Haikai and Zen

 

My relation to Japanese aesthetics began with a course in Zen that I took at the University of Buffalo, back in another lifetime, in the land of the Tonawandas. The teacher was a Korean ex-monk sent to the West by his master to spread Buddhism. I actually dropped the course during the first week, for the main book was Nature (yes, he wrote it on the board with a capital N), and I believed him. I invited him over for tea and discussed the Capture of the Ox, an allegory of the spiritual quest wonderfully depicted in ancient drawings on a book by Dasetz Suzuki. In those days, I still believed in the idea of finding oneself, as if I was a pair of lost keys in the sands of time, and therefore, in the idea of stages in an imaginary trip to the nowhere land of bliss and truth, precisely the theme of the Ox Hunt. I asked him in which of the 10 stations of the spiritual journey was thriving and answered -to my delight- that sometimes in 5, others in 10, but then again dropping to 1, and so on. We laughed for quite a while. I never saw him again, I did not call him or went back to his classes at the University, for I did not want to break the lightning clarity of that sparkling moment.

  As I understand the Haikai, they are about such lightning clarity, a rare phenomenon in the poetic arena that requires both effort and spontaneity, a combination that can only be synthesized in the limits of the human psyche.