, is such a person, and the haiku that record his journeys, geographic and spiritual, are gems as works of art, as insights-the two one thing. The Dharma jewel is so unremarkable that it takes a person of unusual insight to remark it, and remark so vividly that others see it as a treasure. Rare, polished, costly, the worldly jewel is not the same as the Dharma jewel, by contrast common, rough-cut and without market value.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |