Haiku and waka poems convey perhaps more easily than painting the subtle differences between
 the four moods of sabi, wabi, aware, and yugen.
 The quiet, thrilling loneliness of sabi is loneliness in the sense of Buddhist detachment,
 of seeing all things as happening by themselves in miraculous spontaneity.
 With this goes that sense of deep, illimitable quietude which descends with a long fall of
 snow, swallowing all sounds in layer upon layer of softness.
 Sleet-falling, fathomless, infinite loneliness.
 Wabi, the unexpected recognition of the faithful suchness of very ordinary things, especially
 when the gloom of the future has momentarily checked our ambitiousness, is perhaps the
 mood of the following haiku.
 A brushwood gate, and for a lock this snail.
 The woodpecker keeps on in the same place, day is closing.
 Winter desolation, in the rainwater tub sparrows are walking.
 Aware is not quite grief, and not quite nostalgia in the usual sense of longing for the return
 of a beloved past.
 Aware is the echo of what has passed and of what was loved, giving them a resonance such
 as a great cathedral gives to a choir, so that they would be the poorer without it.
 Aware is the moment of crisis between seeing the transience of the world with sorrow and
 regret and seeing it as the very form of the great void.
 The stream hides itself in the grasses of departing autumn.
 Leaves falling lie on one another.
 The rain beats on the rain.
 Since yugen signifies a kind of mystery, it is the most baffling of all to describe, and
 the poems must speak for themselves.
 The sea darkens, the voices of the wild ducks are faintly white.
 The skylark, its voice alone fell, leaving nothing behind.
 In the dense mist, what is being shouted between hill and boat?
 A trout leaps, clouds are moving in the bed of the stream.
 The association of Zen with poetry must inevitably bring up the name of the Soto Zen monk and
 hermit, Ryokan.
 It is easy to form the impression that the Japanese love of nature is predominantly sentimental,
 dwelling on those aspects of nature which are nice and pretty, butterflies, cherry blossoms,
 the autumn moon, chrysanthemums, and old pine trees.
 But Ryokan is also the poet of lice, fleas, and being utterly soaked with cold rain.
 On rainy days the monk Ryokan feels sorry for himself.
 And Ryokan's view of nature is all of a piece.
 The sound of the scouring of the saucepan blends with the tree frog's voices.
 He thinks of the lice on his chest as insects in the grass, and expresses the most natural
 human feelings, sadness, loneliness, bewilderment, or pity, without a trace of shame or pride.
 Even when robbed he is still rich, for "the thief left it behind, the moon at the window."
 And when Ryokan has no money, "the wind brings fallen leaves, enough to make a fire."
 The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in "cha no yu," the
 art of tea.
 Strictly the term means something like "tea with hot water," and through this one art
 Zen has exercised an incalculable influence on Japanese life, since the chajin, or man
 of tea, is an arbiter of taste in the many subsidiary arts which cha no yu involves—architecture,
 gardening, ceramics, metalwork, lacquer, and the arrangement of flowers, or ikebana.
 Ceremonial tea is not the ordinary leaf tea which is steeped in hot water.
 It is finely powdered green tea, mixed with hot water by means of a bamboo whisk, until
 it becomes what a Chinese writer called "the froth of the liquid jade."
 Cha no yu is most appreciated when confined to a small group, or just two companions,
 and was especially loved by the old-time samurai as today by harassed businessmen, as a frank
 escape from the turmoil of the world.
 [ Silence ]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.63 sec
Decoding  : 0.36 sec
Transcribe: 389.78 sec
Total Time: 390.78 sec