The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet —
露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
Kobayashi Issa
Wandering
Born 1763 in a small mountain village in central Japan, Yataro Kobayashi, who later in life adopted the pen name "Issa," was surrounded by nature from an early age. The son of a farmer, his mother passing away when he was two years old, Issa was raised primarily by his grandmother. He studied with a calligraphy and haiku master while attending the village school but encountered familial tension with his new stepmother and was sent away after his grandmother's death when he was 14 years old to train as an apprentice for hire at the capital in Edo.
The next ten years of Issa's life are largely unknown, but by age 25, he had begun publishing poems under a haiku teacher through the Katsushika school, known for stylistic references to animals and the natural world, which would soon populate Issa's poems.
After his master's death, Issa was promoted, but again faced tensions with his fellow poets and resigned by 29, departing on less than ideal terms. He traveled alone to visit his father before moving onward, wandering the countryside for ten years on a pilgrimage to Pure Land Buddhist temples across Japan before returning to his childhood home to tend to his father on his deathbed. Dividing the family property in half, Issa lived side by side with his stepfamily and married but lost all of his three children shortly after their births before finally losing his wife and their fourth child. Issa remarried several times but died before the birth of his one and only daughter, whom he never met. Her family was still living at the Kobayashi property into the 1950s and perhaps later.
Issa's story represents another all too human pattern. In a sense nothing special, he encountered the same sorts of conflict and loss that characterize any of our lives. In our second installation of a series on Japanese poetry, we feature here one of Issa's many poems as a reflection on transience, a both painful and hopeful theme that weaves its way into the present pandemic as much as the environmental crisis and other such events. And yet, and yet...
Cup of Tea
Issa (一茶), whose pen name means "a cup of tea" with the added implication of "a single bubble in steeping tea," saw the bubbles of transience, the tides of change, sweep over his eyes on countless occasions, often bearing misfortune. Yet being a child of the farm, a wandering man of the countryside, he also witnessed nature's impermanence at every step, perceiving beauty, even if mournful, in the transient nature of existence. His haiku on dew conveys these perhaps mixed feelings.
"The world of dew" (露の世) he writes at the outset, thereby setting the scene for his readers. Deeply influenced by Buddhism, particularly its Pure Land doctrine of salvation in the divine abode of the Buddha of light, Issa saw the world as a dewdrop perched precariously on a blade of grass, gone in an instant, vanished in a flash. Upon losing his infant daughter to smallpox, Issa composed this poem, mourning her death through creation.
World of Dew
For Issa, this world of dew symbolized the fleeting joys of life. Despite their transience, Issa saw them as no less joyful while they were present. Their loss, however, was heart-wrenching for him. His early childhood encounter with death through the loss of his mother at age two, followed by the loss of his grandmother who had been his primary caretaker at age 14, foreshadowed the blows dealt to him later by mortality with the passing of multiple infant children and his first wife. Issa also lost his father in the midst of this whirlwind of death. He grieved deeply. Bearing strong resemblance to each other, another of Issa's poems reads:
A world of dew
and in every dewdrop
a world of sorrow.
露の世の露の中にてけんくわ哉
Kobayashi Issa
Indeed, the world of dew is an image that finds itself repeatedly interwoven throughout his poetry. The Pure Land school to which he belonged laid particular emphasis on the desperately fleeting nature of worldly existence, offering relief through the grace of Amitābha, the Buddha of light. By chanting Amitābha's name, some semblance of peace was restored in the hearts and minds of devotees, who were promised rebirth in a heavenly paradise known as the Pure Land. Many have since attempted to establish such a Pure Land on earth, an effort that becomes all the more pertinent in the face of pandemic and climate change with its feverish symptoms which plague the planet. Issa no doubt invoked the pure light of Amitābha throughout his encounters with death and loss.
And Yet
We turn now to the concluding lines of Issa's haiku, "And yet, and yet —"...
Left with a sense of inconclusiveness, perhaps spaciousness and hopefulness, Issa ends on open terrain. While in his other poem, he concludes with reference to the world of sorrow, here the possibilities are endless. The Japanese phrase "ながらさりながら" (nagara sari nagara) rolls off the tongue with the sense of sauntering onward.
In light of the various waves of impermanence sweeping the globe, whether environmental or epidemiological, it remains uncertain what, precisely, lies on the horizon. While pained by these ongoing traumas, if we can find even the slightest opening, the faintest glimmer of hope, then perhaps behind the darkness, beneath that crack in our armor, lies a wellspring of light. "And yet," writes Issa, "and yet —"...
To be continued.
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