The sudden visions of nature which form the substance of haiku arise in the same way, for they are never there when one looks for them. The artificial haiku always feels like a piece of life which has been deliberately broken off or wrenched away from the universe, where the genuine haiku has dropped off all by itself and has the whole universe inside it. From the earliest times, the Zen masters had shown a partiality for short nomic poems at once laconic and direct, like their answers to questions about Buddhism. Just as Tung Shan's "Three Pounds of Flax" was an answer full of Zen, but not about Zen, so the most expressive Zen poetry is that which says nothing, which, in other words, is not philosophy or commentary about life. Basho, who was the great 17th century master of haiku, said, "Get a three-foot child to write haiku, because they're the sort of direct, guileless things that children would say." But now there are magazines devoted to haiku poetry, where in every issue there will be 10,000 haikus written by people all over the country, and they get so stilted and so affected that one wished one had never heard of haiku. But there's no formula, you see, for fixing it so that you can do it again and again and again, because the moment you start doing it again and again and again, it isn't it anymore. The real thing has escaped. Do you remember some time ago there was a fashion for having wrought iron fish, just the outline of a fish, some artist originally, you know, put this fish together and it looked great. But then you suddenly found them in every gift shop and dime store, and they looked perfectly terrible. So this is the mysterious thing, while not only in the arts, but in lifestyles, in everything, when you start saying, "What is the technique for getting this thing?" And people say, "Well, this is it." It's gone. And when you know how something is done, it doesn't surprise you. This is known in Zen as a very difficult, this is the most difficult virtue to attain, "Buji." It means nothing special. It means no business, no artificiality. So Buji is where something doesn't stand out like a sore thumb, but it is absolutely different from being modest. A Buji person may be immodest in the sense that if he knows he can do something well, he just says he can. He doesn't go all sorts of blushing violet techniques. Buji, you see, is this mysterious quality of nothing special, no special method. Because if there is, let me repeat, if we do know the method and we know it infallibly, it ceases to be interesting. Thus the aimless life is the constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the artist's own inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment. All of us have those moments occasionally, and it is just then that we catch those vivid glimpses of the world which cast such a glow over the intervening wastes of memory. The smell of burning leaves on a morning of autumn haze, a flight of sunlit pigeons against a thunder cloud, the sound of an unseen waterfall at dusk, or the single cry of some unidentified bird in the depths of the forest. In the art of Zen, every landscape, every sketch of bamboo in the wind or of lonely rocks is an echo of such moments. The sense of an infinitely expanded present is nowhere stronger than in Cha No Yu, the art of tea. Since Cha No Yu has become a conventional accomplishment for young women, it has been made the subject of a great deal of sentimental nonsense associated with brocaded young dolls in moonlit rooms, nervously trying to imitate the most stilted feelings about porcelain and cherry blossom. But in the austere purity of, say, the So Shu Sen school, the art of tea is a genuine expression of Zen which requires, if necessary, no further apparatus than a bowl, tea, and hot water. If there is not even that, Cha Do, the way of tea, can be practiced everywhere and with anything, since it is really the same as Zen. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 0.34 sec Transcribe: 375.41 sec Total Time: 376.40 sec