Robert
Spiess
804
R. H. Blyth says it well: The one thing that a haiku
poet is instinctively and consciously on guard against is
explanatorypoetry.
[Haiku,
Vol.. I, p. 286, original edition.]
805
A genuine haiku poet is one who has not lost the heart of
a child.
[Prompted
by a passage by Mencius.]
806
Haiku place living above thinking.
807
The haiku poet finds perceptual reality supremely more important
than conceptual reality.
808
Haiku are oases in the desert of technology.
809
Haiku are about experiences and experiencing, the experiencer
exists only by implication.
810
Haiku are the infinite ways of expressing the finite.
811
Authentic haiku look into the nature of reality
not through intellective analysis but by deep absorption
so that awareness is not superficial but profoundly intuitive.
[Gloss
on words by Mu Soeng Sunim.]
812
In haiku we inter are.
813
Although simile occasionally occurs in Japanese masters
haiku, it is rather rare. Perhaps for us the main reason
that good haiku seldom use simile is exemplified by the
proverb Comparisons are odious. Haiku is the
comparison-less poetry of Suchness.
814
Genuine haiku poets generally accept the proposition that
they and their creations should not be self-centered. This
view is excellently expressed by Arnold Toynbee in his book
A Historians Approach to Religion (New York,
1956, pp. 4-5): Self-centeredness is an intellectual
error because no living creature is in truth the center
of the universe; and it is also a moral error, because no
living creature has a right to act as if it were the center
of the universe. It has no right to treat its fellow creatures,
the universe and God or Reality as if they existed simply
in order to minister to one self-centered living creatures
demands.
815
For haiku poets all entities have equal value, for every
entity has infinite or absolute value.
[Gloss
on words of R. H. Blyth.]
816
Haiku have a strong ally in the modern and influential process
philosophy, which holds that the processes of change and
relations between events are more basic than the concept
of enduring self-contained entities, that nature is a dynamic
web of interconnected events, characterized by both uniqueness
as well as order, and also that human life and non-human
life are not separated by any absolute demarcation.
[Prompted
in part by a passage of Ian G. Barbours.]
817
The study and practice of haiku encourage one to move from
a narrow, ego-centered venue to one that is limitlessly
open. It is an awakening to the dynamic suchness of the
worlds entities.
[Promoted
in part by a passage of Taitetsu Onnos.]
818
A genuine haiku murmurs Just this, just this.
819
The haiku poet leaves everything in its own state and place,
and follows the natural order of existence.
820
Haiku poets should not allow their words, their mode of
expression, to exceed the suchness of the entities presented
in their haiku.
|